AMHERST — Members of the Community Responders for Equity, Safety and Service will be heading out to a narrow range of calls made to the town’s emergency dispatchers starting Monday at 8 a.m.

Nearly 18 months after the CRESS program launched, when eight individuals were sworn in and trained to be part of the unarmed police alternative in July 2022, the five current responders will begin handling some calls for service on weekdays from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., and on Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Fire Chief Tim Nelson, part of the interim leadership team for the CRESS department, told the Community Safety and Social Justice Committee this week that dispatchers will have responders go to six specific types of calls at the outset. Those types of calls, based on the current computer-aided dispatching system, are well-being checks, mental health calls, assisting businesses or agencies, assisting citizens, admin work and follow-up.

“They’re dispatch-directed calls,” Nelson said, explaining that this allows responders to begin handling calls that likely pose the least amount of threat and danger, yet are important parts of the public safety system. As an example, the CRESS teams might head to the Jones Library when staff calls about someone needing help in the building.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Director Pamela Nolan Young, also a part of the interim leadership team, said that the five responders were involved in discussions about the calls they would go to. Young said that the department’s expansion to being dispatched, coming after almost a year and a half, is right on track with the national trend in similar departments, and is a milestone that should be celebrated.

“The fact that this interim leadership team, working collaborating with dispatch and the responders, to have this group go live Monday at 8 a.m., is a huge achievement,” Young said.

But some members of the Community Safety and Social Justice Committee pushed back on this, observing that the Community Safety Working Group, which recommended the creation of CRESS, advised that more calls, including noise complaints and disorderly conduct, should be handled by CRESS responders, rather than police officers.

If the intent is to deescalate and keep people out of jail, said committee member Everald Henry, than those calls need to be added to CRESS operations. “I genuinely think noise complaints and disorderly conduct response are small things to start with,” Henry said.

Committee member Debora Ferreira, who served on the working group, said it is unacceptable to limit CRESS responses, and that the teams have mostly been used as a transportation service, rather than an alternative public safety department. She worries that even with this, they are limited to mental health or social service calls. “We’re not seeing the public safety part of it,” Ferreira said.

Ferreira said there is urgency because people from the Black, Indigenous and people of color communities in Amherst are demanding this.

“There isn’t room for us to start small,” Ferrira said. “We should be starting with what it is that CRESS can respond to.”

Nelson, though, said the line has to be drawn somewhere on the calls responders go to.

“We made our best decisions on how to start to do dispatching,” Nelson said. He said the hope is that these initial calls rarely have a violent episode, or something that ends up being dangerous to the responders.

“First and foremost, we’re looking out for responders’ safety,” Nelson said. “We’ve been charged to make this work, and we’re going to make this work. We’ve got a lot of experience and a lot of smart folks who want to make this work.”

Young said CRESS will likely have additional call types added as the rollout of service continues, with an examination of what more it can do based on data. The interim leaders are also in the midst of hiring three new responders so the town will have a full complement on staff.

Committee member Lissette Paredes asked how long it will take to compile the data.

Any changes or revisions to the dispatch protocols, Nelson said, will likely be made when a new permanent CRESS director, to replace the original director Earl Miller, who resigned this fall, is in place.

Scott Merzbach can be reached at smerzbach@gazettenet.com.