Richmond’s crisis team has been 5 years in the making. Here’s how its first 120 days went

On a recent overcast August morning, three city crisis response workers walked around downtown Richmond, making their daily rounds to places where they would be most likely to find people needing their help.

Michael Romero, Nikko Higgins and Raymond Hodge, three of the city’s five Reach Out with Compassion and Kindness (ROCK) responders, are familiar with several known “hotspots” — places like the FoodsCo on Macdonald Avenue. 

It was a brisk morning. Hodge approached a man lying on the sidewalk wrapped in a blanket and offered him a snack. He asked him what he needed and if he wanted help finding shelter. 

The man, who Richmondside isn’t identifying to protect his privacy, took the water and granola bar but didn’t want any help beyond that.

Just then, a man in a yellow jacket rolled by the corner of 13th Street and Macdonald Avenue on a yellow bike. The ROCK team recognized them as someone they had worked with.

“I like your bike, it matches your jacket today,” Romero called out. 

“How are you feeling this morning?” Hodge asked.

“I’m pretty good,” he said, saying that he was headed to the SOS Richmond warming center on Harbour Way. The ROCK team said they would see him there later.

Romero, the director of the ROCK program, told Richmondside that the man had been in some trouble with police previously but since then ROCK helped him find a job. Now, he has an opportunity to improve his situation.

“That’s what he needed,” Romero told Richmondside, who was shadowing the duo during their rounds. 

Richmond’s road to create ROCK started six years ago in the aftermath of the 2020 murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis. Richmond, like many other cities nationwide, was feeling public pressure to implement alternatives to traditional policing. The city council reappropriated $3 million from 12 police department vacancies to fund four programs: ROCK, the Office of Neighborhood Safety (ONS), SOS Richmond, a homelessness prevention program, and YouthWorks. The goal was to deploy services that address community problems that can lead to criminal activity.

Since then, the budget for the four programs has grown from $6.4 million in 2021 to $9.4 million in the current fiscal year.

ROCK handled an average of 119 calls a day its first few months

But a union dispute with the Richmond Police Officers Association delayed ROCK’s start. Though Romero was hired in 2024 and did some solo work, he couldn’t hire anyone until the dispute was resolved. 

After a public hearing last year, the ROCK positions were assigned to the city public employee’s union, and Romero was able to hire four additional crisis responders. After a hiring process involving both ROCK and the city’s first responders that took the latter part of 2025, the crisis responders began taking service calls last March. The team also has a fifth position, an analyst, on staff.

City officials who championed ROCK, such as council member Claudia Jimenez who is running against Ahmad Anderson in the Nov. 3 election, said that the union was trying to keep the program from being implemented while the RPOA blamed the city for bypassing labor agreements on which union would represent the new positions.

Since the program launched, according to data obtained by Richmondside as part of a public records request, ROCK  responded to 477 calls between March and June:  69 in March, 91 in April, 128 in May and 189 in June  — about four a day.

On average, according to city data, emergency dispatchers receive about 533 calls per day or about 16,500 calls per month. ROCK’s data shows that about 94 of the 477 calls they responded to in its first 120 days were dispatched by the city’s computer aided dispatch (CAD) system. The other calls came from city and county community organizations that made referrals to the ROCK team or a person flagging ROCK down.

The program is in its infancy, said Romero. They’re still trying to build trust with the Richmond police and fire departments and the dispatchers who try to pair a call for service with the right response.

“The reality of this work is we’re going to end up side-by-side on scenes where they (police) are either with us or next to us,” Romero said. However, ROCK cannot be sent to violent or dangerous scenes where a crime is in progress or has been committed.

Of the 477 calls ROCK handled in that timeframe, the most common were like those Richmondside observed on that August morning. They involved people who might need to be referred to “supportive services” such as GRIP (homelessness), RYSE (youth programs), or the Family Justice Center. Those calls, including some referrals to mental health services in Martinez, accounted for 187 of all the calls while 129 were for “wellness checks.” Thirty of the 477 calls came from referrals from local community organizations, such as GRIP or SOS Richmond, and 19 were tagged as non-violent, non-medical “behavioral incidents.”

