St. Pete Police Chief Anthony Holloway and Dr. Sandra Braham, CEO of Gulf Coast JFCS host a Community Conversation about CALL next Tuesday, Feb 9th. The public is welcome.
Last month’s unanimous City Council vote to approve the new CALL Program cemented an innovation in policing strategy for the City of St. Petersburg. It also represented the first major win for Black Lives Matter activists, after months of protests last year.
CALL stands for Community Assistance Life Liaison, an $850,000 Pilot Program approved by City Council in a 7-0 vote on January 7th, making St. Pete the only city in Pinellas County (and one of the few in the nation) to move to a 100% clinical response to 911 calls for help for mental and behavioral health incidents.
Over the next 8 months, the CALL Program will send social workers to handle the roughly 12,000 non-violent, non-criminal calls received by the St. Petersburg Police Department each year, to cope with mental and behavioral health crises.
Initially, social workers will be accompanied by police officers to those calls, but by the 6-month mark, pairs of social workers will be handling roughly 80% of them on their own.
Though the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Department has implemented a similar program, a key difference is that – unlike St. Pete – the sheriff will continue to dispatch sworn officers along with social workers to all such calls. At least for now.
St. Petersburg’s CALL program will be administered by Gulf Coast Jewish Family and Community Services (Gulf Coast JFCS), which will use the funds from the City to hire 16 social workers to become “first responders” to calls to the police for issues such as truancy, mental health crises, homelessness, and suicide threats.
Police Chief Anthony Holloway and Gulf Coast JFCS CEO Dr. Sandra Braham will host a Community Conversation next Tuesday, February 9th, to introduce the pilot program, which will run through September, with plans to continue services if results are positive.
The funding is a direct result of the agitation of Black Lives Matters protestors that took to the streets of downtown St. Pete in June of 2020, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd (a black man) at the hands of police in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Hundreds of local advocates held nightly protests in St. Petersburg over the summer months, calling for an end to police brutality and a fundamental shift in police budgeting and strategies. Among their demands was for the City to cease funding to new police officers, and instead allocate resources to trained mental health professionals.
The CALL Program answers that demand. The $850,000 contract is a drop in the bucket relative to the City’s annual expenditure for policing (less than 1% of the City’s $116.3 Million approved budget to the police department for FY2021).
But City officials expect a dramatic reduction in the criminalization tied to policing mental illness, and a significant time savings by the City’s sworn force of 575 police officers – a savings that City leaders say will be reinvested into quality community-centered policing activities.
Gulf Coast JFCS’s executive team will spend the next month hiring and training the team of social workers who will be stationed for rapid response in multiple office locations. The agency will also prioritize community engagement of as many partners as possible, says Gulf Coast’s CEO Dr. Sandra Braham.
She and Chief Holloway held a January 22nd virtual webinar to introduce CALL to non-profit leaders and policy makers.
The upcoming February 9th event will welcome a larger audience of city residents, community leaders, clergy, non-profit leaders and business owners.
Leaders of the protest movement in St. Petersburg are cautiously optimistic about the pilot.
Ashley Green, an organizer for Dream Defenders and Black Lives Matter, says “It’s a promising first step in a larger conversation on how we prioritize ‘care over criminality’ in our community. But it’s going to take a lot of vigilance and determination to make it work and to hopefully see it expanded beyond the pilot.”
Jabaar Edmond agrees. He spent weeks galvanizing protests with the Movement St. Pete group. “We are in a ‘wait and see’ mode to gauge the outcomes of the pilot,” said Edmond. “I hope it doesn’t stop here. Whether the pilot is successful or not, we have deeply rooted problems in the police department that need to be addressed. The CALL Program has to be one of many action steps to permanently shift the paradigm.”
The local police union also voiced support for the move when first announced by city officials in July of 2020. A Tampa Bay Times article quotes Sun Coast Police Benevolent Association president Jonathan Vazquez as saying “Reducing the police response to non-criminal incidents has been a long standing issue…We believe this will lead to decreased strain on our police resources, reduce risks to our member officers, and better outcomes to the most vulnerable citizens that we serve.”
Chief Holloway has attended several community meetings to introduce CALL. In answer to the Power Broker’s request for comment, Holloway says “I am confident that this partnership will benefit both the police department and the community by ensuring we respond with the most appropriate resources for our residents when they are in crisis.”
This conversation is co-hosted by One Community, Pinellas County Urban League, Mt. Zion Progressive, Community Development & Training Center (CDAT), People Empowering & Restoring Communities (PERC), WAS Collaborative, Pinellas Opportunity Council, the Enough is Enough Initiative, the St. Petersburg Branch NAACP, and the Foundation for a Healthy St. Petersburg.
