Last summer the city issued a request for proposals for an unarmed crisis response team. In December, city staff rejected the only proposal submitted.
Supporters of the proposal were outraged that city council didn’t even consider it. City administrator Milton Dohoney responds by email that, as a staff-level decision, it didn’t require a council vote.
Dohoney says staff found the proposal from local group Care-Based Safety unacceptable because its program would take at least five years to fully ramp up and be available only on limited days and hours. That would leave the city without an unarmed crisis response after 11 p.m. weekdays and for much of the weekend.
Formed in 2021 in response to community calls for an alternative to sending armed police, Care-Based Safety says the city asked them no questions and gave them no clear indication why their proposal was rejected. In an email, the group says that “we are unaware of any similar program in the country which has started with 24/7 service and the programs we are aware of that have been running for several years, still only run for limited hours.”
Dohoney sees other problems with the proposal. “The city’s RFP included a list of situations where it would be inappropriate to dispatch an unarmed crisis response, such as a report of a person with a gun, domestic violence, or someone being held against their will,” he writes. “The CBS submittal disregarded the RFP directive and indicated it would seek volunteers from their response team to go on such calls if they felt safe doing so.”
CBS says that’s “false … Nowhere in our proposal does it say we would send volunteers to those situations—we absolutely would not.”
Though it wasn’t in the RFP, the CBS proposal included a separate emergency number and dispatch service. They say that in dangerous situations, their dispatchers “would advise the caller of their options, including dialing 911 (with a warning that this would bring law enforcement.)”
The city planned to release another request for proposals by the end of January with the hope of getting underway yet this year. That’s good: The $3.5 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds earmarked for the project have to be spent by the end of 2026.
