I wanted to make a correction for my previous video on the managed competition clause of the police union contract and how it could relate to the Community Emergency Services & Support Act (CESSA) recently passed unanimously in both houses of the legislature. CESSA would create crisis-teams to respond to nonviolent, noncriminal calls for service without the assistance of police.
The TL;DR version is that the Bloomington police union contract has a clause called Managed Competition, which basically means you can’t hire people to handle incidents traditionally handled by police if it could lead to less police being needed.
For example, if someone is having a mental or behavioral health problem, right now it’s an armed police officer who is responding. Many activists, especially Defundists, support having crisis support teams answer these calls instead of police. In the last video, I pointed out how Interim police chief Gregg Scott & City Manager Gleason basically said anything but a co-responder model, where police accompany crisis teams, would violate the union contract.
But, we don’t want a co-responder model. We want an alt-responder model where unarmed crisis teams are responding to nonviolent, noncriminal calls for service.
Upon a little bit more research, it looks like CESSA would in fact preempt police union contracts with managed competition clauses; and, it would do this in two ways.
First. The alt-responders created by CESSA would not work directly for local municipalities. They are established by the Division of Mental Health Services of the Department of Human Services and are run by the state. The police union contract is between the union and the city, not the union and the state.
Secondly. CESSA narrows the list of situations where police would traditionally respond. CESSA states:
Basically, CESSA is specifically removing nonviolent, noncriminal mental and/or behavioral health issues from the policing apparatus–which is itself a tool of the criminal justice system–and places these incidents within the realm of the healthcare apparatus. This is critical because the current number one resource for mental & behavioral health care issues are county jails. The insufferable Sheriff Sandage goes on and on about how proud he is they expanded the jail so it could help more mentally ill people. Right now, we are using violence whether by police or the violence of incarceration to handle these incidents. CESSA provides help not harm in resolving healthcare concerns.
CESSA preempts home rule, meaning that even if municipalities want to create their own alt-responder team they wouldn’t be violating any managed competition clauses because by law these incidents are no longer considered traditional law enforcement matters.
