Dariana “Didi” Schultz was out to breakfast with friends on a Wednesday morning in early October — a treat she allows herself just once a month, after her disability check comes in — when she said a masked woman who knew her name approached her.
“It was embarrassing, to be completely honest,” Schultz said. “I thought I was in some type of trouble.”
But the woman who seemed to know her wasn’t a police officer; she was a responder for Northampton’s Division of Community Care, a non-police crisis response team the city established in 2020 in the wake of national and local uprisings against police violence. Schultz was confused because she wasn’t in crisis and hadn’t requested a responder. The woman had come to see if Schultz wanted a ride, which she didn’t.
That incident came as Schultz and the friends she lived with at a campsite near Fitzgerald Lake say they came to experience the DCC as, at best, pestering, and at worst, complicit with police and other coercive forces shaping their lives. At the very moment of Schultz’s encounter with the DCC responder, other DCC responders were at Schultz’s campsite, along with police and city officials who were attempting to evict the campers.
And it isn’t just the city’s campers who have expressed these concerns about the DCC.
Four former DCC employees spoke with The Shoestring about what they described as the agency’s internal dysfunction and lack of adherence to its mandate of serving as an alternative to policing. Those who were present during the DCC’s rollout of its rapid-responder program said the responders’ roles were unclear and eventually evolved into menial tasks and enforcement. They also alleged that Northampton’s Department of Health and Human Services, which manages the DCC, failed to pay employees for overtime work.
For Sean Donovan, the first employee hired to lead the DCC in 2021, the contradictions were apparent from the start.
“I left my role as DCC Implementation Director because I felt the skills, wisdom and needs I had around peer support and harm reduction … were not feeling compatible with the coercive policies and liability concerns of public safety, even though we were working from the standpoint of public health,” Donovan wrote in an email to The Shoestring.
Theo Peierls, who worked in the first cohort of DCC responders starting in June 2023, put it more bluntly.
“They don’t have the power to do anything besides show up and annoy you before the cops come,” they said.
Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra and her chief of staff, Alan Wolf, did not respond to multiple interview requests.
After declining an interview, Department of Health and Human Services Commissioner Merridith O’Leary responded to questions via email. She said that although there might be occasional complaints or criticisms — particularly from people no longer with the DCC — “it’s important to view such feedback in context.”
“I prefer to focus on providing accurate information and addressing substantive matters,” she wrote when asked about allegations from former employees. “I won’t be commenting on speculation or criticism that isn’t based in fact, as my priority is to ensure a constructive and informed dialogue.”
“What I can say without a doubt,” she continued, “is that the people working here pour their hearts and souls into this work, driven by a genuine commitment to improving the city, uplifting the community, addressing health outcomes rooted in the social determinants of health, and treating every individual with respect and dignity.”
Every former DCC employee The Shoestring spoke to for this article expressed some version of the latter sentiment — that workers at the agency are trying their best to do good work.
However, the DCC is unique in Massachusetts in actively offering non-clinical, non-police crisis response as a public service. Only a handful of communities in the state have worked to create similar agencies, including Community Responders for Equity, Safety and Service in Amherst. And given their experiences in Northampton’s nascent civilian response agency, all four former employees who spoke with The Shoestring expressed skepticism that such a service really could — or should — be a functioning part of city government in Massachusetts.
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When Peierls began working for the DCC in June 2023, they said guidance from DCC leadership on what their job was supposed to be was limited and liable to change at a moment’s notice.
“We showed up to start working with no policies or protocols,” they said. “We didn’t know what our job was and what it wasn’t.”
According to Peierls, rules for responders changed “all the time,” but the division’s higher-ups would “pretend” they didn’t. When the cohort of responders began talking with each other about this dynamic, Peierls said, higher ups banned them from the staff room at the drop-in center — the DCC’s office and community space at Roundhouse Plaza.
Ben Drake, the DCC’s first lead responder and Peierls’ direct supervisor at the time, corroborated this story.
“I was often the one that sanitized what was coming down to the responders” from DCC and DHHS leadership, Drake said.
For Peierls, the day-to-day experience of the responder position ended up being not at all what they had pictured. The actual work of crisis response was rare, they said, and supplemented significantly with work at the drop-in center. But eventually, Peierls said it seemed like only men were allowed to do response work.
Peierls said community members regularly directed sexual harassment, racism, and transphobia towards DCC responders. “We would mention it because we wanted support, not because we didn’t want to support people who were acting this way.”
But instead, the job continued to evolve in new directions, with some people relegated “mostly to making coffee,” Peierls said. Meanwhile, they said the 10-digit phone number the DCC used as a line for community members to call for assistance would sometimes get zero calls in a day. Eventually, Peierls said, the mayor’s office began asking the DCC’s responders to do enforcement work around camps the city wanted to move.
