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When the Cambridge City Council voted unanimously in June 2020 to develop an “alternative public health response” to policing, it was heralded as an ambitious effort to reimagine what public safety could look like in the city.

After then-City Manager Louis A. DePasquale created a task force to recommend how to implement the order, the Cambridge Community Safety Department was first proposed. Then, in 2023, came the department’s Community Assistance Response and Engagement Team: a group of unarmed social workers and mental health clinicians, trained to de-escalate without an armed police presence.

By July 2024, the CARE team was dispatched to its first 911 call.

“We are really so grateful to have the opportunity to be on these calls,” CSD director Elizabeth Speakman said in a July 2024 interview. “We’ve already just seen the impact of having a different response that has a little bit more time, a little bit more capacity, and a little bit more of that expertise around mental health assessment.”

But as the CARE team launched, so too did a second alternative response team pioneered by the Cambridge Police Department.

The Cambridge Police Department began developing its own co-response program as early as late 2022, department leadership confirmed — nearly a year before the city’s CARE team announced its first staff. The co-response team, modeled after other examples nationwide, jointly dispatches a licensed mental health clinician and armed police officers to many of the same mental health calls as CARE.

Even as co-response remained in development for years, CSD officials were informed of its formal plans only weeks before its launch, multiple department employees confirmed. Ever since, city officials have struggled to reconcile the two teams whose efforts have often been seen as duplicative.

“They’re these two organizations who are focused on similar work have been pitted against each other by these two ends of the political spectrum — one which is calling for less policing, and one who’s calling for more policing, or at least a continuous of the status quo,” Niko Emack, a CSD consultant, said in an April interview.

Internal city data and emails obtained by The Crimson through a series of public records requests — as well as separately obtained, unredacted meeting notes and correspondence — detail how the overlapping mandates have catalyzed tension between the departments.

And interviews with nearly a dozen current and former Cambridge officials, city councilors, employees, and affiliates of both CSD and CPD revealed that the relationship between co-response and CARE has been strained ever since.

Co-response, backed by the muscle of the police department’s $81 million budget and CPD’s longstanding clinical infrastructure, is now taking on calls that the CARE team is also equipped to handle. CARE staff now find themselves without room to grow — and, CSD employees and affiliates say, without the means to compete.

In a Thursday afternoon statement, City Manager Yi-An Huang ’05 acknowledged that there has been conflict between the two teams. “I believe there is a role for Police Co-Response, in addition to Community Safety,” he wrote, “though I recognize that there is a need to better clarify some potential areas of overlap.”

‘Operating Like A Startup’

After the policy order in 2020 kicked off efforts to launch the CSD in Cambridge, it would take more than four years until the CARE team was dispatched to 911 calls. Meanwhile, the police department’s co-response team began to take shape.

A 2021 report by the city’s Public Safety Task Force first recommended that the city create a “Cambridge Department of Community Safety” with “primary responsibility” over 911 calls related to certain mental health emergencies, homelessness, crisis counseling, and nonviolent drug use, among others.

The city announced Speakman as head of the department in February 2023. She built up CARE to a team of five responders by September of that year, with a plan to dispatch 911 calls by the spring of 2024.

“With any new organization, there’s going to be a lot of growing pains, and a lot of things you discover. In a lot of ways, the Community Safety Department is operating like a startup,” Emack said.

Simultaneously, and much more quietly, the police department’s co-response team was also taking shape. CPD began discussing ways to set up its co-response team in November of 2022, Superintendent Frederick Cabral confirmed in an early April interview.

But the police department did not announce the move immediately. Among the first public disclosures of co-response’s development came in a February 2024 report written by the nonprofit Police Executive Research Forum following the 2023 police shooting of Sayed Faisal. In the report, PERF recommended that the city “consider implementing a co-response system for certain types of mental-health calls.”

A note appended at the bottom of the report — which, according to a draft of the report obtained through a public records request, was added within days of its final publication — acknowledges that report staff were later “advised that CPD is piloting a co-response system” in January 2024.

In a Thursday night email, director of CPD’s Clinical Support Unit James Barrett clarified that the police department “was planning for co-response” in January 2024.

‘Stunting the CSD’s Ability To Grow’

Both the CARE and co-response teams were formally dispatched to 911 calls in the summer of 2024. But even as both teams — one armed, one unarmed, and both aiming to respond to often-identical calls — proceeded in parallel, they rarely coordinated.

Staff from CSD, CPD, the Emergency Communications Department, the Cambridge Fire Department, and unions representing police and communications dispatchers met often in the months preceding both CARE and co-response’s formal launches.

The goal of these meetings was “coordination between departments,” said Cabral, the police superintendent. But as city staff spent months scrutinizing the CARE team ahead of its formal launch, co-response went hardly mentioned across more than a dozen meetings, according to unredacted minutes obtained by The Crimson.

