Trauma Voters in three wards will vote on a referendum that would send mental health workers to crises instead of cops.

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Mental health on the ballot

Voters in three wards will vote on a referendum that would send mental health workers to crises instead of cops.

By MAX BLAISDELL

On a Sunday afternoon in mid-September, Jackie Harvey stepped out of her home in Woodlawn for a breath of fresh air, only to notice flashing lights from several police vehicles and ambulances fi lling her street.

She walked down the block to fi nd out what was going on, seeing several of her neighbors amid the swelling crowd. As they looked on, one police o cer attempted to resuscitate a young man using CPR. Another young man was being wheeled on a stretcher by EMTs to the open doors of an ambulance. Harvey saw blood su using his clothes. He had been shot.

Harvey, an administrative assistant at Cook County Hospital with 29 years of experience, says that witnessing the aftermath of a mass shooting that left two men dead and two seriously injured was traumatic, even for her. So she understood when a relative of one of the victims arrived at the scene hysterical with grief.

What she could not understand was why a police o cer handcu ed the man. The o cer took the cu s o only after other community members explained the familial connection to one of the victims and demanded his release.

“If I would have gotten involved, because I’m emotional and hysterical too, they probably would have handcu ed me,” Harvey said.

Harvey wondered whether the o cer had never received sensitivity training, which could have prepared him to deal with a distraught relative. And why, out of the 20-some emergency responders on the scene, was there not a single person on hand who could o er counseling services after such a horrifi c event?

One reason such services aren’t yet available has to do with the overall lack of mental health resources available to residents living in neighborhoods such as Woodlawn. Despite the frequent traumatic instances of violence thereabouts, the city has engaged in decades-long divestment from operating mental health centers.

Back in 2012, Rahm Emanuel closed Woodlawn and Auburn-Gresham’s public mental health clinics as well as four others across Chicago in a continuation of the policies of his predecessor, Richard M. Daley, who had shuttered several before. In all, Emanuel and Daley closed 14 of the city’s 19 mental health clinics.

On November 8, residents of the Sixth, 20th, and 33rd Wards will vote on a nonbinding ballot initiative that asks whether they want to change course on that trajectory and reopen the city-run mental health clinics in support of a new dispatch system to send mental health professionals and EMTs instead of police o cers to mental health emergency calls.

In an impromptu interview at the Whitney Young Library in Chatham, community residents Richard Rosario and Brad Redrick indicated their support of the initiative. They said that reopening the clinics and dispatching care workers, not cops, made intuitive sense. Why send cops to deal with situations they’re not trained for?

“This should have been done so long ago it ain’t even funny,” Redrick said. “I used to work in mental health . . . and [people struggling with mental illness] are a vulnerable population that needs that kind of consideration.”

Tynisha Jointer, a former social worker at Deneen Elementary School who lives in Chatham, said that people in her neighborhood avoid calling the police because of fears that they will harm the very people they are called to assist. “Having an [alternative] outlet could defi nitely be helpful for families . . . supporting folks who are struggling with mental illness,” she said.

Although the referendum is nonbinding, it is part of a sustained e ort by a group of community organizations known as the Collaborative for Community Wellness (CCW) to press the mayor and City Council to include funding for the development of a citywide mental health crisis response system in the city’s 2023 budget. In 2020, 33rd Ward alderperson Rossana Rodriguez Sanchez introduced a resolution that would have es-

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tablished such a system.

Since September 2021, the city of Chicago began piloting a co-responder program, pairing police officers with mental health workers and paramedics in Crisis Assistance Response and Engagement (CARE) teams. CARE teams operated in a handful of neighborhoods on the southwest side during weekday hours. The teams were dispatched to over a hundred mental health crisis calls in the past year. In none of those cases was an arrest made or a use of force reported, according to Allison Arwady, Chicago’s public health commissioner.

Although Arwady has insisted police offi cers’ presence is essential to ensuring the safety of the other responders, in only one case out of 134 did a CARE team member sustain a minor injury. Organizers of the referendum contend that including officers on CARE teams is unnecessary at best and dangerous at worst.

According to Cheryl Miller, a lifelong Chicagoan and former cabdriver who is now the public health organizer for Southside Together Organizing for Power (STOP), one of the groups that is a part of CCW, o cers’ training teaches them to establish control over a situation, using force whenever a person is noncompliant, even if that person cannot readily comply because of their mental illness.

“If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything you see is a nail,” Miller said.

Debates on the 2023 budget begin soon, as does voting on candidates for all 50 aldermanic seats, so the referendum comes at a time when city o cials may be more susceptible to public pressure.

And for Kennedy Bartley, the legislative director at United Working Families and who also worked on the referendum campaign, the organizers’ vision is about more than just providing essential mental health services— it is also about getting back the 125 unionized medical worker jobs, most of which were held by Black and Brown people, that Emanuel cut in 2012.

“We believe that we don’t need to privatize our care,” Bartley said. “Governments are responsible for providing for safe and healthy communities.” v