Who You Gonna Call?

After Oakland cops drew guns on an accident survivor, a new kind of emergency responder rushed to the scene.

- By Madison Pauly

ONE MORNING this spring, Cat Brooks got a call letting her know that Oakland police were swarming a crashed car on East 25 th Street. The driver of the silver hatchback was unresponsive, and his stereo had been blasting R&B for an hour before a neighbor, worried the man might need an ambulance, called 911.

The neighbor hadn’t seen the gun in his lap, but the cops who arrived did. At least 16 police officers soon took over the block and surrounded Lavel Jones, a father of four, who remained in the driver’s seat, appearing to pass in and out of consciousness.

Brooks rushed to the scene. An antiracist activist and former mayoral candidate, in 2012 Brooks co-founded the Anti Police-Terror Project, dedicated to fighting police brutality targeting Black, brown, and poor people. In 2020, the community group had launched a hotline in Oakland that people could call during emergencies that they worried cops might make worse. The hotline, which serves as an alternative to 911, is now dispatching volunteer medics, mental health specialists, and security specialists to psychiatric, substance use, or interpersonal violence emergencies. Though nascent, Mental Health First is the kind of homegrown alternative to police intervention that more people in the United States began seriously considering after a Minneapolis police officer responding to a minor complaint murdered George Floyd. With city governments from Denver to New York launching programs that dispatch fewer cops and more counselors and health care workers, aptp holds bimonthly calls with community groups and local officials pursuing similar initiatives across the country.