The president of the Richmond Police Officers Association, Sgt. Ben Therriault told Richmondside that the labor dispute and the lead-up to how ROCK was launched, has impacted the way that officers view the program. He said that he also believes that the efforts of members of the 2021 Reimagining Public Safety Taskforce, the group that came up with the four police alternative programs, were taken over by “activists” that he believes worked with elected officials to overstate what ROCK would be capable of accomplishing. 

“It was basically not based on the reality on how things work on the ground when it comes to the logistics of how people are dispatched, the reality of what the resources available to the city of Richmond are, and the politicians kind of gaslit people in thinking that some of these things were real possibilities,” Therriault said. “That was never the case and never going to be the case.”

Therriault said he thinks elected officials who pushed for ROCK acted before fully understanding how the program would fit into the existing ecosystem of emergency responders and dispatchers.

“They (Richmond’s city council) live in a world where there’s no consequence,” Therriault said. “There are always consequences. That’s why things get thought out methodically. It’s not that we should never do things differently. Things always change, and we should look to doing different things.”

One thing both Romero and Therriault agree on is that the reality of responding to crises can be challenging due to how quickly a situation can change.

Recent incidents highlight challenges police and crisis teams face

Richmond has experienced a number of incidents this summer that exemplify the complicated nature of mental health crisis response, the resources involved in getting people help, the need to protect the public’s safety and how these factors can intersect, sometimes in a split second.

In late August, Sergio Rivera-Vega was arrested on murder-arson charges in connection with a house fire that killed four of his family members.

According to an East Bay Times report, Rivera-Vega, who pleaded innocent to the charges, had completed and been released from a two-year pre-trial mental health diversion program that he was sent to after family members said he threatened them with crowbars and metal poles and damaged the 15th Street home during two separate incidents in 2022. When Contra Costa County Judge Julia Campins removed him from the diversion program she said that he had “turned a corner,” though prosecutors objected to the move.

Under California law, because Rivera-Vega was deemed to have successfully completed the  diversion program, the 2022 charges were dropped.

Last week, Richmond police say Officer Justin Church was shot and injured by a woman at a Key Boulevard apartment while responding to help the county’s mental health crisis team, A3. Jasmine Robinson, 39, was ultimately arrested on charges of attempted murder, assault with an assault weapon and kidnapping.

In a statement to Richmondside on Friday, Reimagine Richmond, a local public safety reform organization whose members have been appointed by Mayor Eduardo Martinez to bodies such as the city’s Community Police Review Commission and ROCK’s Community Advisory Board and who were a part of the 2021 taskforce that created ROCK, said that the Key Boulevard incident “underscores” the need to reconsider how police respond to mental health crisis calls.

“When someone is in crisis, sending armed law enforcement as the default response can escalate an already volatile situation and place the person in crisis, officers, and the broader community at greater risk,” Reimagine Richmond wrote in an email. “We need to build a continuum of non-police crisis response teams like Richmond’s ROCK.”

When asked if the group wanted to respond to Therriault’s assertion that the group overpromised ROCK’s capabilities, they said  that they don’t believe supporting non-police crisis intervention equates to an  “unrealistic understanding” of how dispatch works.

“No one is arguing that every call should be diverted away from law enforcement,” the group wrote. “ROCK does not need to replace police; it needs to provide another option when a call can be safely and appropriately handled by trained crisis responders.”

Romero told Richmondside it’s currently up to dispatchers and the police to evaluate when to send ROCK out on a call.

For example, if GRIP calls the nonemergency police phone number and asks for ROCK, the dispatchers will ask whether weapons are present to evaluate whether it’s safe to send unarmed crisis responders. 

But if there has been a history of physical fights breaking out at that location, ROCK likely won’t be sent there, Romero said.

“(Dispatchers) can only look at it in general. We’ve been called over to places where people get violent but from a dispatcher’s perspective, if there have been six fights in a place in the last week …even though it may seem simple to send ROCK, they (callers and dispatch) have to know what that (situation) looks like.”

Richmond police Lt. Donald Patchin, a spokesperson for the department, said that asking if there are weapons during a mental health call is a “standard” question dispatchers ask a caller. 

But it can be complicated. 

