We still haven’t gotten around to part two… Originally published on November 27, 2022.
Allegheny County’s so-called Crisis Response Stakeholder Group might be the most powerful local organization you’ve never heard of. We’d be tempted to call it a secret cabal, but it’s not, quite at least, a secret. The group first came to light in September 2020 in an investigative piece by Public Source’s Rich Lord, who revealed that its membership consisted of movers and shakers involved in law enforcement, philanthropy, and government in Allegheny County. None of the members would comment on its activities for the record, but Lord was able to piece together some basics using leaked documents and anonymous statements from sources close to the organization. CRSG hasn’t raised its profile much since. After its cover was blown, the county mounted a bare bones PR effort, but the group still largely remained under radar. It has never issued a press release under its own name, and has no social media presence. Subsequent press coverage of the organization has been notably sparse, with a followup article by Lord late last year being the only substantive mention.
CSRG began to come together a few months before the first Public Source piece appeared, with the purpose of retooling the county’s approach to dealing with individuals experiencing mental health crises. Its last known membership breaks down like this: eleven civilian employees of city and county government, most of them in the county Department of Human Services; six current or former police officers; six representatives of UPMC, Pitt, or Allegheny Health Network; seven executives from tame local charities; three representatives of large foundations; an academic; and Braddock Mayor Chardae Jones, the lone member who, at least in theory, has to answer directly to voters.
Personnel is policy. Even at its formation, one could get a rough idea of what CRSG was up to just from who it excluded. Nowhere to be found were any independent front-line organizations who deal with mental health crises regularly, like Prevention Point or Bridge to the Mountains. Similarly left out were liberal reformist groups that nonetheless have some critique of the police, such as ACLU of Pennsylvania or Alliance for Police Accountability. Everyone involved was obviously firmly in the corner of law enforcement, if not from personal inclination, then as a condition of their continued employment. It wasn’t quite clear what CRSG was going to actually do, but who they were going to do it for was not in question. Probability seemed high that it would at least do something. Typically, such blue ribbon commissions are launched with great fanfare, spend months or years “investigating” some perceived emergency, and finally, after the scandal that birthed them has slipped out of the news cycle, release a voluminous report that is promptly filed away and ignored forever after. Here was a blue ribbon commission so averse to grandstanding that it wouldn’t even talk to the press. Its recommendations clocked in at a trim and tidy eight pages, as far from the usual unreadable doorstop as can be imagined. CRSG was obviously serious about achieving its goal, whatever that goal was. We don’t have to look very far to see why.
In July of 2020, when CRSG was conceived, police everywhere were dealing with the George Floyd uprising. Actual riots had subsided in most cities, but protests were still a daily occurrence. The demand to abolish the police was being diverted into merely defunding them, but at the time it seemed like that fallback position might be gaining traction. Activists across the country were advocating for money to be taken from police budgets and put toward more humane responses to mental health emergencies. Many pundits were holding up the example of Eugene, Oregon, where the CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets) program has been sending medics and social workers, unencumbered by cops, to answer 911 calls for minor incidents since 1989. Denver’s STAR initiative, which is based on the CAHOOTS model, was ramping up as well. To the cops, the threat was obvious. CAHOOTS answers 17 percent of Eugene’s 911 calls, with a budget only one percent the size of EPD’s. Granted, police do other things besides chase 911 calls, but it’s still easy to imagine many police chiefs responding to those numbers with a heartfelt “Fuck that, nobody’s cutting my budget by 17 percent!”
