We share this petition as a coalition of care providers and community members from Western Massachusetts who are strongly opposed to expanding police and institutional involvement in mental health emergencies. Please sign to show your support for funding community-led, person-centered care programs.

Fund Community-Led Crisis Support Programs

We, the undersigned, call on the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to reduce the footprint of policing and invest $20 million in community-led mental health, addiction, harm reduction, violence prevention, and crisis support programs. These programs should be decoupled from law enforcement, coercive/involuntary treatment, and punitive measures.

We are care providers and community members in Massachusetts who are deeply concerned about the well-being of our loved ones, neighbors, and clients. Two years of pandemic and recession have shown how broken our care systems are, leaving far too many of us suffering without support for our basic human needs. We must build our communities’ capacity to take care of people without the constant threat of arrest, section, punishment, and violence.

• We do not want police involved in mental health emergencies. Police officers themselves have repeatedly emphasized that police are not care providers and their departments are already overburdened.
• We do not want police-embedded social workers or profit-driven mental health services. These programs are not solutions but merely tweaks to a dysfunctional system. We cannot create viable alternatives when law enforcement-based co-responder programs crowd out other possibilities.
• We want community-led solutions, shaped and led by the people who are most harmed by the status quo. Institutionalized social work and clinical models rely heavily on paternalistic and coercive interventions, collaborate with other harmful state institutions, and often have bad reputations with clients as a result. Peer-based care models instead draw on the wisdom and experience of survivors of state violence and psychiatric care. Peers “know what it is like to feel powerless over their own life,” in the words of the Wildflower Alliance, and offer care that respects people’s rights, dignity, and agency.

Funding civilian, community-led programs is a major step towards social justice, reducing people’s contact with law enforcement, the criminal legal system, and punitive health/social services, all of which cause significant harm in people’s lives. These harms fall hardest on people of color, queer and trans people, neurodivergent people, people with disabilities, and low-income people, well beyond the high-profile killings that make headlines and spark large-scale protests.¹Nationally 23% of people killed by police were experiencing (or perceived to be experiencing) a mental health crisis, a figure that rises to 39% in smaller cities and towns. 42% of people killed by police are Black or Latinx. A person with unmet mental health needs is 16 times more likely to be killed by the police. These alarming figures do not reflect the mass incarceration of people with mental and cognitive disabilities and unmet mental health needs locked up in jails and prisons, in psychiatric institutions, in emergency rooms, left houseless in the streets, and dying by suicide or overdose every day. If we want to make genuine progress towards racial equity, we must reduce the footprint of policing on our communities and invest in truly non-carceral forms of support. Community-led initiatives, such as the well-known CAHOOTS program in Oregon, offer new and innovative models for mental health intervention and support that focus on providing consensual, person-centered care without the threat of arrest, incarceration, or other sanctions.

Programs like these need state funding to get started and thrive, and their services should be covered by MassHealth so that Massachusetts can gain access to significant federal funding for these crucial programs. In addition the Equitable Approaches to Public Safety (EAPS) grant program should only fund non-police, community-based programs.

We call on our state government to invest in our communities by funding mental health, addiction, harm reduction, violence prevention, and crisis support programs that are community-led, peer-led, and decoupled from law enforcement, coercive/involuntary treatment, and punitive measures.

See detailed information on the related ACES bill here. For background on the Greenfield People’s Budget and our proposal for civilian mobile crisis response in Franklin County, see our website. 558 people have signed as of April 15, 2022.

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  Nationally 23% of people killed by police were experiencing (or perceived to be experiencing) a mental health crisis, a figure that rises to 39% in smaller cities and towns. 42% of people killed by police are Black or Latinx. A person with unmet mental health needs is 16 times more likely to be killed by the police. These alarming figures do not reflect the mass incarceration of people with mental and cognitive disabilities and unmet mental health needs locked up in jails and prisons, in psychiatric institutions, in emergency rooms, left houseless in the streets, and dying by suicide or overdose every day.