By SHOMIK MUKHERJEE | smukherjee@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group

PUBLISHED: February 20, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. | UPDATED: February 21, 2023 at 7:31 a.m.

OAKLAND — For all that Kim Dean was experiencing — the morning’s “hella cold” wintry chill, the days-old bandages peeling off her wounded leg, the lack of weekend shelter — none would be classified by police as an active emergency.

So when a pair of community workers found the 54-year-old hunched over an East Oakland curb, they calmly engaged her in conversation, offering blankets and new socks, and one attended to Dean’s leg with steely focus, carefully applying saline to flush the wound before redressing it with gauze.

After handing Dean some extra bandages for later, the pair drove away in a van marked MACRO — Mobile Assistance Community Responders of Oakland. They planned to circle back to the area later that week to see how she was doing.

“It’s harder for women, especially older women, to survive out here,” Fran Ramirez, a trained medical technician and MACRO team member, said later as she applied sanitizer to her hands. “If you don’t have a full-time encampment or another setup, you don’t sleep at night. You have to be on guard.”

These are the lessons learned by workers at MACRO, a $16 million program in the Oakland Fire Department that began last April with the intention of taking nonviolent, nonemergency 911 calls out of law enforcement’s hands. But they’re also trying to provide assistance before those calls need to be made.

Cities across the Bay Area and beyond are experimenting with community nonpolice response, hailed by progressives and police reformists as a pathway for treating those experiencing crises with compassion, not suspicion. San Francisco, New York City and Portland have all started pilot programs, while cities across the East Bay, from Antioch to Hayward, have explored the addition of mobile crisis teams.

In Oakland, though, MACRO often finds itself under scrutiny from those who had expected the teams to spend most of their time responding to lower-stakes 911 calls, allowing Oakland police to focus on violent crime.

Only about 3% of MACRO responders’ 854 interactions with the public involved a 911 dispatch from September, when such calls began transferring, to the end of the year. Another 3% came from community referrals — direct requests by the public for MACRO’s assistance for themselves or others.

The rest of the interactions were classified as “on-view” or “self dispatch,” which involve two-member teams driving the streets and looking for those who need help.

That’s not enough for members of law enforcement such as Barry Donelan, head of the Oakland police officers’ union, who said the program’s focus means it hasn’t made a dent in the flood of emergency calls to police and fire departments.

And it isn’t just police officers who have complained. Members of a citizen group appointed to advise MACRO on its affairs say the program’s leaders don’t sufficiently communicate their progress.

“The community kept saying that people need someone other than the police department to show up because cops make us nervous,” said Millie Cleveland, a member of the community advisory board. “If that’s the case, they need to be able to respond to calls that come into the dispatch center.”

With an ethos “grounded in empathy, service, and community,” according to its mission statement, the program is one of a kind — formally operating under the fire department, but headed by an Oakland native with no experience in fire, police or emergency medical services.

Program manager Elliot Jones, a former political organizer whose last job was at Airbnb, is animated about the value of a “proactive outreach” that results in fewer people requiring emergency response because they’re kept above a certain level of suffering.

“Don’t broaden what you want us to do because you think it’ll be effective,” Jones said in an interview. “Let us work on what we’ve proven is effective. For all those on-views, how many calls did we save? What didn’t end up coming through the 911 system?”

What do those on-view calls actually entail? A two-hour ride-along with a MACRO response team in late December revealed the many ways its process differs from typical police procedure.

The responders are on a first-name basis with many of the unhoused residents they encounter, keeping track of where they can be found and the resources they most likely need. They look for signs that those they interact with might be traumatized from past gun violence or are actively using drugs — helping the responders flag early signs of an overdose.

The teams are also unarmed and rely on codewords to exit gracefully when someone they approach has a weapon, or if the same vehicle circles around more than once in a neighborhood known for turf wars between gangs.

“When the adrenaline kicks in, you need to find a way to keep yourself grounded,” said Ramirez, who recalled a grisly car crash for which emergency responders asked MACRO’s EMTs to help out. “You remind yourself why you’re doing this.”

On one December morning, the crew approached a man, Daniel, who was lying motionless on a street corner off International Boulevard. Responders call these cases “sleepers,” and the goal is to make sure they aren’t knocked out from fentanyl use. By the time they left, Daniel had a new water bottle and fresh blanket, courtesy of MACRO.

Over time, the responders want to build relationships with residents ahead of stressful situations. During last month’s Bay Area storms, the program made several hundred visits to residents around town, mostly for wellness checks or sleeper cases.

But a process like that is built out over time, leaving critics, community advisors and police frustrated with what the program has to show for itself after nearly a year.

That includes some who supported the idea of MACRO from before it had an official name. Cathy Leonard, a member of Oakland’s Coalition for Police Accountability, said the pilot program has suffered from a “lack of transparency, community education and community engagement.”

“I talked to someone today who said they called the MACRO number and nobody answered the phone when there was a guy in crisis in deep East Oakland,” Leonard said at a recent Oakland Police Commission meeting.

Jones said he wants the program to produce increasingly more data as it expands in scale. For now, it’s the small successes that he says move the needle and stop a number of crimes from ever taking place.

A recent impact report released by the program detailed a case where a person looking to steal from Safeway would have likely ended up in jail if MACRO had not tracked them down and transported them to a shelter.

Dean, the East Oakland woman with a wounded leg, lives alone on the streets — dramatically increasing her likelihood of falling into sudden trouble. It gives her all the more reason to be on guard, as she was when Ramirez and team partner Rob Hanna approached her that December morning.

The last cell phone she owned had recently stopped working, but to the responders that wasn’t too much of a problem. They would be coming back around soon enough.

“If you see our vans with MACRO on the side, flag us down,” Hanna told her. “Whenever you’re ready to go to a shelter, let us know. We’ll get you there.”