A Morning with BART’s Crisis Intervention Specialists

• ‘We Approach in Peace’: Are BART’s Efforts to Help People in Crisis Working?

Episode Transcript

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra, and welcome to the Bay local news to keep you rooted. If you ride Bart, you may have seen uniformed employees with the words crisis intervention specialist on their backs.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: They walk through trains equipped with latex gloves, snacks and Narcan to help reverse drug overdoses, hoping to connect those in need with social services. And they’re part of the agency’s attempt to address human crises that show up on Bart trains and platforms every day, with the goal of getting more people back on trains.

Stephanie Barnes: We approach in peace. It’s it’s about a greeting. It’s about, hey, how are you? How are you doing? You know, how can I best support you today?

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: A day in the life of the Bart crisis intervention specialist.

Matthew Green: The ridership levels plummeted during the pandemic and they have rebounded a little bit, but nothing like where they were.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Matthew Green is a digital editor for KQED.

Matthew Green: They’ve been trying a number of different approaches. They recognize that riders are particularly displeased with the way the agency has handled homelessness. They’ve tried to balance enforcement with a more social service focused approach. So creating a new agency that is not law enforcement based. That really deals with helping people in need in the system and referring them to services.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And these are known as crisis intervention specialists. Right. And I know you decided to do some reporting and actually meet up with some crisis intervention specialists. Tell me about that. Who did you meet and where did you go to meet them?

Matthew Green: Yeah. So I got in touch with Bart. They put me in touch with the program, and arranged for me to meet, two women who have been with the program since it started in 2021, Stephanie Barnes and Natalie Robinson.

Natalie Robinson: I would describe this position as, in my words. You know, we get to do God’s work out here. We’re helping people.

Matthew Green: They are veteran Bart workers. Natalie worked as a police dispatcher for 15 years.

Natalie Robinson: One of the first people to move over to the crisis intervention team.

Matthew Green: Stephanie said that she had worked as a station agent for. I believe she said 27 years.

Stephanie Barnes: Prior to coming over to this position, I was the opening station agent at the Coliseum.

Matthew Green: And just saw a lot of people who, in her words, needed more than a corporate card.

Stephanie Barnes: A lot of the problems that were happening outside the station were coming inside the station. And of course, as an agent, you see that firsthand. So this…

Matthew Green:  And she said that when bart came up with this initiative, she thought it was an amazing opportunity. And in her words, it was kind of customer service on steroids.

Stephanie Barnes: We don’t have any weapons. We come in peace. We do carry Narcan and we do carry, you know, flashlights and stuff of that sort. But when we come, we come in support of you.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: What are folks like Stephanie and Natalie hired to do exactly as crisis intervention specialists?

Matthew Green: They’re hired to look for people who they think are experiencing some kind of crisis.

Natalie Robinson: We’re helping people who are unhoused, who have substance abuse, issues, who have mental health, issues as well, and being able to connect them to the proper service and those who are willing to.

Matthew Green: And it’s their job to go up to them and make it clear that they’re not the police and offer to connect them to social services, not social services. Bart offers social services, in the community. And these are providers that Bart partners with. So I think they would say their job is to help people rewarding.

Natalie Robinson: See those changes happen and to build the relationships with individuals so that they can trust that you’re actually here to do good for them.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Matthew, what are the origins of these crisis intervention specialists like? When and how did this idea come about?

Matthew Green: The homelessness issue on Bart had been going on for a while, well before the pandemic and long before the impact of George Floyd’s murder, the protests that followed. Related to that, in terms of in terms of race and policing accountability. But, I think in the in the immediate sense, it’s Bart board of directors decided to create something called the Progressive Policing Bureau, in October 2020.

Matthew Green: The idea was to have a group of workers who were affiliated with the police, but not police officers, who could really go out and work directly with populations in the system who were, in their view, really becoming an overwhelming presence and very much mirroring the increase in homelessness in the communities that Bart serves.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And so, Matthew, you spent a day with Natalie and Stephanie. Where did you go first? And what did you see when you were out with them?

Matthew Green: So I met up with them at the Lake Merritt station at, 930 on a Tuesday morning. Now and then. We hung out there for a little bit and then sort of almost on cue, they got a call from their dispatcher that there was a disturbance happening on a train that was now stalled in that station in Lake Merritt, at Lake Merritt.

Matthew Green: And they talked with the train operator and found out that there had been a man in the first car of the train.