With this in mind, lets take a look at those eight pages. Taken as a whole, they are hopelessly inadequate, but individually none of them can be faulted. The county cleverly exploited this feature to design a survey meant to drum up support for CRSG’s work. The survey carefully omitted any question of overall effectiveness, asking respondents only to rate the recommendations on an individual basis. It got the result it was meant to, with every recommendation receiving well over 90 percent approval. Let’s not be taken in. As with the group’s membership list, what is left out of the recommendations is at least as revealing as what is included. For starters, CRSG says nothing about CAHOOTS, STAR, or any similar program. The closest they come is recommending beefing up resolve Crisis Services, and possibly having resolve employees ride with cops on patrol. This is different from CAHOOTS, however. CAHOOTS workers are often dispatched by 911 operators to qualifying calls without police involvement, whereas resolve relies solely on its own phone number and is most often contacted for support by the police themselves. There is one cryptic suggestion in the recommendations that reads “Could also consider Emergency Medical Services + Mental Health co-response model.“, but this isn’t what CAHOOTS does either – rather, it’s completely separate from Eugene’s EMS and police departments, and has its own vehicles.
We can see now why CRSG’s membership had to be so tightly controlled, and why the group has stayed so resolutely below radar. It doesn’t take a hard core abolitionist to think that a program that both saves money and improves outcomes in other cities might be worth adopting here. Those recommendations couldn’t be allowed near anyone who might have ever heard of CAHOOTS, unless that person was guaranteed to be so firmly in the bag that they didn’t mind wasting millions of taxpayer dollars as long as the money went to the police.
That can’t be the whole story, though. The agencies represented on CRSG have more than enough political clout to fend off a CAHOOTS-like program in Pittsburgh without going to this much trouble. Many of their recommendations are substantive, even sensible. Most have nothing to do with 911 response. The rest of the document is much more than window dressing for an anti-CAHOOTS campaign. Recommendations one, eight, and fourteen for example, stress the need for low barrier walk-in centers and clinics that are open around the clock. These ideas obviously informed the creation of Second Avenue Commons, the newly-built homeless shelter next to Allegheny County Jail. We wrote about Second Ave. Commons, aka Jailview Apartments, in a previous post. The new shelter is a combo platter of bandaid, PR stunt, and surveillance hub that can’t possibly solve the problem it purports to address and was never meant to anyway. Financially and logistically however, it still constitutes a major project. Here we again see the difference between CRSG’s recommendations and a typical blue ribbon commission report. Usually, if any of the recommended measures are implemented at all, it’s only the cheapest and least controversial ones. Here the most expensive and difficult thing was done early.
The remainder of CRSG’s recommended steps are a grab bag of worthy but minor reforms. It’s tempting to dismiss some of them as mere fluff, included only for PR purposes and not intended to be taken seriously. Does CRSG really care about, say, number sixteen (“Increase the number of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) behavioral health providers.“)? Or is it only thrown in to make it look like the group is concerned about racism? Here we have to remember that the recommendations weren’t originally intended for public consumption. PR fluff doesn’t work if nobody ever sees it, and no one would ever have even heard about GRSG or its recommendations if it weren’t for Rich Lord. On some level all the recommendations are meant to be taken seriously. The question we have to answer is how they advance their authors’ agenda.
Once again, it’s useful to analyze what was omitted. In that spirit, number fifteen is worth quoting in its entirety.
Develop a process to address mistrust and hurt between communities and government, including law enforcement. The City of Pittsburgh started this work in 2015 through a collaboration with the National Initiative for Building Community Trust & Justice. Pittsburgh was selected as one of six pilot sites to employ strategies, examine policies, and develop evidence through research to reduce implicit bias, enhance procedural justice, and promote racial reconciliation. Ideas include:
> Leverage the work that has previously been done with the National Initiative for Building Community Trust & Justice.
> Build on this effort to acknowledge and address the history of racial trauma in all of Allegheny County, and the mistrust and hurt that has built up over time between government (including law enforcement) and communities of color, with a particular focus on Black communities.