“If we’re honest, there’s weapons in everybody’s house,” Patchin said. “Everybody has steak knives. What constitutes a weapon? In a broader term we are talking about firearms and stuff like that but that creates issues.”

Right now, Romero said, ROCK and the police department are developing a system for assigning calls, and in June they assigned a code that shows when ROCK is responding.

Romero said he hopes that ROCK can offer police an alternative to locking someone up or putting them on an involuntary psychiatric hold, especially if they’re not a danger to themselves or others. But being able to do that means they need to be available at the time (they work Mondays-Saturdays 7:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.) and they need to have the time to do follow-up work with clients.

ROCK trying to build trust with fellow first responders

Romero previously led Huntington Beach’s crisis response team and also has relationships with other similar programs around the country — including  ones in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Durham, N.C. 

He said that ROCK is building a foundation through those daily partnerships with police and fire and are trying to strategically shape the program’s future. He also said they are hoping to earn the trust of the Richmond police as his team did in Huntington Beach.

“Some folks were saying ‘We don’t need this (program)’ and Huntington Beach PD felt that way too. So it was intense,” Romero said. After a while, however, the benefits of having a crisis intervention program, he added, became more evident.

“They’d see the work that we were doing and would call us to do our thing,” Romero said. “Now (officers) got to stay on the road, and we were able to get them (the client) to voluntarily go get mental health support or go get recovery support.”

But building a new program requires understanding, in partnership with police, the parameters of what calls they can take and the reality of the current financial situation the city is facing regarding creating new positions.

In Richmond, Romero said he is having ongoing conversations with police leadership on what that looks like. Police, he said, are ultimately the ones who are in charge of an incident and make the call on whether ROCK should be brought in. 

“That’s where a lot of the work is happening behind closed doors,” Romero said. “(Right now) we are still working on what the parameters are, what is safe, what can you do, what’s approachable. You don’t get it until you’ve been there (out in the field).”

Additionally, he said that ROCK has been meeting with Richmond police and fire, A3, county mental health officials, BARTpolice, BART’s  Crisis Intervention Team, Contra Costa’s homeless response team (CORE), and RPD’s Crime Prevention to coordinate the work.

He believes that given the stage that those relationships are at, ROCK is handling the appropriate number of calls considering the team’s size and how long it has been staffed,

“I think we are growing at a reasonable pace because it’s a new service,” Romero said.

System for dispatching ROCK is complicated

Patchin said that he believes the department “appreciates” ROCK.

“We recognize that the community wants an answer other than the police,” Patchin told Richmondside. “Not every situation requires an officer to come.”

Part of the issue is that ROCK can’t send itself to calls, Patchin said. To have access to the CAD system and be on the same channel as police, a person must pass a police background check. Currently, ROCK uses the Richmond Fire Department’s channel.

ROCK’s program, however, is structured to hire people with “lived experiences,” according to the city’s website, which can include someone with a prior criminal history.

So when they are called, there are some barriers to how it works.

“”They’re not on the same radio channel as us. That’s a huge disconnect,” Patchin said. “There’s no direct communication between police and the team — they’re not able to monitor the police channel and go, ‘Hey, that’s a call we can handle, let us answer up for that.’ “

Patchin said that a dispatcher will send a call to  police, and a department supervisor has the option of letting them  know if it can be handled by ROCK.  But because there are so many calls (several hundred a day), a call ROCK could potentially respond  to might have to wait until a supervisor is able to evaluate it.

“They (dispatchers) then have to go to the other channel and recite the call as best they can,” Patchin added. “If they were all on the same channel, they could look at CAD and self-dispatch and recognize calls they could handle. If they can’t, they could put it back on for the police to respond.”

When asked if the dispatch protocols are limiting the program’s effectiveness, Reimagine Richmond’s team told Richmondside that the dispatch protocols should allow them to screen calls with immediate threats of violence without having to wait for police to make that distinction. 

“The existence of these calls does not justify sending police to each crisis, it means each crisis is unique and desires a unique response,” the group wrote, adding that they believe crisis responders are adequately screened for the job. “The fact that crisis responders may not meet the same requirements as sworn police officers is not evidence that they cannot respond to 911 calls; it is evidence that the City needs to establish appropriate hiring, training, dispatch, supervision, and safety protocols for a crisis-response workforce.”

