Richmond is one step closer to changing its approach to public safety now that it has resolved a yearlong dispute with the police union that delayed the hiring of crisis intervention specialists.
The issue pitted the police union, the Richmond Police Officers Association (RPOA), which argued that the new jobs belong in the sworn officers’ union, against the city, which had placed the positions in the service employees union.
Ultimately, on Tuesday six Richmond City Council members voted to deny the police union’s appeal of the city’s decision, with District 4 council member Soheila Bana abstaining after a tense exchange with Mayor Eduardo Martinez and city attorney David Aleshire, who said her questions were irrelevant to the public hearing.
Now, the eight crisis intervention specialists, which haven’t been hired due to the labor dispute, will be represented by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1021.
Since the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, the city has been developing the Community Crisis Response Program (CCRP), now known as ROCK (Reach Out with Compassion and Kindness).
The city council initially began forming the CCRP after it voted in 2021 to reallocate $3 million from unfilled police department positions to fund the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force’s recommendations that the city deploy a four-pronged approach that included ROCK, YouthWORKS, the Office of Neighborhood Safety and Safe Organized Spaces (SOS) Richmond.
ROCK, with just two employees, Director Michael Romero and an administrative assistant, has been waiting to hire a team that will respond to non-emergency calls, including noise complaints, wellness checks and loitering.
Sharron Taylor, Richmond’s director of Human Resources, said during the hearing that placing the new ROCK positions under the RPOA would send the wrong message to the community.
“We deliberately assigned the community intervention specialists to the Community Crisis Response Program under the umbrella of the Office of Neighborhood Safety instead of the police department to message to the community that this organization provides nonpunitive and noncriminal services,” she said.
Taylor also said that because the intervention positions are non-sworn, putting the jobs in the police union would mean the city would have to create a labor agreement similar to SEIU’s within the RPOA’s labor agreement.
“There’s a lot of different nuances,” Taylor said. “They are distinct. We would eventually, if it was to occur that we would bring a general employee to the RPOA, would have to do a carve out. It would almost be like its own standalone MOU (memorandum of understanding) within an MOU. It would be in the same agreement but for non-sworn employees.”
Sworn officers are those who have a California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) certification, can handle firearms and can make arrests. Non-sworn employees — which include positions such as jailers, parking enforcement officers and police records technicians — cannot.
Jonathan Murphy, the lawyer representing the RPOA, refuted Taylor’s assessment of the meetings between the city and police union and said that the city attempted “‘bad faith” negotiations by trying to push their union preference for the crisis intervention positions.
“There has been a single meet and confer between the union and the city. There have been side meetings trying to figure out what specifically these intervention specialists will do because we don’t know,” Murphy said, adding that it is too early to have this union placement conversation. “If we don’t know what they do, how could we possibly know what the community of interests of these individuals are?”
Jack Hughes, an attorney who represents the city in labor cases, said that the only issue of relevance for Tuesday’s hearing was the issue of which bargaining unit the positions should be placed into, not the other outstanding concerns.
“There are a variety of labor relations tasks that need to be completed to stand up this program,” Hughes said. “The association has objected to the movement of duties from police officers to non-sworn staff. This is an entirely separate process that we need to go through associated with that and we’ve really only begun that process.”
Reimagine Richmond supporters say police union stalling new crisis program
Some residents and police accountability activists with Reimagine Richmond, a local public safety reform group established in 2020 after Floyd’s death, chastised the RPOA, saying that the union has been stalling policing alternatives that the community supports.
Marisol Cantu, a member of Reimagine Richmond who was on the Reimagine Public Safety Task Force, tried to remind the council of the commitment made by the body in 2021 to “create a plan to transition from Richmond’s current community policing model to a plan conducive to a reduced police force.”
“This means non-police options for community crises were voted on and approved,” Cantu said. “Hundreds of public comments came in support of this and I know that we have new council members that may not remember that history so I want to remind you and I’m really disappointed that you all are asking questions that have already been known for the past five years.”
Some speakers at the hearing, such as Hope Dixon, a faculty member at Contra Costa College, referred to the February fatal police shooting of 51-year-old Jose De Jesus Mendez during a stand-off with Richmond police along the Carlson Avenue train tracks. Mendez, who police said was carrying a knife sheath they believed was a knife, had been living at a nearby homeless encampment just blocks away from his estranged family, which had a restraining order against him.
“No rhyme or reason why they couldn’t use the less lethal force weapons we’ve heard so much about,” she said. “This discussion is shameful and honestly coming to these meetings starts to feel… like the police union is being villainous. Why don’t you want to work with us, with the community, to serve the community? Why is the process to provide crisis intervention counselors blocked at every stage?”
In a phone call on Wednesday, RPOA President and police Sgt. Ben Therriault told Richmondside that the union plans to file an unfair labor practice complaint against the city with the California Public Employees Relations Board (PERB).
“It could take six months, it could take a year but the goal with the unfair labor charge will be to put those folks into our unit,” he said. “The easy thing to show is that the city did not bargain in good faith. That will be an easy point to make.”
Therriault also clarified that the term “community of interests” does not refer to the community residents but rather how an intervention specialist’s duties resemble work being performed by officers represented by the RPOA.
“When you specifically say that you want to take work away from police officers, OK, that’s fine, but they are still doing things that we were just doing,” he said. “Ergo, one would think that they should be in a bargaining unit that is similar to the work being done. Ultimately, this is a political thing with council members who are beholden to certain unions. These decisions are not being made on a rational basis but politics or a lack of understanding.”
Therriault pushed back on the suggestion that officers are against the ROCK program.
“The whole politics around this is that the police officers don’t want this program. The problem is that it’s not true. We don’t want a program that fails or is going to cause us to have to do more work,” he said. “Having them integrated union-wise makes a lot of sense based on the work they are going to do.”
The RPOA labor dispute was not the only labor-related item that surfaced during the Tuesday night meeting.
Prior to the hearing, during the public comment session, Richmond police jailer Kito Williams said he was representing 80% of the non-sworn employees from the department who want to move from the SEIU 1021 to the RPOA.
“This decision did not come lightly. It stems from a deep, shared belief among the undersigned employees that our roles, responsibilities, and daily experiences place us in far closer alignment with the mission, operations, and community service focus of the RPOA,” he said. “We work side-by-side with sworn personnel, serve the same public safety goals, and operate within the same command structure and environment.”
Although Murphy referenced the desire by the non-sworn police department employees to move back to the RPOA, who represented them prior to the mid-1990s, Hughes said that because the crisis intervention specialist positions are under the umbrella of the Office of Neighborhood Safety that this example would not apply to ROCK’s new positions.
According to Hughes, the city can now move forward with hiring the crisis specialists.
If the union designation ends up changing, then the employees will just be represented by another union, Hughes added.
