Winston-Salem’s BEAR Team was supposed to be an alternative to police. But activists say the program isn’t living up to its potential.

Featured photo: Olivia Doyle and other activists speak out in front of Winston-Salem’s city hall on Sept. 16, 2024. (Photo by Gale Melcher)

Olivia Doyle has clinical major depression, and struggled deeply with it this summer.

“I was going through a suicidal episode,” she told TCB in an interview last week.

When her family tried calling Winston-Salem’s Behavioral and Evaluation Response team, which acts as an alternative to police, the voice on the other line told them that they needed to go down to the magistrate’s office in order to get her involuntarily committed. They said that they couldn’t send a crisis counselor out to see her.

“And ever since then our confusion has been, ‘Okay, well, if that’s not a mental health crisis then what is?’” Doyle asked.

If someone is experiencing a non-violent mental-health crisis, counselors with the BEAR team, which first started answering calls without police in 2023, can respond to the scene to help de-escalate the situation as well as offer support and connection to services. It operates under the purview of the fire department and most of its expenses are currently covered by grant funding.

Many local activists had been urging the city for this kind of team — particularly in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing in 2020 — and were hopeful when it first started answering calls last May.

But now, more than a year later, they say that it isn’t working, or at least isn’t reaching people. And they’re worried that members of law enforcement, not BEAR, are being sent to the scenes of mental health crises instead.

“As much as I advocate for a functional BEAR Team, I know that one mental health service cannot solve the local problems that we contribute to,” said Doyle, an organizer with Hate Out Of Winston, a grassroots organization dedicated to combating white supremacy.

Doyle and others gathered at city hall on Monday evening to call for action. As the rain dripped through the leaves of the magnolia trees in front of Winston-Salem’s city hall, activists with Hate Out Of Winston, Winston-Salem’s Black Lives Matter, Democratic Socialists of America, Housing Justice Now and the Coalition for Accountability and Transparency spoke at a press conference.

“I want to personally call on myself, my family members and my neighbors to come together and address the white supremacy that allows us to feel unbothered by this anti-Blackness that keeps white Winston running,” Doyle said. 

What activists want

Local activists are demanding increased transparency about the BEAR team’s operations, including call data, response times, outcomes, call-to-case management ratios and individual examples of successful case management. They also want a “robust community oversight board” to ensure accountability and transparency, within BEAR operations and on city police spending compared to BEAR. 

In addition to making the program a permanent fixture that doesn’t have to rely on grant money to exist, they’re asking the city to ensure that the team is fully staffed.

“We get multiple calls per day from law enforcement, EMS, fire, other first responders,” said BEAR’s director Kristin Ryan. Ryan, along with other BEAR team members, observed the press conference.

“We are being highly utilized by all departments,” Ryan said. The team has answered more than 3,000 calls in their first year.

“When we’re called, we go.”

But right now, they’re a small team of six, plus Ryan. According to the city,  BEAR will have four more counselors on their roster “within the next month” with some additional funding that the team received earlier this year. 

What are people saying about BEAR?

While the groups want BEAR to be a line item in the city’s budget so that the program can exist in perpetuity, they are also demanding delivery of what it’s advertised to be: An alternative response to policing. Many people don’t want law enforcement to show up when they’re experiencing a mental health crisis. In July, the murder of Sonya Massey made national news when Massey was murdered in her own home by an Illinois sheriff’s deputy. 

When people request that BEAR be called instead of police, some community members say they are met with police anyway.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Miranda Jones said she saw a man walking south on Broad Street who was wearing only shorts and appeared to be disoriented. She called 911 to be connected with BEAR and was “taken aback” by the verdict of the 911 dispatcher, who said that they would send out a police officer to assess the situation.

“It felt like a complete play towards policing,” Jones said.

Jones said that not only are she and Doyle having personal experiences, many other residents have reached out to them about their own encounters.

“BEAR was advertised to us as ‘you can request them,’ but if the system is still being put in place to have the cops come out to evaluate and then send BEAR, that’s not an alternative response,” Doyle said.

“The way it’s operating…it almost feels sinister, and feels dismissive,” Jones added. It hurts  the “most vulnerable of our population.”

Tackling a nationwide issue

Local activists’ demands are part of a nationwide call for limiting interactions with law enforcement as the number of people killed by police grows with each passing year; this year alone police killed 946 people. Last year, 1,352 were killed and in 2022, 1,266 were murdered by members of law enforcement. Data also shows that Black people are almost three times more likely to be killed by police than white people. Those disparities exist in the Triad, too.

Police are simply not equipped to effectively help people experiencing mental health crises, experts say.

“I think in general, there is widespread consensus that we don’t need an armed first responder in every situation,” Kami Chavis, the founding director of the Center for Criminal Justice Policy and Reform at William and Mary Law School told TCB in an interview in 2020. “We can’t assume that every officer is going to be the best person to respond to a mental health crisis or deescalate a mental health crisis

But alternative response teams like BEAR have been around for a while. 

In 1989, the Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets (CAHOOTS) program launched in Eugene, Ore., pairing crisis workers and medics to respond to 911 and non-emergency calls involving mental health, homelessness and substance use. With an annual budget of around $2 million, it saves the city more than $22 million annually in public safety, ambulance trips and emergency room costs. In December 2020, Greensboro implemented a co-response program where mental health counselors go out on calls with police officers.

The Winston-Salem Police Department’s budget of nearly $93.9 million takes up a sizable chunk of the city’s $485.8 million operations budget. 

Activists like Dr. Anita Miles, a community advocate for veterans and the unhoused, wants city officials to make sure there’s more money to ensure BEAR lives up to its promise.

“There is a problem when our city elected officials do not keep their word,” she said.

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