When Allegheny County Council introduced legislation in June to ban police from using “less lethal” weapons like tear gas and rubber bullets, 288 community members submitted public comments. But by the intended day of the vote, the councilors had only received about 50.

Pre-coronavirus, members of the public had three minutes each to share their thoughts in-person with the 15-member council at its meetings. Now, they must submit comments to councilors via an online form or email.

That’s one of many ways that public processes across the Pittsburgh area have transitioned online during the pandemic, with in-person public comments becoming digital messages and legislative meetings becoming livestreams. Though virtual meetings have increased accessibility by eliminating the need for transportation and in-person attendance, many residents and elected officials say the coronavirus has posed new obstacles for public access and government participation. 

Comments submitted to county council are usually read aloud by staff during the meeting and forwarded to councilors in advance. But due to the high volume of comments on banning “less lethal” weapons, they were unable to read all 288 at the meeting, instead planning only to list the names of the 268 commenters in favor of the ordinance and the 20 against it.  

And by the time of the meeting, the majority of the comments were still missing from councilors’ email inboxes, according to at-large County Councilmember Bethany Hallam. 

“We were planning on bringing that legislation for a vote that night and couldn’t in good faith do so,” Hallam said. “For our staff to just not send them to us, and for us to be expected to vote on something without hearing them, is doing a disservice not just to us, but to the folks who took their time to have their voices heard.” 

Council President Patrick Catena wrote in an email to PublicSource that prior to the meeting, all council members were aware there were additional public comments that communicated the same message as comments that were already sent. 

The issue reveals the imperfections of public processes as many of the interactions between officials and residents have moved online — sometimes with added barriers. Throughout the pandemic, Pittsburgh-area government bodies have canceled meetings, restricted options for public comment, or instituted circuitous processes for accessing meetings. Residents say technological difficulties and lack of disability accommodations have also prevented them from fully participating in public processes.

Technology offers the “promise of ‘this is more accessible,’” said Bonnie Fan, an organizer and Carnegie Mellon University graduate student who is researching public access. “But also, it gives more tools for control to the government.”

Sunshine vs. ‘glomming’

Pennsylvania’s Sunshine Act, otherwise known as the state’s Open Meetings Law, mandates that government bodies — including boards, councils and commissions — ensure the public can attend and participate in meetings. Act 15 of 2020, which went into effect in April, instituted specific requirements addressing online meetings during the pandemic.

However, the execution of these provisions has varied across agencies. And some residents say the existing legislation still fails to guarantee unhindered access to public meetings.

When Pittsburgh resident Paul O’Hanlon attempted to tune in to a virtual City Operating Budget Forum in September, he said he was surprised to discover that the meeting hosts had disabled the chat function. 

Since the city was also live streaming the meeting on YouTube, O’Hanlon visited that site to check if the broadcast enabled a live comments section. It didn’t. 

“It seemed really odd to me that a public entity is holding a public meeting, and essentially filtering or shutting down public comment,” O’Hanlon said. “It seems that we, the public, should have the right to talk to each other at a meeting around something like the city budget. People should be able to hear what the neighbors think.”

The only recourse residents had to share their insights on the operating budget was to submit statements and questions beforehand, according to the original Sept. 10 Facebook post advertising the meeting. 

“I mean, that’s kind of crazy, because if you’re hearing a briefing on the complications of a city budget, how are you supposed to know ahead of time what questions you might have?” O’Hanlon said. 

City spokesperson Timothy McNulty wrote in an email that the City of Pittsburgh’s Law Department advised the city’s cable bureau to turn off the chat function for its meetings.

“During a City Council meeting this summer there was interaction over chat between council members and public commenters, which Law deemed to be problematic under City Code,” he explained, declining to elaborate on the interaction. 

Act 15 permits local government agencies to allow public participation either via email, postal mail, or the remote conferencing system used to hold the meeting. The state Office of Open Records wrote in an advisory that agencies would ideally accommodate all three methods, along with others.  Some agencies have fallen short of that ideal, and observers say these solutions are an insufficient substitute for in-person comments.