Natalie Robinson: Apparently, the laundry that he was going through had feces all over it. So it was all over the train cars. They said he wiped it out, but it definitely needs disinfecting.

Matthew Green: The man had already walked off the train and headed up the stairs toward the exit, and they tried to follow him.

Natalie Robinson: He has an immediate need. I know that there’s a shower and laundry truck that comes to the lake sometime, so we’ll look up that schedule and see if that’s something he might be interested in getting. But we’ll check. Where?

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Did they find him?

Matthew Green: They didn’t. They tried though.

Natalie Robinson: We’ll always try to make an attempt to find someone and and offer our assistance. On the back side, the train operator has people they report to, and our dispatch has people they will call, and they’ll get those seats all cleaned up.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: But yeah, it sounds like ultimately they didn’t they weren’t able to offer him those services, which it sounds like is the immediate goal. Were they able to do that at all the day that you spent with them?

Matthew Green: So I was with them for about two hours that morning. And we went, to a bunch of stations between San Leandro and Lake Merritt. During that time, they approached roughly ten people, and nine out of ten either kind of went away or waved them off and, you know, said they didn’t need help. The one person that they found who was interested in hearing them out was a woman who introduced herself as cat.

Natalie Robinson: What is it, cat. Cat? Yeah. It’s a short for something. Catherine. Okay. Yeah, I think.

Matthew Green: She was outside the San Leandro Bart station. She was pretty frantically grabbing a random array of belongings from one of those Bart bike lockers. There were items kind of splayed all around her, and they made clear that they were not police.

Matthew Green: They said they weren’t interested in rushing her out and had no intent on telling her to leave. Natalie asked. It looks like you’re on a deadline. And she said that a, Bart police officer had just told her that she needed to get all of her stuff out of there immediately.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: What ultimately came out of that interaction with Kat?

Matthew Green: They asked if they could tell her about some services and asked a little bit about her story. She seemed somewhat tentative, but, was receptive and kind of continued pulling stuff out as she was talking.

Matthew Green: But told them that she and her boyfriend are from Southern California and had moved up here recently and were living in their car, nearby and keeping their stuff in his locker, and they were looking for work.

Matthew Green: Natalie and Stephanie started talking to them about a supportive housing service in Hayward.

Stephanie Barnes: Well, we can at least give you points. You in the direction if you guys are interested in getting on the list for permanent housing in Alameda County.

Stephanie Barnes: Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah. You know where to go. You don’t have to go running around in circles. Yeah. Because they they do it. They do it. They do. Right there. Okay.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Matthew, what did Stephanie and Natalie tell you about how the morning went?

Matthew Green: They were not fazed at all or didn’t seem to be faze at all when people wave them off. They just kind of kept on going. Stephanie explained to me. She’s like, you know, we don’t like we’re not going to beg to help people. We’re going to offer.

Matthew Green: And if they don’t want our help, then they don’t want to help, and we move on. There’s plenty of other people that will want our help. The sense I got is they didn’t see it as necessarily good or bad. It was just sort of part of the course for the the work that they do.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Coming up, we’ll talk about whether the Crisis Intervention Specialist program is working. Stay with us.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: It’s hard to know for folks like Stephanie and Natalie whether those services actually get utilized in the long run. And again, this is just one person the two of them were able to make contact with in those two hours.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Is that pretty typical of these interactions with kids is that you sort of maybe get Ahold of one person, and then you sort of are left to guess whether they’ve actually were able to connect with the services.

Matthew Green: Every time they can connect someone experiencing a crisis with support services, they consider that to be a success. My impression is that it’s pretty common that the actual rate of success, in terms of having people be responsive and say that they will follow up on services, is pretty low.

Matthew Green: In the last quarter of 2023, the Progressive Policing Bureau reported their SES has had more than 4500 contacts with people, 210 of which, resulted in verifiable connections to service providers. That’s just under 5%.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: So there are 20 of these crisis intervention specialists. How much is Bartz spending on this program so far?

Matthew Green: It says it’s spending a little over $8 million on the progressive policing program that includes the 20 cities, as are called crisis intervention specialists. And it also includes up to ten transit ambassadors. One of the big arguments they make is that for every six, you need fewer police officers.

Matthew Green: Are there, dealing with problems that if they weren’t there, police would have to deal with? And these aren’t issues that police should have to do. So they’re freeing up police to deal with, really dangerous situations.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Matthew, we are talking about this one single program and as you mentioned earlier, it was really a result of the uprisings we saw in 2020 where people were sort of looking for alternatives to police. But it’s 2024 now, and I feel like the pendulum has kind of swung in the opposite direction.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And I know that there are Bart surveys actually showing rioters wanting more police. And Bart has actually been simultaneously, while doing this program, been beefing up its police force. Right.