While ROCK was at the FoodsCo shopping center passing out snacks, Higgins and Hodge tried to help an unhoused woman who was yelling and moving some possessions out of the parking lot. She declined.

It was the first time they had met her. Whenever ROCK contacts a potential client, they document the encounter in a log to help understand what state they are in and how they could potentially try later to connect them with services.

“Initially, sometimes it goes like that (where they refuse help) and then, when she sees us again, she’ll remember we gave her snacks so she’ll let us get closer next time,” Hodge said, getting back into the team’s logo-clad orange and black transport vans.

Richmond resident Fancy Banks, who said she moved from San Francisco to the Iron Triangle three years ago, was walking out of FoodsCo when she saw the team talking with the woman. She was unaware of ROCK and said it was her first time seeing the vans. She said that it’s needed in the neighborhood.

“Clearly there was something wrong,” Banks said, referring to the woman, who appeared to be in distress as she paced around the shopping center lot. “When I saw the (ROCK) truck, I thought to myself ‘Oh, that’s a good thing. Help them.’ That’s all I can say.”

But Romero and his team know that they risk becoming pigeonholed into homelessness abatement if they don’t develop the right working relationship with police and dispatch and the organizations already working with unhoused people.

“We are going to have to always pivot back to scope or we’ll be doing this (homeless outreach) all day,” Romero said. “That work is a 24-hour a day thing.”

Romero added that if residents see ROCK as another homeless outreach effort it could appear to be duplicative to SOS.

That day the team visited the SOS Warming Hand center to talk with Daniel Barth, SOS’s director. The visit is part of their daily routine.

About two dozen people were there,some eating while others used the showers.SOS employees are there to connect them with employment opportunities or other services.

Barth compared the partnership with ROCK to a shared labor of “preparing the soil” for folks to voluntarily accept care.

“Everything that we’re doing that’s front and center is touching these people before other people do,” Barth said, seemingly implying police intervention. “It’s early interaction.”

Both know that while they may have an easier time garnering the community’s trust than a law enforcement officer might, people they’re trying to help might still be suspicious of their intent. 

By working together, they might win more clients over.   

“We could be the ones that help them bridge for even friendly people like these guys,” Barth said, referring to ROCK.

How ROCK is trying to distinguish itself from similar services

Some critics of ROCK have also said it duplicates work being done by the county’s A3 team.

Contra Costa County launched A3 in January 2022, after years of advocacy from the family of Miles Hall, a 23-year-old man killed by Walnut Creek police during a mental health crisis in 2019.

The county seeded the program with $5 million from Measure X, a countywide half-cent sales tax voters approved in 2020. Since July 2023, A3 has run on $20 million a year in ongoing Measure X funding, and the program now operates 24/7. According to county statistics, since 2024 A3 has received a total of 60,057 calls, averaging out to just over 83 calls a day.

The primary difference between the two is that ROCK can’t force someone to receive care. ROCK’s crisis intervention specialists are not clinicians while A3 deploys clinicians, substance abuse counselors and psychiatric technicians who help evaluate whether or not a person needs to be placed on an involuntary psychiatric hold.

Another key difference is that A3 is a 24/7 service.

ROCK, Romero said, has also developed relationships with A3 and has been receiving referrals from A3 to respond to calls that fit within its scope in Richmond.

Romero said that though ROCK does not have employees certified to place someone on an involuntary hold, he believes that there is a place for that option.

“It’s definitely part of the work (of mental health crisis response),” Romero said. “There are situations where it is appropriate that someone gets placed on a hold or, frankly, gets locked up. There are situations where the criteria is very clear that this is the appropriate option.”

If someone is eventually placed on a hold in Richmond, Romero said, it won’t be because those making that decision haven’t already explored every option to persuade  them to voluntarily seek help. 

“There are some clients and you can go down the street where you’ll see a client that no matter what you say to them, there’s nothing you can say to that person that they’re gonna hear. The voices are too loud. 
The dope is too powerful,” Romero said. “We are another option before it gets to either A3 or PD (for holds).”