For instance, people wishing to make a public comment at an online county Board of Elections meeting had to submit their written statements in advance for County Executive Rich Fitzgerald to recite during the meeting. But rather than read every individual comment into the public record, the board groups responses about a similar topic into one generic statement. 

“Let’s say, 50 people submitted public comments about satellite voting locations,” Hallam, who also sits on the board, said. “As opposed to actually reading through the comments and seeing the different issues that people are bringing up and the specific concerns that they have and listing them, they lump them all together.”

Squirrel Hill resident Juliet Zavon argues that the board’s practice of “glomming” comments together blunts the power of individual, meticulously drafted statements, turning many potentially subtle, complex opinions into a few sentences.

“The specific issues that you raised are not highlighted, and they’re not read,” Zavon said. “It takes away the foundation of making a public comment where somebody hears the whole thing.”

Assistant County Solicitor Allan Opsitnick said in a statement that with the ongoing pandemic, everyone, including the Board of Elections, has had to do “things a little differently.” 

Though comments are summarized when read aloud during Board of Elections meetings, “public comments – in full – are sent to all three of the board members and are posted online prior to the start of the public meeting, a process that provides greater detail and information on the comments than is possible during an in-person meeting,” he said.

“The subtlety or complexity of those opinions is available to all who take advantage of having these comments available, in writing, in advance of the meeting,” Opsitnick said. 

Unlike the Board of Elections, the Jail Oversight Board currently reads each submitted public comment out loud and verbatim during its meetings — if time permits. 

However, Laura Perkins, an organizer with Pennsylvania Prison Society’s Allegheny County chapter, emphasized the importance of public officials hearing people read their statements in their own voice. She questioned why the agency couldn’t allow residents to unmute themselves during the meeting to deliver their comments.

“Our tone of voice would be heard, which is extremely important, and how I pause between the words,” Perkins said. “I know that sounds kind of petty, but it really affects how my point is being communicated.”

County Councilmember Tom Baker said the online format of public meetings has also precluded the “serendipity” of casually conversing with constituents before and after in-person meetings begin and hearing their concerns in a less formal context. 

“One of the nice things about meeting in person is that we often got to know our constituents or other advocates that were there at the meetings by seeing them in person speak to us,” Baker said. “They could, from a physical proximity perspective, come right up to us afterwards, or chat with us a little bit before the meeting.”

Prior to COVID-19, public meetings also used to be prominent sites of protests, Fan noted. Activists and community members often congregated at meetings holding signs and wearing the same T-shirts to collectively demonstrate their support or opposition to certain measures.

“You also had people walk out and interrupt the meeting if they were dissatisfied, but that’s not really possible with Zoom anymore,” Fan said. “It’s no longer a place where that kind of interruption can happen.”

Where is the (virtual) meeting?

Since meetings moved online, some agencies now require community members to register beforehand to receive the call-in information, rather than publicly posting meeting links on their websites or social media. 

For example, Rahul Amruthapuri, an organizer from Pittsburghers for Public Transit, said residents must now pre-register to receive information about attending virtual Port Authority of Allegheny County meetings.

Before COVID-19, anybody could freely walk into the in-person meeting to attend. 

“But now that’s not the case,” Amruthapuri said. “You need to fill in a form online, or you need to call up the Port Authority’s customer service, and they provide you with the call number.”

Port Authority spokesperson Adam Brandolph wrote in an email that the agency requires meeting registration as a safety measure to preempt “Zoom bombing” incidents.

“There have been multiple occurrences of video-teleconferencing meetings being hijacked or disrupted by pornographic and/or hate speech or threatening messages,” he wrote. “The FBI recommends password-protecting meetings to prevent that from occurring.”

But to even register for meetings, people first need to know where to look. 

Hallam and County Councilmember Olivia Bennett both said they have received frantic, last-minute emails from confused constituents seeking meeting details.

“I would like to see a little bit more push publicly about ‘here’s our meetings, here’s our links, here’s how you make public comment,’” Bennett said.

One of Act 15’s provisions mandates that local government agencies provide “advance notice” of all remote meetings and how the public can participate, to the extent practicable. This notice must appear on the agency’s website, in a “newspaper of general circulation,” or both. 

The Office of Open Records encourages agencies to further use social media, email newsletters, and other methods to publicize meetings.