Matthew Green: Yeah, it is pretty aggressively recruiting. If you ride Bart with any regularity, you’ve probably seen posters announcing higher starting salaries and signing bonuses. They recently announced that in 2023, there was a 62% increase in arrests.

Matthew Green: So that’s a pretty significant departure from at least their stated language when they created the Progressive Policing Bureau, which was to try to address a lot of these societal problems in their system without the use of force or without the use of people who could use force.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Matthew, does everyone agree that having these crisis intervention specialists is the right way to get more people on Bart?

Matthew Green: No, they definitely don’t. There was, survey put out by a business group that works with Bart, that found that, pretty large majority of people surveyed, and these are people surveyed who have in the four out of the five counties that Bart services would rather Bart exclusively focus on the business of transportation, on getting people from A to B efficiently and safely and not delve into the work of social services. Leave that to outside providers and agencies.

Debora Allen: We should remain focused on transit.

Matthew Green: On the Bart board, even though, the majority of the board voted for the program and supports it, and I believe continues to support it. There’s, one pretty pronounced opponent, Bart board director Debora Allen.

Debora Allen: I’m trying to take a business case approach and say we are doing a very good job of even delivering the transit.

Matthew Green: She’s pretty focused on numbers, specifically on Bart’s financials, and has been for years now a pretty staunch proponent of more enforcement on Bart, trying to get the agency to do more to address fare evasion.

Debora Allen: And what I have argued all along is. It’s certainly okay to put some of those people outside of the fair gates, but our first line of defense should be to keep those people out of the system.

Matthew Green: She, you know, sees it as a nice idea, but something that doesn’t have proven results. And that’s costing money for a system that doesn’t have any money to spare. And that ultimately isn’t what writers want.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: How do Stephanie and Natalie respond to this criticism? Like, why do they think that their jobs are actually necessary?

Matthew Green: One part they both truly believe that this is the way to reach certain people in the system who are not going to be responsive to the police.

Stephanie Barnes: Because most of the jobs here station agents, train operators, for worker supervisors, police officers. There was nothing, though, that really addressed the mental health component or the homelessness crisis that we’re experiencing in the Bay area.

Matthew Green: They truly believe that they’re making a difference, even if it’s at a pretty slow pace, or even if it’s not easily quantified.

Stephanie Barnes: Because we can be more accessible to the public than the officers can. You know, they’re responding to emergencies. They’re responding to fights. They’re responding to, someone with a weapon, and they need to talk to me for an hour. You have me for an hour.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I mean, it seems like the goal really is to to get people feeling safe to ride Bart again. So, I mean, I’m curious, what do you think, Matthew, after reporting on this story? Do Bart’s efforts to help people in crisis seem to be working in that regard?

Matthew Green: I mean, my sense is that when riders see Bart personnel, regardless of whether they’re police or not, they I think that it’s a that’s a net positive when they see that the Bart this is don’t have any enforcement power and aren’t armed for some people that that diminishes their confidence. That said, I think there’s also a lot of people, especially in the Bay area, who don’t want to see a lot more police on Bart. I think it’s a mixed bag.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And I mean, for Bart, it’s really about getting more people riding again. But how do you think Stephanie and Nathalie measure success in their job?

Matthew Green: I think it’s individual interactions. They both told me stories in which they ran into people, that they helped people who were really having a hard time were kind of at the very bottom. And they directed them to services and they basically essentially held their hand and later found out that they had followed through and that their lives had pretty significantly changed.

Stephanie Barnes: It’s amazing how even when people are in their worst state, they are still are very thankful that someone’s checking on them.

Matthew Green: I mean, I think those are the things that, that really keep them coming back to the job.

Natalie Robinson: It’s really rewarding, to see those changes happen and to build the relationships with individuals so that they can trust that you’re actually here to do good for them.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Well, Matthew, thank you so much for sharing your reporting with us.

Matthew Green: Thanks for having me.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: That was Matthew Green, a digital editor for KQED. This 40 minute conversation with Matthew was cut down and edited by senior editor Alan Montecillo. I produced this episode, scored it, and added all the tape.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: We got additional production support from Ellie Prickett-Morgan and to Tamuna Chkareuli. Music courtesy of the Audio Network. Where production of listener supported KQED in San Francisco. I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next time.