Police in Cambridge, MA, to Start Using Social Workers to Respond to Some 911 Calls
“Four years after the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd spurred nationwide protests, the CARE team is Cambridge’s first real try at an alternative to police in emergencies.”
Police in Cambridge, MA, will begin using social workers to respond to some 911 calls instead of actual cops. This is an idea that has been pushed by some on the left since ‘defunding the police’ became a thing. What could possibly go wrong?
Critics of this type of policy have pointed out that even when police are responding to a seemingly routine 911 call, they never know what they’re walking into. Someone at the scene could be armed, psychotic, or worse.
The Boston Globe reports:
Calling 911 in Cambridge? Soon, the city may send social workers instead of police.
It took less than a minute for the crew of five social workers in matching mint-green T-shirts to find people who could use some help.
Right outside the door to their Central Square headquarters last month, they found a woman sitting on the ground with a few small bags, taking a rest in the 80-plus-degree heat, and gave her water and snacks. A few steps down Mass. Ave., they chatted with a homeless man who wanted assistance getting an ID.
Later, they consoled a woman who walked up to them in tears, asking if someone could pray with her. They obliged.
It was just another afternoon for Cambridge’s new five-member Community Assistance Response and Engagement, or CARE, team, which has for months been meeting with some of the city’s most vulnerable.
But if all goes according to plan, the team will soon have a more high-stakes task: responding to 911 calls, sent to the scenes of nonviolent, mental health-related incidents handled at present by cops with guns.
Four years after the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd spurred nationwide protests, the CARE team is Cambridge’s first real try at an alternative to police in emergencies. As envisioned, it would be among the most ambitious such efforts in Massachusetts, because it would respond to some incidents instead of — rather than with — police. The team’s launch has raised thorny questions about when people in crisis actually need the cops, and when a social worker can show up instead.
Cambridge Police Commissioner Christine Elow publicly supports the CARE program and said she has met frequently with the team.
Some Twitter/X users are skeptical.
Misguided, unsafe, and irresponsible. I am genuinely concerned for the social workers’ safety. This won’t last long and unfortunately Cambridge is willing to allow well-intentioned individuals to jeopardize their lives for a progressive political experiment.#mapoli https://t.co/vFcBzpc0vp
— Logan Trupiano (@LoganMTrupiano) June 6, 2024
This has DISASTER written all over it. The people who made this happen should be somehow legally held culpable when people get assaulted and killed. Which WILL happen not if but when. https://t.co/6EJRBgXAMT
— Robsizzle (@robjdaigle) June 6, 2024
Stay tuned. They'll be calling the police for help. https://t.co/BdnyRlJS7t
— Hobson – Please Stop That (@chimera246) June 6, 2024
What could possibly go wrong? https://t.co/8fukoGe2SK
— Bay State Blues (@Baystateblues) June 6, 2024
Jazz Shaw of Hot Air comments:
Police receive special training to deal with all manner of emergencies. And contrary to liberal dogma, they don’t show up at the scene with guns blazing. They will always try to talk people down off the ledge (figuratively) if possible before resorting to potentially deadly force. Unfortunately, there are some situations, particularly involving deranged individuals, where force may wind up being the only viable option to keep the community safe.
So what do they expect these unarmed CARE workers to do if they respond to one of those calls and everything goes south? Particularly if the maniac they are dealing with produces a weapon, a clipboard isn’t going to be of much use. If one of these CARE workers winds up dead or seriously injured at the hands of some mentally disturbed maniac, the police are still going to have to be sent in to clean up the situation anyway.
Cambridge is sacrificing public safety to virtue signal. It’s madness.
Featured image via YouTube.
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When seconds count police are minutes away. Hold my beer.
There was a story out of Nashville a couple days ago about employees at an outlet store trapping an organized retail shoplifting crew inside the store they were trying to rob (the employees simply left and then locked the doors behind them).
https://www.abc3340.com/news/nation-world/viral-video-shows-alleged-shoplifters-trapped-inside-antioch-tanger-outlets-store-nashville-tennessee-perfumania
Not reported by local media however, is the fact that it took police ONE-HALF HOUR to finally show up. This is why I carry everywhere I can now. A half-hour is an eternity.
Will the DA or whoever does such things move to bring charges against the outlet store employees for “false imprisonment” of those poor misunderstood perpetrators?
Also, the phrase “false imprisonment”. If someone locked me up, I’d sure feel truly imprisoned, not falsely so.
Yep I saw that one. That would actually be illegal in deep blue state under dem super majority, such as NY or CA. The store owner would get sued for wrongful imprisonment, and the employees would get fired.
Diall 911 and leave message at the tone, the police have been defunded.
In this case I’m fine with the cops being minutes or hours away.
Everyone says they’re worried about the social workers. I think it’ll be cool once they get in over their heads.
The only idiots who would volunteer for this kind of stupidity are liberals. Face it, it’s not like we don’t have an overabundance of liberals.
