‘Something our community desperately needs’: Richmond crisis response preparing to start

Starting in February Richmond’s crisis response team will start hitting the streets and responding to non-violent calls instead of police. 

It will help people connect to social services, de-escalate conflicts and crises, and provide transportation to care services at no cost.

The Community Crisis Response Program’s advisory board was updated Friday night about how the program’s mobile response team  — known as Reach Out With Compassion and Kindness — will work.

ROCK will respond to behavioral health checks, wellness checks, suicidal ideation and noise disturbances. Responders may also be deployed alongside police and firefighters. 

The program has been several years coming, after being green-lit by the Richmond Public Safety Task Force in 2021. It was slated to begin in summer 2023. Program Manager Michael Romero wasn’t hired until May 2024.

The program began hiring response workers in June after ironing out a dispute with the Richmond Police Officers Association, which wanted ROCK as members, given that their role would entail duties handled by officers. However, the workers were placed in Richmond’s general employees union.

Romero said seven response workers will begin eight weeks of training Dec.1, focusing on de-escalation, crisis response and trauma-informed care. Unlike Contra Costa County A3 and Oakland MACRO, ROCK responders are not all licensed clinical workers. Romero said the team has a combined level of education, lived experience and ability to connect with people in crisis.

“Crisis work is centered on one’s ability to connect with people in a deep and impactful way,” Romero said.

Duties could expand

On the ground, responders will help people get connected with social services such as substance and alcohol use interventions and behavioral health care. People will be able to voluntarily choose to get transported to care in the response team’s vans.

ROCK will generally only respond to calls within Richmond city limits, although it might go outside boundaries for calls concerning Richmond residents.

In February, the responders will begin a soft launch period, where they will be sent out with supervisors. Eventually, said Sam Vaughn, Neighborhood Safety Office director, the types of calls responders go to may be expanded. 

“There might be 15 different categories of disturbance the dispatcher may have in the initial months here. They might be very comfortable with sending us to two or three,” Vaughn said. “Once we build the trust, once we build their confidence in what we can accomplish, just as every jurisdiction that we’ve seen, that number just goes up.” 

There are over 200,000 calls to Richmond’s non-emergency line every year. With Police Department staffing low, officers are having a harder time responding to those calls. With ROCK taking lower level calls, police can focus more on violent crimes. 

Pedie Perez case

Conversations about having alternative responders from police started in 2014, when 24-year-old Richard “Pedie” Perez was shot several times by a Richmond police officer responding to a nuisance call at Uncle Sam’s Liquors. Perez was intoxicated but unarmed when he was killed outside the store. The officer was not charged.

In August, 27-year-old Angel Montaño died after being shot by officers called for a mental health crisis. In police video footage, Montaño stepped out of his home armed with two knives, and at least two officers shot him. That case is still under investigation.

“This is something our community desperately needs, not today but yesterday,” Hope Dixon, the program’s advisory board chair, said at the meeting.

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