Alameda County’s faltering mental health system needs reform
COUNTY AFFAIRS: US Department of Justice report reveals undue reliance on Santa Rita Jail for psychiatric treatment
Rachel Lee/Staff
One of the largest providers of mental health services in Alameda County is not a community clinic or treatment center but a jail. And not just any jail: Alameda County Santa Rita Jail, a facility notorious for dangerous and inhumane conditions.
For decades, as access to psychiatric care has dwindled, jails and prisons nationwide have become de facto destinations for people with mental health issues.
Alameda County is no exception. Almost half of the people currently held in Santa Rita Jail struggle with mental health issues. One quarter face severe mental illness. The situation is dire: A recent report by the U.S. Department of Justice, or DOJ, deemed the mental health services provided by Alameda County so abysmal as to be potentially unconstitutional.
The Voices of the People in the Center
One of the RPS Task Force s working groups focused on community engagement, including the strategies used by the task force itself to involve not just a broad range of Austinites, but those most directly harmed [who] stand in the center of the engagement and design of our recommendations. On April 10, after the task force released its draft recommendation, it held a virtual community listening session (with simultaneous translation in nine languages), which collected testimony from more than 150 Austinites and which was viewed on livestream by more than 1,200 others. In its report, the task force presents the following top 10 list as a snapshot of what we heard :
Art by Zeke Barbaro / Getty Images (Photos by David Brendan Hall and John Anderson)
At their April 20 work session, the members of the Austin City Council certainly sounded thankful for the recommendations the City-Community Reimagining Public Safety Task Force had just laid at their feet. Vanessa Fuentes expressed her gratitude. Ann Kitchen promised to study the recommendations. Alison Alter praised the task force members for pouring themselves into the work.
Those whom they d praised – the community activists the task force comprises – were quite untouched. With the three-hour meeting wrapping up, they wanted to know where they stood. It s imperative that we see the city manager s office, staff, council, and the city as a whole make a public commitment, said Monica Guzmán of Go Austin/Vamos Austin.
City auditor’s office finds racial disparities in Berkeley police stops
Karin Goh/File
The city auditor’s office presented an audit of Berkeley Police Department that found racial disparities in stops and response times. The audit used computer-aided dispatch to analyze more than 360,000 events involving police between 2015-2019.
The Berkeley city auditor’s office released an audit of the city’s police department focusing on racial disparities in stops and response times to incidents involving mentally ill or unhoused individuals Thursday.
In response to the national conversation on race and policing sparked by the killing of George Floyd, Berkeley City Councilmember Ben Bartlett proposed collecting data about police activities as part of a process to discuss police reform. The proposal was later incorporated into Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín’s Safety for All: George Floyd Community Safety Act, which was passed by the city in July 2020.
As we note in our coverage of the Texas Legislature in this issue, lawmakers are whacking at the Austin piñata in both chambers, hoping some kind of candy spills out in time for the 2022 primaries. There s a lot of pent-up scolding, some of which didn t make it into law in 2019, such as stripping the city of its power to adopt ordinances guaranteeing paid sick leave and other worker rights, or making sure Austin doesn t help groups that help people who don t want to be pregnant, in ways that are different from the groups whose help will be forced upon people who don t want it. And, as we reported last week, a bunch of Westsiders just want to bail on the city and its tax bills altogether, because why the hell not. We look forward to visiting the future anarchist collectives on the Lost Creek playa.