If one or all five get hosed by a violent, insane felon, sobeit. With luck it’ll be 5 antifa jerks being hosed down, and that wouldn’t even generate a single tear from me.
I still remember the murder in Denver and the shooter got off scot free.
Do we get bonus points if hostile foreign invaders take out the social workers?
Subotai Bahadur
Popping corn to watch the Sons of Cornpop bag these lambs
One the bright side they won’t kill your dog for yapping
Or misuse their badge and seek to enforce made up ‘laws’ or use ‘officer safety’ as the excuse for illegal detention or a number of other things the bad apples within the larger number of LEO routinely do.
I can see maybe where this program could be useful in limited circumstances; a welfare check on an elderly person requested by an out of town relative as one. There have been LEO who showed up for this, startled the person and ended up shooting them b/c the person came to the door with a weapon. Police work is a demanding job and constant training to minimize these sorts of situations and apply lessons learned to adjust policies and training to minimize the risks to the public.
Sending Social Workers instead of LEO outside those sorts of narrow circumstances seems Cray Cray but I suppose we gonna find out.
Nor will the scream obscenities at your wife and aim firearms at your children, discover they have the “wrong house”, too-bad-s0-sad, hah-hah, our bad, we have qualified immunity, phucque you, bye bye.
On YouTube a good source to see how much police misconduct exists is ‘The Civil Rights Lawyer’. He has video today where five LEO enter a man’s home without a warrant and arrest him for a parking violation. Absolutely insane 4th amendment violation.
Sadly more and more LEO don’t seem to understand that their authority has very clear limits and just b/c they get emotional they can’t (constitutionally) use their badge and gun to unlawfully detain, question or arrest Citizens on a whim. It is past time to create a national registry of LEO with histories of civil rights violations and what would be criminal offenses if committed by a non LEO. Require every jurisdiction to carry liability insurance for every LEO individually and if an insurance company won’t underwrite a policy for that specific LEO then don’t hire or retain them. IMO that’s the only (peaceful) way this ends; by creating significant financial disincentives for the Communities that choose to hire and retain the bad apple LEO and having an outside entity (the insurance underwriter) make a bias free call about the LEO.
I see other videos were four six or even eight police officers more or less surround somebody on the sidewalk and start questioning them. Virtually all of them have their thumbs jammed in their duty belts and their legs apart and what used to be called a wide stance. At bottom I think most of these guys are just cowards.
When I see them with their black blue and white American flag patches with the line down the middle of it I know exactly where I stand with them. As a quote civilian quote I am the enemy. I am the other.
One thing I left out: this qualified immunity nonsense needs to stop.one thing I left out: this qualified immunity nonsense needs to stop.
IMO qualified immunity is valid under certain circumstances. What I mean is did the LEO stick to the training and policies of his agency? If so then that LEO has qualified immunity BUT where the actions of that LEO using the training/policies resulted in an unconstitutional result the agency is now liable.
So under this more comment sense framework where there was an unconstitutional or unlawful action by a LEO then either the LEO is accountable or the agency is accountable or both. What we shouldn’t accept is the current qualified immunity bs. Hold them financially accountable and I would wager they begin to act more consistently within the constitution.
Or shoot you, with body cams off of course.
Those cameras aren’t off, they’re malfunctioning.
Which SHOULD result in an automatic presumption that the LEO and their Agency is destroying evidence. Body cams are THE single most powerful tool for discovering the truth which can protect both LEO from BS misconduct allegations and Citizens from bad apple LEO….but only when they are turned on and when the evidence is used to prosecute the guilty even maybe especially when LEO is the guilty party.
Put known bad apple LEO into a National registry and if a jurisdiction chooses to hire them then that jurisdiction should face heightened scrutiny for the actions of all its agents. Bad choices should always have bad consequences for those making them, otherwise folks continue to make bad choices when the threat of consequences is removed or mitigated.
I like the way the Arlington, Texas police department handles this. My son is a certified social worker, but he became a police officer over 20 years ago. Because of his training, he was assigned to the negotiation team which works with citizens threatening suicide or having other mental problems. He noted that as a police officer, he has dealt with the same people he saw as a social worker, but he has a lot more authority. Next week, he starts a new job as the supervisor of the department’s mental health unit.
So, why don’t cities hire social workers and give them the standard police training, pay, and benefits? After all, they are putting themselves in danger just like other first responders.
Because then the left would hate him, whereas they loved him as the same person the day before.
It’s the police training that they get…. it changes them from pure to corrupt to the eyes of the Defund Police people. Perspective changes….. The proponents of social worker only don;t know what they don’t know and Kruger_Dunning for sure.
https://i.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExd2EyemhjZW9jOGNtM3NseDB1MTgzdjg4dnR1d3M4ZXNsZHp3OTBibiZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfYnlfaWQmY3Q9Zw/81xwEHX23zhvy/giphy.gif
tinyurl.com is your friend.
