NORTHAMPTON — The city has secured a $450,000 state grant that will help support a new department designed to provide alternative responses to some public safety calls — an initiative that emerged in the wake of a March 2021 report by the Northampton Policing Review Committee.
The framework for the so-called Division of Community Care, which is a part of Northampton’s Department of Health and Human Services, is currently being created to provide multiple types of civilian responders to community needs — including peer response to mental health and substance use crises — as an alternative public safety response.
Northampton received the funding from the state Department of Public Health’s Equitable Approaches to Public Safety grant program.
The program is funded in recognition of the impacts that public safety outcomes have on individual community health. Among the goals of the program are to better respond to mental health, behavioral health or other public health needs in the community, as well as to increase equitable public safety outcomes through alternatives to public safety responses and training in de-escalation, racial equity, cultural competency and social services navigation.
“This grant is an acknowledgment that there is a need for this kind of model to exist (in Northampton),” said Merridith O’Leary, commissioner of Health and Human Services.
Northampton originally applied for the state grant program in the summer of 2020, but was not selected because the city’s public health-based approach to alternatives to public safety response did not fit the grant’s initial guidelines, according to Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra.
She said that state Sen. Jo Comerford, D-Northampton, spent considerable effort helping the Department of Public Health understand the merits of the city’s approach, and helped convince the state Legislature to provide additional funding with Northampton in mind.
“Senator Comerford recognized the value of our efforts to build the Division of Community Care, and worked hard to convince the Commonwealth that our model is one in which they should invest,” Sciarra said in a statement.
The Division of Community Care began taking shape in March 2021 after the Northampton Policing Review Committee delivered in its final report, titled “Reimagining Safety,” that called for creation of an alternative policing model. The Policing Review Committee was appointed by former Mayor David Narkewicz and then-City Council president Sciarra, and charged with exploring alternative solutions for public safety responses in certain cases. Ultimately, the committee recommended the establishment of a new Department of Community Care to provide multiple types of civilian responders to community needs, including peer response to mental health and substance use crises, as an alternative public safety response.
In December 2021, the city hired an interim director to lead the development of the division, and moved the division under Health and Human Services in the spring of 2022.
Similar to Amherst — which secured a $450,000 EAPS grant last year to boost its Community Response for Equity, Safety and Service program — Northampton has hired Medford-based nonprofit Law Enforcement Action Partnership as a consultant in its implementation of Division of Community Care. The nonprofit will look at data logs of the city’s Police Department and work with the city’s first responders in identifying what calls community responders will take, said O’Leary.
At this point, the city has budgeted for four community responders. She said the city will be looking at other funding sources to add more support as the division grows.
In the coming months, the city will discuss areas of response that include establishing a place to bring people that are divergent from jail or the hospital, she said.
“We want to be able to bring people to a space and settle down — receive a mental health intervention,” she said.
In the meantime, the city will continue to reach out to its different partners and agencies to ensure all stakeholders are heard and that the process is collaborative.
O’Leary estimates that training for the community responders will take place next spring with a hopeful launch of the pilot program by June or July.
“We want to change outcomes. This model could really work and be a game-changer,” she said. “We are so excited to receive this support from DPH in recognition of and to assist in building these critical services for the people of Northampton.”
Emily Thurlow can be reached at ethurlow@gazettenet.com.
