Cambridge Police-Alternative Team Hosts First Information Session

Cambridge’s Community Assistance Response and Engagement team discussed near-future plans for responding to 911 calls and answered resident questions at their first public information session on Tuesday.

The City of Cambridge has been working towards establishing an unarmed emergency response team since June 2020 following the police killing of George Floyd. The city faced added pressure to implement the unarmed response team in the wake of the killing of Sayed Faisal by a Cambridge police officer last January.

Trained responders will be dispatched to low-risk 911 calls, including welfare and mental health checks and other non-violent situations. The current team of five responders, who were hired in September, will begin responding to emergency calls “very soon,” according to Cambridge Safety Department Director Elizabeth M. Speakman.

“Our number one priority has been making sure that we get a team out in the community responding to 911 calls as soon as possible,” Speakman said.

According to Speakman, CARE will be another dispatch option for 911 calls, alongside the police, firefighters, and paramedics. While responders will be unarmed, they will have an emergency button on their radios for immediate access to armed responders in the case that a situation becomes dangerous or violent and cannot be deescalated.

CARE’s roll-out comes after three members of the team were fired in January. Speakman said in an interview with The Crimson that the team has a “little bit less coverage available” following the firings, citing CARE’s lack of initial round-the-clock coverage.

Speakman added that the team will be hiring new members to fill the vacancies “in the next month or so,” and anticipates that the team will have increased evening coverage in the fall.

According to Speakman, the lack of evening coverage will impact the team’s ability to address many of the calls about the unhoused, which generally come more frequently in the evening.

“Our goal is in the next six months or so — don’t totally hold me to that — that we’ll have a second team who will be working the later shift to be able to be available for some of those calls,” Speakman said.

Another priority of the team will be to eventually establish a separate emergency line where CARE can be reached directly.

“The biggest question that we get asked, and I’m sure it’s gonna get asked here is, how can we get in touch with you if we don't feel comfortable calling 911?,” Speakman said. “We know that calling 911 takes the ability to decide who’s coming out of your hands because the dispatchers do their own triage, and then decide who to send.”

“That is one of the things that we will be working on next year,” Speakman added.

Betty Desrosiers — a life-long Cambridge resident who attended Tuesday’s meeting — called the CARE team “stunning.” Desrosiers, whose daughter struggles with mental health, believes the new response model will provide her daughter with additional support.

“I’m excited to see that Cambridge has another model for addressing things when she gets dysregulated,” she said.

Desrosier was quick to praise the “fabulous” Cambridge Police Department for their help in responding to multiple calls about her daughter, but noted the department’s limitations.

“They are still police, and they still come in a uniform, and they still come with a badge, and still come with their guns,” she said. “They come at it with a safety approach — which is what’s right — and they come at it with a compassionate approach, but they don’t come at it with a lot of skill and knowledge.”

“I'm hoping that this model will address that,” she added. .

In a statement to the Crimson, CPD Commissioner Christine A. Elow wrote that she believes the CARE team’s non-police response is a “good idea”.

“Our officers have so many responsibilities day to day and to have a partner that can respond to certain calls will be beneficial on so many levels, including helping us better connect with our most vulnerable,” Elow wrote.

—Staff writer Sally E. Edwards can be reached at sally.edwards@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @sallyedwards04 or on Threads @sally_edwards06.

—Staff writer Asher J. Montgomery can be reached at asher.montgomery@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @asherjmont or on Threads @asher_montgomery.