Because the small team is still building relationships with organizations, trying to connect those who need help with those who can help them, it can take a significant amount of time to see one case through to its resolution. So the team is focused on quality of care versus the number of calls they answer in a day.

For example, in 2025 Romero was a part of the group of first responders who worked to save a man in a mental health crisis who refused to climb down from atop a tall PG&E power structure for three days.

Patchin told Richmondside that for that particular incident, ROCK was called out after officers had already secured the scene to spend more time talking to the man than police could have.

Recently, Higgins and Hodge helped the family of a young man who had been diagnosed with severe depression.

“This young man was put on a 5150 hold,” Higgins said, using the police code for someone who is forcibly admitted to medical supervision.“His depression severity level put him on a hold for four days.”

Even though the young man was connected with therapy and medication while on that psychiatric hold, he was soon back home and those resources “fell through.”

“He didn’t get his medication or stay connected with therapy. His mom was continuously calling 911 and eventually an officer said that someone needs to spend more than five minutes on this,” Higgins said.

After an initial meeting with the monolingual, Spanish-speaking family, and some one-on-one talks with the patient  and his 20-year-old sister, Higgins and Hodge discovered that the family as a whole could benefit from services offered by RYSE and family mediation through the Family Justice Center.

“How do you fix this? It’s not an overnight fix,” Hodge said, adding that ROCK plans to continue visiting the family, taking the youths out for one-on-one time.

“It has felt so good to know that they found us as a source of safety,” Hodge said.

Higgins, a former paramedic for about a decade, had long wanted an opportunity to spend more time with people than what emergency responders normally have time for or are allowed to do.

Often, his partners would ask him why he wanted to stay longer than usual at a call.

“I would be like ‘I don’t know, I really wish I could help people,’ ” Higgins said. 

But both Higgins and Hodge know that the longer they spend on a case, the fewer people they can get to. They have to evaluate each situation.

“Sometimes the calls are worth sitting in for hours,” Higgins added. “We spent three hours getting someone moved out of a home where they were abusing someone else because we just weren’t going to leave the abuser with the abused. It took a lot of teamwork that day but that one was worth it.”

Hodge said that they balance that with understanding when to move on.

“We have to remember we are a crisis team,” Hodge said. “Once the crisis is diverted, we have to move on. That’s our job. This is not a program or a case management or a shelter, any of that stuff. We have to be available for the next call.”

Recently, ROCK’s advisory board has called for the city to create a new position of “care navigators,” which would help those that Higgins and Hodge connect with on the street to access continued support.

However, it’s clear that the city doesn’t currently have the budget for that. Outgoing City Manager Shasa Curl said earlier this year that the city can’t add any new positions without retirements happening first. Curl pointed to the rising costs of labor and pending contracts with the city’s police union.

Hope Dixon, chair of ROCK’s Community Advisory Board, said that adding care navigator positions are critical to the program’s effectiveness.

Though agreeing that it would be difficult to fund such positions, Dixon hopes the city will do so, especially considering the impact of federal policies.

“SNAP cuts, immigration scares and the economy, people here are suffering and are in more crisis than ever. That’s where adequate resource allocation is desperately needed,” Dixon said. “It is more important than ever to be digging into our reserves and making decisions that are ethical even when they are hard.”

Reimagine Richmond also called for the city to increase its investment into the program.

“We believe now is the time for the City of Richmond to double down on ROCK and make it as effective as it can be,” Reimagine Richmond wrote in an email to Richmondside. “We call on the city to fully invest in a 24-hour response team, create care navigator positions, and build a system of care around it.”

Romero, however, knows there are limits to what he can do with the reality of the city’s hiring issues. For example, Albuquerque’s program, which began in 2020, has about 150 staff members for a 500,000-person city. For Richmond, he said, that might equate to  a 70- to 80-person crew, though the city currently doesn’t have the budget for that. 

For Higgins and Hodge, the complicated position of where the program stands doesn’t reduce the value of their work, the need or the resources they want to provide.

“They (the services) are essential. Because what are we doing besides giving them a good pep talk without something tangible for them to hold onto?” Hodge said about those folks the team come in contact with. “People need solutions. Motivation is good but you can’t run a race without your track shoes. We have to get the track shoes for them.”