CRSG’s law enforcement focus shines through clear as day here. If the idea was to move as much responsibility as possible away from the police via programs like CAHOOTS, “mistrust between communities and government” wouldn’t be nearly as big a deal. The group could take it as a given that everybody hates the cops, and do everything in its power to minimize police involvement in dealing with mental health issues. It’s also instructive that the only action items CRSG could come up with amounted to “keep doing that one thing we started seven years ago.” and “yeah, we’re racist, but we should at least admit it.” If the Pittsburgh police were really interested in building trust with Black communities they could try reinstituting the city residency requirement for officers. And if CRSG wants to hire more Black social workers, why not also hire more Black cops? Neither of these measures would do much of course, but they couldn’t be any less effective than “develop(ing) evidence through research to reduce implicit bias”, and attempting them would at least show that police were willing to make sacrifices to mend fences with Black residents. Just like the submarining of CAHOOTS, recommendation fifteen makes it obvious that a key objective of CRSG is to maintain the status quo for the police.
Similar limitations are shot through the entire document. Take number twelve for example, “Address basic housing needs.“, which heads a laundry list of bandaids and half measures related to housing security. Nowhere on the list is any attempt to build more affordable housing. Nowhere on the list is any suggestion to create new laws favorable to tenants. Rent control? You’re kidding, right? Instead, we get gems like “Provide guidance to local housing authorities and landlords to reduce collateral consequences of criminal records, and other barriers to housing for people with behavioral health needs and justice system contact” and (our fave!) “Convene a network of landlords that are committed to supporting people with behavioral health needs.” In fact, no political solutions appear anywhere in the document. It doesn’t once suggest passing, repealing, or amending any law, despite the obvious problems that oppressive laws pose to CRSG’s purported clients. It might be objected that since the group has so few elected officials among its members, it would be overreaching its authority by promoting legislative remedies, but such arguments ignore the realities of local politics. The organizations represented on CRSG have all the influence they need to get legislation passed at the municipal and county levels, especially if they allied themselves with some of the activist groups who were so carefully excluded from membership.
Speaking of laws, another benefit almost completely absent from the recommendations is support for those caught in the criminal justice system, perhaps a consequence of the county public defenders office being among the agencies frozen out of CRSG membership. Given the immense damage to mental health caused by arrests and confinement, this is a significant omission. Anyone whose mental stability was on shaky ground when they went into Allegheny County Jail is likely to be a lot worse off by the time they get out. Yet the only gesture toward alleviating this situation is the anemic “Reduce or eliminate fines and fees to ensure people have adequate financial resources to access housing“, listed in both number four and number twelve. It’s not clear how this would be accomplished, but maybe someone could convene a network of prosecutors who are committed to supporting people with behavioral health needs. They could meet in the same phone booth as the landlords.
If there’s one lesson to take away from CRSG’s approach to addressing mental health emergencies, it’s simply this: We can’t have nice things. If we leave it up to the “stakeholders”, we’ll never get rent control, CAHOOTS, eviction protections, or any other humane and effective approach to ameliorating the city’s twin crises of housing precarity and mental health. Instead, we’ll see the same lip service and minor tinkering as before, except more tightly coordinated by CRSG’s members, and paired with aggressive camp sweeps and broken windows policing. To understand the group’s philosophy, we need look no further than the introduction to the recommendations, which defines ‘crisis’ as: “…an instance when emergency services are engaged because a person is in acute mental health distress, engaged in problematic substance use, is experiencing unsheltered homelessness or has an intellectual disability/autism.” In other words, substance abuse, mental health distress, homelessness, and autism are fine as long as they happen out of sight where emergency “services” never has to deal with them. CRSG’s collective interest lies in managing problems, not in solving them. The organization’s strategy is to get out ahead of any demands for substantive change by pushing ahead with limited small reforms, while freezing dissenting voices out of the conversation.
By now it should be abundantly clear that we can’t count on CRSG, or by extension any of the agencies and organizations it includes, to deliver any effective solutions to mental health needs in Allegheny County. If we want that to happen, we’re going to have to do it ourselves. The sooner we start, the faster it will happen…