Dear Mayor Nicholson:
Today, on one of the most important days in American history, we find ourselves repeating the question by Martin Luther King: “Where Do We Go From Here?” After several years of good faith efforts to work with our government to enact much-needed systems change, we, of the Lynn Racial Justice Coalition (LRJC), find ourselves once again impelled to express our concern about the future of the unarmed crisis response team that the people of Lynn have been demanding since the outpouring of righteous indignation in 2020. We are worried that the recently announced Community Behavioral Health Center (CBHC) run by Eliot Community Human Services—while an important intervention for the provision of mental health services in our city—does not embody our community’s vision of ALERT, the All Lynn Emergency Response Team.
For nearly three years, we have worked so hard to build an accountable, representative, culturally competent unarmed crisis response team, first with your predecessor, then with you as a mayoral candidate and now as the leader of our city.
The CBHC is important. Done correctly, a mental health response team might have prevented the death of Denis Reynoso, the Lynn father and veteran who was killed by police during a mental health crisis in 2013. But even a perfectly designed mental health crisis team would not cover all of the situations in which our community has been subject to racist aggression. Even your assertion in your recent Op-Ed in the Daily Item that the team “would respond to needs other than just behavioral health, such as assisting unsheltered residents,” is not sufficiently clear about its mandate. We all remember that it was a confrontational police response to a non-violent noise complaint that led to the arrest, the hurling of racial epithets, and subsequent beating of Victor White in 2020, a situation that no mental health response would have helped with. In other words the current proposal is limited.
Eliot, like so many other crisis response teams, frequently relies on the police as the first response to mental health crises. Its mobile crisis program had problems with poor response time and even non-response. Eliot is closely tied with the Lynn Police Department, and staffs LPD’s Behavioral Health Unit. These teams are housed within systems that contribute to the retraumatization of Black and Brown communities through involvement of the police. ALERT was always intended to disrupt these systems. In other words, the current proposal does not sufficiently deemphasize police involvement in mental health crisis response.
Our community is acutely aware that Eliot has never centered cultural competency and resisting systemic racism in their work. We are not confident that layering cultural training or the hiring of a few new staff members on top of an organization with a long history of working within a sedimented structure of racism can address our community’s needs. We have long seen that Eliot, even when it does hire passionate, aware, and effective staff members who share our experience of the world, has a high turnover rate of its personnel. Thus, we are concerned that the current proposal situates racial justice as an afterthought.
Moreover, we are deeply troubled by the precedent of opacity, exclusion, and secrecy that has been set by the design process so far — even as you have claimed to be working alongside the community. The LRJC worked in good faith as partners with your office to begin a design process and hire consultants to assist with the work. However, we were sidelined every step of the way. Although LRJC members served alongside other community members as part of the advisory committee charged with providing input on the design of ALERT, all of us have been so sidelined that we had no idea until December 20th about your proposal to Eliot, which had already been in the works for several months. We have been so sidelined that our knowledge of the proposal’s contents are limited to a single Power Point presentation. We have been so sidelined that we have been forced to submit a public request in order to even see the plan that Eliot has proposed. The community has been excluded from the process.
This is not just our frustration with a process issue. The consistent marginalization of the community suggests that systemic racism and police brutality has not been centered. Any process that truly has combating systemic racism at its core would make the inclusion of the community in the decision-making just as crucial as the outcome. The remaining “questions to be answered” about community inclusion that you correctly emphasize in your Op-Ed as so important to the program’s success depend on an authentic relationship of collaboration with the community. We are saddened that the process so far has included us as providing the politically expedient image of community partnership, but not the actual collaboration that is necessary for our City to make this crucial stride forward.
Martin Luther King Jr. said, “True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.” We are hopeful that this open letter will not move you to shut us out further as you move forward with the illusion of a peaceful solution that addresses the mental health and structural racism problems in Lynn. What we hope is that by displaying the wounds openly, you will seek to remedy the harm caused by eliminating the community’s voice. We hope that you will invite us to truly work together, in the spirit of peace and justice, to realize a new vision of health and public safety for the City that we all love. We remain willing.
Sincerely,
THE LYNN RACIAL JUSTICE COALITION
- Diverse People United
- Essex County Community Organization
- IUE-CWA Local 201
- Lynn United for Change
- New Lynn Coalition
- Northshore Juneteenth Association
- Prevent the Cycle
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