On September 6th, a day after members and allies of the Fort Lee community delivered their demands for transparency and justice to the town’s mayor, town council, and police chief—five weeks after 25-year-old Korean American Victoria Lee was killed by police during a mental health crisis—community leaders and advocates sat down with Representative Andy Kim to discuss possibilities in alternative crisis response, investment in mental health, and police accountability at the federal, state, and local levels.
Participants described the need for authorities to do more than establish new policies and check off boxes. Existing policies stipulating that law enforcement employ de-escalation techniques and use force only as a last resort were already in place before Victoria Lee was killed, but adoption of these guidelines is inconsistent across NJ municipalities. More forceful leadership and tools to ensure accountability are needed to ensure these strategies are actually being practiced in the field.
Asia E. Marche, Advocacy and Policy Liaison for Black Lives Matter Paterson, highlighted the fact that, in the state of New Jersey, mental health providers are not designated as emergency responders; they are not considered an essential service. She emphasized the need to break down silos and learn from alternative crisis response models in states such as California and Oregon, which have made notable progress in this area.
Yannick Wood, Director of Criminal Justice Reform at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, affirmed the need for unarmed, community-based first responders and pointed to the Seabrooks-Washington bill as an existing effort that, when implemented, will launch pilot programs in New Jersey for communities to develop their own crisis response teams: “It’s empowering communities to keep communities safe. Mental health counselors, people who are trained in social work or people who are psychologists, they have the weapons, if you will, to actually combat these mental health crises.” People would be empowered to help their families, friends, and neighbors, and would already be equipped with the cultural competency and language skills that law enforcement officers often lack.
AAPI New Jersey’s Policy and Advocacy Adviser Jeff Chang raised the issue of there not being enough mental health providers to send a qualified first responder whenever they are needed, even when there is widespread agreement. He stressed the importance of building that pipeline as soon as possible. Rep. Kim concurred: “We are having a mental health crisis as a country right now, and part of the challenge that I hear is that we as a nation lack a sufficient workforce for mental health providers. That’s something at a federal level we can be operating to try to build up that workforce, incentivise people to come into it and make sure that they’re available to these different efforts.”
The group recognized that in order to push forward for rapid progress and ensure that no one else’s call for help ends the way Victoria Lee’s, Najee Seabrooks’, and Andrew Washington’s calls did, a simultaneous, multipronged effort is needed. “Rather than think about it sequentially, I think it’s better for us to move forward and say, we need to invest in mental health, build up that pipeline, and we need to engage universities and colleges and see who we can bring into the conversation,” said Rep. Kim. “I’ll certainly think through at the federal level how I can use my position, my reach, my role in the state to push that we should codify in state law some of these responses to mental health incidents and guidelines. Let’s try to make sure we think about that together.”
