Sea Lion at Drake’s Bay

To: <s-acc@yahoogroups.com>

From: "Andrew Phelps" <starfish@northcoast.com>

Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2011 14:28:37 -0800

Subject: Re: [s-acc] compassionate witnessing

Actually I'm involved in that "compassionate witnessing" advocacy in San Jose. See HERE and HERE

Before with a 9-1-1 call the police would come, and if things "got out of hand," they'd taser and then shoot and often kill. In their lingo, "5150" means intervention, and confusing situations were "5149 1/2."

The Coalition for Justice and Accountability advocated in regards to a number of police shootings, like that of Bich Cau Tran in 2003 where that 25 yr. old "mental health client"/mother was shot for holding up an Asian vegetable peeler and expressing an "anger attitude." We've struggled hard on that one; today the Vietnamese politician who supported us [a] became the first Vietnamese elected to the City Council and [b] has just now become the Vice-Mayor of the City of San Jose.

Under the Mental Health Services Act "Innovations" some of us argued eyeball-to-eyeball with the top police officers in the County and now we have a program that Mental Health calls "Postvention." Before 9-1-1 calls happened and police intervened and there was no followup. Today they mean to check up on 9-1-1 calls that go "5149 1/2" and use "compassionate witnessing" to find out what's actually happening. So "next time they are called," the police will have a better notion what's happening. [In Cau Tran's case, that likely would have saved her life.]

Anyway there's a "compassionate witnessing" program happening in San Jose, and Allison Torres and myself, who are on S-ACC, are involved with the Learning Advisory Committee that's overseeing it. Of course, it should be noted that this is not a solution to the problem of police intervention, it is only an amelioration.

Andrew

Lnp wrote:

Sure. Common shock, as this author put it, resulted from witnessing acts of violence and violation. Common shock could be anything from a child witnessing an angry parent slap a child to genocide. Common shock could occur on the individual, family, and/or societal level. The author expanded the victim/perpetrator binary to include bystanders and included numerous examples of the complex interplay of these roles within, say, the same individual as well as examples of how compassionate witnessing could help, say, a perpetrator reintegrate into society. Compassionate witnessing seemed to arise out of transitional/restorative justice approaches I'd heard about and could be used at the micro, mezzo, or macro level. One of the most important ingredients seemed to be a caring, but unflinching examination of the act(s) of violence or violation.