Jeppesen anti-rendition demo
To: s-acc@yahoogroups.com
Cc: Friends
From: Andrew Phelps <dis_course@yahoo.com>
Date: Sat, 10 Apr 2010 09:59:02 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [s-acc] postvention
Hi
The S-ACC list is not focused on building local activities but rather on helping develop infrastructure for their advocacy systems. José and I went yesterday to the meeting following up on the "dialogicality" meeting, on the redesign of this "innovation in crisis intervention" proposal: The police involved and the mental health system had had some time to "digest" dialogicality, so here's their response. I'd hope others will also post on their special activist experiences, with the expectation not of constructing support (although typically we will of course be supportive), but of lending dimension to our understandings of each others' grassroots struggles.
Mental Health took the general point of view that they had succeeded in "knocking our heads together" (that is, the heads of the police and the heads of the "client/survivor" activists and allies). They came up with a scheme they called "postvention" which was meant to be the basis of an "MHSA innovations" proposal where the police would get their money and where the advocates would be willing to comply.
"Postvention" means that there is a pattern where a "5150 call" type of incident repeats itself, until (often) "something bad happens." The former Palo Alto police chief, now working for County M.H. – who was responsible for selling this scheme - and I did agree that in the cases of Cau Tran (2003) and Daniel Pham (2009), there had been repeated police interventions prior to the incidents where they had been shot dead. The Vietnamese-American activist kept bringing people back to "fear of the police in the Vietnamese community," the County Patients' Rights attorney had his take, and so forth. [José talked "lived experience" and I talked "professorially" about "math attitude" and how math students get beaten for exxpressing their feelings about mathematics: See
HERE for a video of a Sept. 2009 incident.] Folks like the police C.I.T. leaders and NAMI put their "foot in mouth" due to dialogicality breakdown, and I reached to them (speaking underneath their stereotyping) with "clinical gaze" critique.Nobody was about to be 5150'd but we did feel pressure to comply. Ultimately "pulling rank" and citing the way Vernon is now taking the CNMHC Public Policy Committee (thanks, Vernon!) helped me to
manage my feelings. Since Hope is organizing the Bay Area Regional CNMHC Forum (for May) in San Jose, from her workspace in the same building as our meeting, the "CNMHC" talk was able to help "keep NAMI in it's place." So José and I helped NAMI "wash the egg off the face" and went our way.I described the solution Mental Health (County and State) has come to for the "transformation" challenge of MHSA as a "coping" strategy. That made the police feel better and the ethnic advocates took it in stride, as it's their advocacy which has brought County M.H. to more open acknowledgement of their manner of engaging the illusion that actual transformation obtains. We can expect that the process will soon provide funding for two "compassion teams" that will go visit people who repeatedly call 911 and make an effort to "regularize" those situations. We can NOT expect that actual "dialogical upgrade" to talk of the "clinical gaze" will prevail in the near term.
Top of the day,
Andrew Phelps
On March 27, I wrote:
Yesterday I drove down to San Jose and participated in a meeting (this is going to get micro) at County M.H. "Learning Partnership." I brought José Rangel and (our newest listmember) Allison Torres, who's currently Vice-President of the Mental Health Clients' Association of San Jose City College (I'm the Secretary). The County had applied for MHSA funding for "Mobile Crisis" as an [!] innovation and it was rejected by the state oversight commission OAC because it was "not innovative." Meanwhile the traditional ethnic advocacies in the Silicon Valley have come together in the "new CJA" - where I and others here have been working since 2003. The purpose is get the police and the local government(s) to "get serious" about police accountability. [And I've brought to their agenda this "mobile crisis" police funding issue.] Anyway I was there in the official role of representing San Jose City College and José was there in the official role of representing the CJA.