It will be interesting to see what the “rules of engagement” will be for social workers responding to 911 calls. What leeway will they have to deal with unusual situations? What will be the fallout when their intervention doesn’t work as planned? Happy endings aren’t guaranteed.
Well, Happy Endings ARE guaranteed. But not at some psychotics home where he or she has a gun.
There’s a YouTube channel called ‘PoliceActivity’ that does nothing but post dashcam, bodycam and other video sources from police shooting events. I would estimate (conservatively) that no less than a third of the shootings they highlight involve suspects with PROFOUND mental health infirmities. There was one from last week where police were responding to a man calling 911 to inform them the voices in his head are telling him to kill someone. Police arrived, it went the way anyone could have predicted an interaction between police and an armed crazy person might go…he was killed. He had just been released less than a day earlier…..after stabbing a cop the week before.
We need to Make Asylums Great Again.
Yep. Those videos and videos from other channels like Police Activity show that it’s high time we take some people off the streets and say, “You’re too crazy to ever be free again” and put them in mental hospitals.
But then we would not have a President in office until January 20.
Rowell that will go well
Weird
Well that will go well
How wasteful. They should respond to 911 calls by Zoom call. Save money. Save traffic. Everybody wins!
No!!!
Smoke signals!
Police Psychics.
No charge if we don’t change your life forever!
Call MS Cleo today!
OK Mr Nasty Man. We will need to use our inside voice.
So, tell me about your relationship with your mother and father. How do you FEEL about that?
You seem to be showing a bit of hostility this morning. Perhaps we can go sit at the park bench and discuss your situation over a nice cup of Chamomile tea.
Can you tell me about what’s been going in your life recently?
Tell me about the feelings you are having regarding your current challenges.
Please explain how you would normally cope with a situation like this.
How does that normally work for you?
Followed by a busted lip and a shattered eye socket.
Why not? Sending the cops to roust people hasn’t really been successful
Who gives a damn if these “social workers” get murdered? They’re as stupid as the naive and virtue-signaling leftist/Dhimmi-crat “aid workers” who breezily waltz into a war zone in a conflict started by goose-stepping, genocidal, Islamofascist, Muslim supremacist terrorist-thugs, and are accidentally killed in a likely set-up by the terrorists.
The dim-witted Dhimmi-crats only learn lessons the hard way.
“Calling Cambridge Social Response unit- we have a person of mental vulnerability chaotically gyrating a butcher’s knife at the progressive elementary school. Use of jungian analysis psychodynamic therapy is authorized.”
I guess they could get you to go in with your high-speed military training.
Cambridge was long ago dubbed “The People’s Republic of Cambridge” by local news writer/talk show host Howie Carr for “moonbat” initiatives like banning Christmas trees on city grounds/buildings.. Recently they announced they were eliminating algebra from middle school, math being racist and all. We knew this was coming.
I grew up next door in Somerville which went from mostly working class to becaming woke in the 90s and now there’s this one-upsmanship of bat-shit crazy wokery between the 2 cities. Expect Somerville to announce exclusively trans social workers responding to 911 or some nonsense.
Back in the day there were great bakeries, bars, pizza places, small grocerias…you could go into a “convenience” store and get a sub from the back counter that would put Subway out of business. Now it’s all “artisinal” this and “sustainable” that. Cambridge had some great used record stores too.
This social experiment failed in various CA cities. Then it becomes difficult to undo the damage. Police will quit and relocate to work elsewhere.
Portland and Seattle too. Trained officers leave crazy town to go somewhere they are appreciated.
Fine by me. We have too many social workers anyway.
Once they’ve thinned that herd some, they should start on gender studies and education majors.
The free market moves in mysterious ways.
Is this the same Cambridge that declared itself a “nuclear testing-free zone in the 70s. Ha, ha, ha, ha.
This is going to suck for the 911 operators because how to you decide who to send?
Flip a coin?
All of the circumstances mentioned in the Globe article are very specifically NOT 911 events. Handing out snacks? Pointing a person to the DMV office? Praying?
The essence of responding to a 911 call is the ability to assess the situation and properly respond to it whatever it is. That very often involves dealing with violent and possibly armed people (for instance).
If handing them snacks and being emotionally supportive is the limit of your repertoire you are less than worthless in such a situation and the actual assistance the victim requires is delayed while you fluff around and eventually call 911 for it.
“Drop the gun or I’ll have your refuse collection suspended!”
So, will these social professionals be riding patrol around the city? What powers will they have?
In a 911 call, the dispatcher sends the nearest officer for rapid response. Where will these social workers be? Does the 911 system now have to keep track of where the socialists are? Does the city system have that capability?
I don’t live anywhere near Cambridge, MA, nor do I visit. So I don’t really care how their experiment in democracy goes.
I just came here to ask, since the article references George Floyd, if they intend to send social workers to respond to calls involving drug-addled, violent thugs with long criminal records.