Drake shared a similar narrative.
“We were going out, we were talking to people, it was a good start,” Drake said of the early days of the first responder cohort. “Then, people who weren’t doing the work started with, ‘What if,’” they said. “‘What if someone gets hurt?’ The work is dangerous if you compare it to sitting in an office.”
After only a few weeks, Drake alleged, leadership began pulling back, taking people off of response work who were deemed things like “too attractive” or “too pregnant.” Eventually, Drake said, it was just themself and one other responder who were regularly doing response work. At times, Drake said, they thought of their job as being a “walking billboard” for the DCC’s existence.
Eventually, Drake said, calls would come down through DCC and DHHS leadership originating from Wolf, the mayor’s chief of staff. “They weren’t disturbance calls,” he said — rather, they were calls to try to get DCC responders to evict campsites so police didn’t have to do it. They said it was as if the city were using them to say to campers: “We can do this the nice way, or the hard way.”
Didi Schultz experienced this lack of separation between the DCC and the mayor’s office firsthand — not only via the DCC’s role as city officials evicted her campsite, but also on a more personal level.
While the DCC, police, and city officials were at Schultz’s campsite that day in October, Wolf handed a packet of documented interactions between the DCC and the campers over to one of the other camp residents.
The packet, which The Shoestring obtained, listed numerous interactions that were not prompted by anyone at the camp. But one interaction stood out in particular: the DCC’s report suggested that Schultz and her partner “did not feel Comfortable being around” the very camper to whom Wolf had handed the packet, “and that they were not comfortable with all the attention” that person was bringing to their encampment.
Schultz said that DCC responders had “wildly misconstrued” her comments, which, if DCC’s version had been accurate, could have endangered her when those comments ended up in the hands of the person she had allegedly complained about.
“That makes me not want any of their help,” Schultz told The Shoestring. “Provided I had felt that way, why the hell would you have dealt with it in that way?”
Schultz also said she asked DCC responders on multiple occasions whether they recorded things that she told them. She said she had never received a straightforward “yes” answer.
The latest job description for the responder position adds as its second “essential function” that responders will be a “main point of contact for daily collaborations with law enforcement, emergency services, and health agencies.”
And although DCC responders work in collaboration with these other city agents, DCC responders are non-union and are paid far less than the other city employees they work alongside. According to the job listing for the second responder cohort, hired this past spring, new responders could expect a starting wage between $21 and $24 per hour. Among the highest paid employees in the city are police Capt. Victor Caputo, who worked alongside DCC at campsites the city evicted, and O’Leary, the DHHS commissioner. City records show that those two made $150,826 and $144,303 in fiscal year 2024, respectively.
Cara Iacoponi, who worked as a grants manager and executive assistant at DCC, said she saw the division’s budget and personnel spread far too thin — including herself.
“My intention was to take leave for two weeks and change medication” in July of this year, Iacoponi told The Shoestring. But during that leave, Iacoponi said she experienced “a state of complete exhaustion” and feared for her ability to work again at all. A health professional told her she needed to resign, she said.
The biggest issue for Iacoponi was overtime. She told The Shoestring that she would sometimes be surprised with a meeting at 4:30 p.m. and end up staying until 9 p.m. or 10 p.m., or that she would go in at 8:30 a.m. or earlier to complete tasks that she said shouldn’t have been hers but were “essential to department function.”
In these instances, an employee would normally be entitled to time-and-a-half overtime compensation. But according to Iacoponi and Drake, the health department instead used an alternate system of “flex time,” whereby employees who were logging extra hours would then take additional time off or bank it for later payout. Iacoponi said she was trained in how to modify timesheets that were filed with the city and separately keep track of employees’ overtime hours using an internal system.
“It felt so normalized and established that I thought, ‘There must be something I’m not understanding,’” she said. “My understanding was the department did not have the budget to pay people according to city policy.”
According to Iacoponi, the city officially found out about the flex time policy in February 2024 and put a stop to it.
O’Leary declined to respond to a question about the flex time system.
At the same time that employees were assigned overtime, Peierls said responders and others in the department would spend significant time and effort on what could have been easy fixes. Peierls described “endless conversations about coming up with clever loopholes to get things approved by the city.”
Take a porta-potty, for example.
Peierls said they and others in the DCC worked with the city to get a lock taken off of a city-rented portable toilet downtown that was typically opened only for events. To Peierls, this seemed like it would be in everyone’s interest, as it would provide a safe and sanitary space for people living outside to use the bathroom. But they said it took over a month of advocacy with other city departments to get the lock removed, and once it was, DCC responders were expected to check on the porta-potty three times a day.
“So much of my job was focused on this porta-potty,” they said. “I don’t know if it’s all government or if it’s just the city of Northampton, but it’s infuriating. It’s a waste of time and money.”