The earliest documented mention of a co-response team between CSD and CPD came at a meeting between staff from the two departments on March 14 2024, three months before CARE first launched, according to notes taken about the meeting.

As the CARE and co-response teams approached their respective launches in the summer of 2024, CSD staff were caught off-guard by CPD’s initiative, two department employees confirmed. Both were granted anonymity to speak candidly about private discussions and decisions within the department without fear of retaliation.

CSD staff were only informed about co-response’s structure and launch in late June 2024, according to an internal email obtained by The Crimson.

According to Jeremy H. Warnick, a city spokesperson, CPD shared an internal announcement with CSD in July 2024 prior to launching at the beginning of August.

But CSD was not notified prior to a November 2024 citywide email from CPD publicly announcing the launch of co-response, according to correspondence obtained by The Crimson through a public records request.

“Did Community Safety have a heads on this announcement? I expect you might get some questions on how co-response will work with and/or supplement CARE and vice-versa,” Warnick wrote in an email to former CPD spokesperson Robert Goulston shortly after the citywide alert was sent.

“I probably should have sent to the CM’s alert list that we do for news events,” Goulston responded, referencing the City Manager’s email list.

Because of co-response’s quiet development, Emack said that CPD’s involvement in negotiating CARE’s call responses formed a “conflict of interest.”

“Community Safety can’t expand without the blessing, for lack of a better word, from the police department,” Emack said.

“You have this conflict of interest, because they’re growing and doing similar work while also at the same time stunting the CSD’s ability to grow,” he added.

‘Undermining The Work of the Community Safety Department’

Concerns about the overlap between the CARE and co-response teams — and the effect that such overlap would have on the work of both CSD and the police department — have been voiced to city leadership for months.

Councilor Patricia M. “Patty” Nolan ’80 expressed her concerns in a December email to Huang, the City Manager, after CPD released a video highlighting the co-response team, which featured a social worker in a bulletproof vest.

“I was distressed and disappointed to see that there was no mention of CARE, and other resources for people to call if in need of mental health,” Nolan wrote. “For the video to show only staff in bullet proof vests and the social worker accompanied by an officer in uniform goes against all the work we have done to ensure that 911 and 988 and other calls where a police officer is not warranted will be sent to CARE - or HEART.”

Nolan further requested that “CPD be asked to be more collaborative in addressing the need for the city to respond to mental health and other calls.”

In an emailed response, Huang acknowledged an “underlying tension” between CSD and CPD over the police department’s “commitment to do this kind of work well,” in an apparent reference to the police department’s clinical support efforts.

CARE is eligible to respond to a set list of call codes, including needle pickups, wellness checks, and nonviolent mental health calls. Co-response — which sits as a unit within the police department — can dispatch to any police call.

Out of a list of 191 partially redacted 911 calls directed to co-response between August and December 2024, nearly 10 percent were calls eligible for a CARE response.

“I would hope that the police is fully supportive of it, and I am concerned that it’s been a very slow rollout,” Nolan said in an interview. “There’s a number of emergency calls that are not going to CARE that I believe should be going to CARE.”

Emack recognized that Cambridge’s extensive network of unarmed response options requires a “compromise” between CSD’s CARE and CPD’s co-response.

“But I think in order to honor that compromise, community safety has to exist with the ability to grow and expand and ultimately be given the space to try and fail,” Emack added.

Warnick wrote in a statement that Cambridge is committed to providing support to both initiatives.

“The priority is helping and supporting those in our community who need it most – to best accomplish this, the approaches to best and safely do so can vary,” he wrote.

Samuel M. Gebru, a Tufts University professor who served on the initial steering committee for the CSD, said he did not “assume malicious intent on the police department’s part.” But he noted that the overlap between both teams may come at the expense of CSD.

“Whether the police department realizes it or not, they are indeed undermining the work of the Community Safety Department,” Gebru added.

For some CSD affiliates, hope for CARE’s growth may be stifled by a potential increase in co-response’s resources.

“Even if the police and community safety are getting along, hypothetically, the nature of their work and their overlap is going to cause concerns for who gets money and who gets funding,” Emack, the CSD consultant, said.

Meanwhile, CPD officials indicate that co-response also intends to expand. Both Cabral, the superintendent, and Barrett, the clinical support services director, said that they hoped to expand co-response to run “16 hours a day, five days a week.”

But Warnick, the city spokesperson, defended the existence of both teams in an emailed statement.

“Having these types of valuable resources – with very specialized skills and training — provides an opportunity to help the City of Cambridge enhance its overall outreach for our most vulnerable community members,” he wrote.

—Staff writer Matan H. Josephy can be reached at matan.josephy@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @matanjosephy.

—Staff writer Laurel M. Shugart can be reached at laurel.shugart@thecrimson.com. Follow them on X @laurelmshugart.