A civilian emergency response team created to provide an alternative to police, especially for people experiencing mental health distress, answered very few mental health calls last year – only three percent of the total, as measured by emergency dispatches.
Cambridge started its Community Assistance Response and Engagement (CARE) team in 2024 as part of a new Community Safety Department, to provide an unarmed alternative to police, especially for people in a mental health crisis. Even by the agency’s own “Impact Report” for 2025, only 43 percent of its calls involved “a behavioral health component,” according to Marie Mathieu, head of the Community Safety Department. And that was often not the reason responders were dispatched but was identified after they answered a call in a different category.
The distinction matters because mental health emergency response was the primary reason CSD and CARE were established. Of the 1,015 calls CARE answered last year, 67 percent were coded as “check person” and another 21 percent were “unwanted person,” according to figures Mathieu provided. Surprisingly, another nine percent were requests for the team from other city agencies, including police, she said.
The three percent figure for mental health calls has previously not been reported. Mathieu provided the number when she was asked for a breakdown of calls answered last year. the data is based on codes used by the city’s Emergency Communications Department, which gets 911 calls and decides which ones will be answered by the CARE team.
Asked to explain the difference, Mathieu said in an email: “The calls that are coded “mental health” straight from Emergency Communications is only three percent. But of the other call codes that CARE responds to, 43 percent of those have a behavioral health component. So, it may come in coded as a “wellbeing check” and when we show up on scene, we find out through our assessment the person has a behavioral health need.”
The department keeps “our own internal data, that is more comprehensive of all the work the team is doing including self-initiated calls,” she said.
Former department head Liz Speakman told councillors last year that the CARE team was being sent to only 45 percent of the calls it was eligible to answer. She cited as reasons unnecessary worry about danger to unarmed responders in some cases, and habit, such as dispatchers sending the same police team to certain kinds of calls. The CARE team still doesn’t respond to all eligible calls, but now the reason is its schedule of limited daytime hours on weekdays only, Mathieu said.
Councillor Patricia Nolan, chair of the council’s public safety committee, said last month she believes the CARE team still isn’t being dispatched to all the calls it could answer. “I say that since I observed and spoke with some CARE folks who would like to be dispatched more often,” Nolan said.
On June 1, CARE started operating 12 hours a day – 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. — from Monday to Friday. Previously, its hours were Monday 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., Tuesday through Thursday 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., Friday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mathieu told councillors at the department’s budget hearing May 12 that the department will evaluate operations and staffing by continuing to look at 911 call data for the calls that the CARE team is allowed to answer. The department had to negotiate with police unions in 2024 about which calls CARE could handle. During the months those talks lasted, CARE responders picked up used syringes — after clearing that task with the firefighters union.
At the May 12 budget hearing, Mathieu said needle pickups could meet the department’s goals. “We really do play the long game for a lot of community members that we serve,” she said. “What we do when we’re doing a needle pickup is if we do encounter someone in the community who uses said needles that are on the ground, we have an opportunity to make a connection, build that rapport, provide resources. And over time that relationship building process has led to us being able to connect people to treatment.”
The team continues to pick up syringes and has collected 229 needles during fiscal year 2026, which began July 1, 2025, Mathieu said in an email.
District attorney offers praise
The Community Safety Department and its responders have received praise for their work. In an interview that is part of “Beyond the Call,” a documentary the department commissioned, an unidentified woman recounted how CARE workers helped calm down someone she cared about who was “dysregulating” — a technical psychological term indicating difficulty with managing strong emotions. She hadn’t wanted a police officer to respond to her concerns, she said, and the CARE team not only helped defuse the situation but followed up with help for the troubled person.
Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan came to a celebration for the department on April 29, with food and a showing of the documentary. “I wanted to be here to thank you for what you have done,” she told the crowd of about 100 people. In an interview, she said the team had been “very effective” and that “people are better off” because of its creation.
The department was established in 2021 after intense controversy over demands for disinvestment in police that grew from reactions to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Community efforts sparked by The Black Response, which describes itself as a civic organization of Black and African Cambridge residents working to “replace policing and other carceral systems with community-grounded solutions for public safety,” led to the formation of Holistic Emergency Alternative Response Team, or HEART. That organization created a team of trained responders that hoped to answer calls from underserved people in crisis.
City councillors wanted the city to fund HEART and voted twice to do it, but that didn’t happen. The group received a temporary grant from pandemic funds but didn’t get funding from city money until last year and must compete each year for a grant. It has also received grants from other groups, such as Cambridge Community Foundation. Meanwhile, councillors compromised by creating a city department – Community Safety — to field a response team.
Delays continued as the police unions negotiated an agreement with city officials on which calls the new department could answer – for safety reasons, a union spokesperson said. For months, trained members of the department’s CARE team could only pick up needles.
Last year controversy broke out again when councillors learned that while police officials were participating in talks about the compromise establishing the department, the police department was organizing its own “alternative” response, a two-person team of a civilian social worker and a specially trained officer. No one told councillors about the police plans, and three councillors were so angry that they voted against sending the proposed police department budget for this fiscal year to the full city council.
About 35 percent of 140 calls that the police team answered in the first three quarters of this fiscal year were mental health calls, according to a list from the emergency communications department obtained under the state public records law. The figure was estimated from the number of redactions under an exemption that covers medical records.
The police team answered many more calls than recorded by dispatchers — 174 — according to quarterly reports of its work to the state Department of Mental Health, which funds the social worker. Those reports have many redactions with no reason given, so it’s impossible to estimate the number involving mental health emergencies, though the purpose of the program is to avoid arrests and emergency room visits for people in a mental health crisis.
Dr. James Barrett, a psychologist and director of clinical support at the police department. who oversees the co-response program, noted that the co-response team doesn’t have to limit its work to calls dispatched by the Emergency Communications Center. Therefore, the reports to the state “include calls in which (the police team is) dispatched by ECC but also include self-initiated activities (follow up visits, checking on someone they see in the community, etc.).”
While the police co-response team can go to any situation it chooses, the CARE team is limited to calls to which it’s dispatched.
HEART funds delayed
As for HEART, the Community Safety Department had $600,000 to hand out to community groups promoting “violence prevention” last year; HEART received $150,000. This fiscal year, which ends June 30, HEART and four other groups each received $60,000, for a total of $300,000, half of the FY25 total. They didn’t get the money until February and must spend it by the end of the fiscal year.
The award was delayed because the department is undertaking a violence prevention initiative, has hired an assistant director in charge of the effort who will start June 1, and didn’t expect it to take so long to hire someone, Mathieu said. The department expects to award a total of $300,000 in grants for fiscal year 2027, she said.
Kwame Dance, a Cambridge native and clinical psychologist who has worked in schools, community groups and public health programs, mainly in Cambridge and Boston, is the new assistant director of violence prevention. He established the Advancement of Culturally Competent Education to Stop Stigma (ACCESS) program in 2019, aimed at exposing teens of color to mental health in order to increase the number of mental health providers of color. He won the Cambridge Community Foundation’s Imagined in Cambridge! Award in 2022 for founding ACCESS. Most recently he served as behavioral health director of the Cambridge Community Center.
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