Iacoponi said she would like to see more transparency from the health department, a better defined scope for the DCC, and responders’ incorporation into one of the unions that represents city employees.
“Funding can only go so far,” she said. “It is up to the organization to correctly and strategically use it in the areas that the community needs.”
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The degree to which the DCC would serve as an alternative to policing in Northampton has been a point of contention since activists first raised the idea in 2020, during the racial justice uprisings that followed the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Sean Donovan was one of those activists, turning up at City Council meetings via Zoom early in the COVID-19 pandemic, speaking alongside others on the evidence for non-police approaches to benefit people experiencing struggles with substances and mental distress.
Donovan’s background is in peer support and advocacy and harm reduction approaches to suicide prevention at the Wildflower Alliance. Donovan explained those practices as “using people’s lived and living experiences to support people through struggles in a way that’s not coercive, that’s based in curiosity.”
“The psychiatric survivor movement developed peer support, and drug users and sex workers developed harm reduction,” he said. “While nonprofits and governments can integrate some pieces of that, it’s very hard to integrate those things entirely, because they were never meant to be part of the state.”
By 2021, the city of Northampton had in hand a report, “Reimagining Safety,” from the Northampton Policing Review Commission, which reiterated activists’ call made the prior year to reduce the footprint of policing in the city. But it didn’t take long after Donovan started his work in the new city agency to see the distance between what activists and peer support practitioners imagined and what the city had in mind.
“When I envisioned a department that was called ‘Community Care,’ I envisioned the city supporting people to take some risks on behalf of our most vulnerable community members,” Donovan said. “What I learned in that role with the city is that it’s a balancing act that gets tipped pretty heavily to being in line with the people who already have power.” Donovan said that the city was not willing to de-center policing or support practices of the “harm reduction community.”
The DCC’s timeline on its website begins with the 2020 racial justice uprisings, but other mentions of policing on the website are few and far between. The DCC’s vision statement says the agency should “provide an alternative means to deal with, mediate, and/or de-escalate situations that may negatively impact any parties involved,” but does not specify what it is an alternative to. Likewise, in a December 2022 announcement of an “Equitable Alternatives to Policing Strategies Grant,” the city does not use the word “policing” in the body of the announcement.
Donovan suggested this may be because the mandate outlined in “Reimagining Safety” — a department that can begin removing certain types of emergency calls from police purview — would almost certainly require changes to state law, or at the very least, a willingness on the city’s part to push the boundaries of current law and accept some liability.
Drake, who said they were the only DCC staff member with 911 experience at the time of the first cohort’s hiring, explained it further. As an example, they said that if somebody were to hear of a person in their community in mental distress, they “can go over, can talk to them for a while, can feel OK about the situation, and can leave.” As DCC responders in this hypothetical situation, Drake explained, they could do the same.
“I think that’s good,” they said. “But the concerns of every other responder partner,” like police or fire, “was about the exposure: we go, we talk to someone, and then they end their life after we leave.” In such a case, the city is taking on legal liability, not to mention a moral burden, they said.
Currently, Drake said, a complex set of legal codes determines what kinds of calls get certain kinds of responses. To begin taking 911 calls as an independent agency, the DCC would need to integrate into this system from the ground up — something that has never been tried in Massachusetts before.
“I can’t think of a harder needle to thread,” Drake said. “What we were being asked by the community to do was act less like government employees, as government employees.”
Drake said they were initially tasked with work related to 911 integration, but were quickly moved onto other work when DCC and DHHS leadership realized the scale of the task.
O’Leary told The Shoestring via email that 911 integration is a long-term goal.
“DCC’s current focus is on identifying non-emergency calls that align with its mission, such as behavioral health, conflict resolution, and community support calls,” she wrote. “It is actively working to refine dispatch protocols to ensure compliance with these legal requirements while providing safe, trauma-informed, and equitable responses.”
All of the employees The Shoestring spoke to for this article left their jobs feeling disillusioned with the DCC’s rollout. Whether there was a certain inevitability to this outcome, or whether the city government really could provide something like the service that the public demanded, depends who you ask.
“Maybe some of the things that I and other people wanted in this department don’t belong in a municipal government,” Donovan said.
Drake, on the other hand, named specific reforms he thought could help, including making the DCC a “freestanding agency” that reports directly to the mayor, giving it a civilian review board “with teeth,” and integrating a legal expert into the agency to confront and help shape state law with a long-term outlook.
“The downfall of the organization was that it refused to acknowledge its mistakes,” Drake said. “As in, we didn’t know a thing, so we didn’t do it right.” They accused leadership of an obsession with appearance.
“We couldn’t be seen as being bad at this,” Drake said of leadership’s logic. “My argument,” they said, noting the DCC’s singular nature within Massachusetts, “was: ‘Show me someone who’s good at this.’”
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