criminal justice reform
act for racial justice
Since the beginning, white supremacy has had its knee on the necks of people of color, murdering our bodies, killing our livelihoods, destroying our communities and denying us opportunities. Continuing ECCO’s longterm work against racial injustice, ECCO leaders are working to address our country’s legacy of segregation, violence, and inequity through campaigns on affordable housing, police reform, and immigration. Read more about our Beloved Economy campaign here!
Our Work has paid off!
Thanks to the hard work of our leaders, in 2018, ECCO played a key role in passing statewide criminal justice reform, and a statewide police reform bill in 2021. We also got Lynn police to wear body cameras and for the police department to engage in implicit bias training. Now, we are working to make sure that Lynn creates an unarmed crisis response team, which would send trained social workers to intervene in nonviolent situations instead of police, and that such team stays independent of the police. For more information, contact revbernadette@eccoaction.org and read on below!
Over the past year and a half, ECCO leaders have played a key role in getting the Lynn City Council to require police officers to wear body cameras and to fund New England’s first unarmed crisis response team.
Unarmed crisis response
Despite the promise of these reforms and interventions, we know those solutions take time. In 2020, in the wake of the police murders of Black men around the country, ECCO leaders looked for immediate strategies to reduce violence and harm for people of color at the hands of police. After learning of the success of the CAHOOTS program in Eugene, Oregon, ECCO decided to work to establish a highly skilled team of unarmed responders in Lynn that answer nonviolent calls for help instead of police.
After forming the Lynn Racial Justice Coalition and holding multiple meetings, rallies, and demonstrations, we were ultimately able to get then-mayor Thomas McGee to allocate $500,000 in the city budget toward the establishment of ALERT, All Lynn Emergency Response Team.
Unfortunately, Lynn’s new mayor Jared Nicholson caved to pressure from police and began to talk about unarmed crisis response as a program within the Lynn police department, despite campaign promises to the contrary. Further, when it came time to release the city budget, mayor Nicholson cut the ALERT budget in half, announcing that he did not want to fund the program until it was fully fleshed out. In response, ECCO leaders began to work with city officials to ensure that the vision for ALERT is developed with guidance from and accountability to directly affected members of the community.
A Victory and a Loss
After months of meeting with the Lynn mayor’s office to fight for a strong and independent unarmed crisis response team, our leaders learned that the mayor had made a plan without consulting us. The plan places unarmed crisis response in the hands of Eliot Community Human Service’s new Behavioral Health Clinic, despite that Eliot has long been known to lack cultural competence in the Black community. On the one hand, we take it as a victory that the mayor shifted his position and answered our call to keep unarmed crisis response separate from police. On the other, we are deeply frustrated both that the program is being placed in an institution that lacks cultural competence and that the mayor made these plans without talking with the Black leaders he had supposedly convened to shape the program’s development.
To protest, 50 ECCO leaders showed up at the Lynn MLK breakfast where Mayor Nicholson was speaking. As Rev. Bernadette powerfully called out the mayor for disregarding the needs of the Black community, all 50 leaders stood in protest, holding signs that read “cultural competency matters!” And “racial justice now! ECCO and our partners also distributed this letter calling for change, and will continue to work for a just solution.
Link to the Lynn Item covering the MLK protest: https://www.itemlive.com/2023/01/16/protesters-interrupt-lynn-mlk-breakfast/
Link to the Lynn Racial Justice Coalition open letter to Mayor Jared Nicholson: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1B63fJoPPblv5_03T_ehdXm5JeiTqyI2V/view
Now, we are organizing ECCO leaders and other people across Lynn to raise our voices to ensure that Lynn’s Unarmed Crisis Response Team remains separate from police and is culturally humble.