Many nonprofits and advocacy groups in the county often conduct widespread outreach to raise awareness of public meetings and facilitate participation beyond activist circles. But the pandemic has hampered traditional outreach efforts such as in-person conversations at government offices and transit stops.

And since many government entities host their meetings using Microsoft Teams, Cisco WebEx, or Zoom, people without access to these programs, reliable internet, or phone service are automatically excluded from participation. 

“The people that we tend to speak to when we’re doing that work are people who don’t have internet access, people who don’t have reliable phone access, and who overwhelmingly rely on transit,” said Toni Haraldsen, who volunteers with Amruthapuri at Pittsburghers for Public Transit. 

“So there’s obviously a concern about losing those voices and losing that connection to those individuals because everything is so online right now,” she continued.

Do-it-yourself accommodations

Despite the challenges of government participation amid COVID-19, Amruthapuri said he hopes the necessity of online meetings will force agencies to rethink their approaches to public transparency when the pandemic is over.

“We are hoping that after everything settles down that some of these changes — for example, having an option to attend these meetings virtually or even having a phone-in option to the board meetings — continue,” he said.

O’Hanlon, who uses a wheelchair and co-chairs City-County Task Force on Disabilities, specifically acknowledged the increased accessibility of virtual meetings for those with physical disabilities who no longer need to travel to county buildings. 

At the same time, the switch to virtual meetings has also thrown agencies’ existing lack of disability accommodations — especially for people who are blind, visually impaired, deaf, or hard of hearing — into sharp relief, according to Haraldsen, who is hard of hearing.

The onus is often on residents to actively seek accommodations such as image descriptions, live captioning and American Sign Language interpretation.

“It’s important for people to know that pre-COVID [meetings were] also not accessible,” Haraldsen said. “The pandemic didn’t bring this about. In many ways, for many issues, it highlighted what was already happening.”

As the Pittsburgh area continues to weather the pandemic, Bennett said government entities must take stock of lessons learned amid COVID-19 and make concerted efforts to dismantle remaining barriers to public access. Especially during times of crisis, public officials cannot afford to lose community voices, she said. 

“We want to make sure that people are coming along with us,” Bennett said, “and they aren’t being left behind as we are claiming and depending more on technology now more than ever before.”

PublicSource summer editorial intern Emma Folts contributed to this story.

Amanda Su is a PublicSource editorial intern. She can be reached at amanda@publicsource.org.

This story was fact-checked by Emily Briselli.

The post Pandemic participation: Online government both enables and stifles access to public meetings in Allegheny County appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

Someone you love is having a breakdown. They could hurt themselves. Who do you call?

If 911 leaps to mind, you’ll likely get a visit in a few minutes — from police, whose training includes behavioral health but is focused more on addressing criminality.

If you can remember 1-888-796-8226 (or 1-888-7-YOU-CAN), you’ll get a mental health professional from resolve Crisis Services, a 13-year-old unit of UPMC hired by Allegheny County to handle behavioral incidents. Help might arrive in half an hour.

Those different digits — the phone numbers and the response times — may be two reasons why social services have taken a back seat to public safety in handling mental health crises, occasionally with tragic and expensive results. Though resolve stands ready for telephone consults, walk-in visits, overnight treatment and mobile teams, its phone number just isn’t as memorable, and its staff doesn’t always zip to the scene.

As local leaders have joined a national search for alternatives to the police-dominated handling of behavioral crises, resolve’s leaders press the case that their 150-clinician team can be part, though not all, of the solution. A two-month PublicSource exploration of resolve — including conversations with clients, analysis of quarterly reports and interviews with officials — revealed strengths and shortcomings at the agency, and showed why shifting duties from police to social services won’t be easy.

• People who have interacted with both resolve and police said that in a behavioral health crisis, they prefer the mental health pros, not armed officers.
• 911 and police don’t regularly refer behavioral health calls to resolve.
• The gap between police response time and resolve’s response time complicates efforts to increase the social service’s role in handling crises.
• With a thrifty mission statement that limits its budget, resolve may struggle to improve response times which occasionally range up to several hours.

“We provide quality services in some of the most bizarre and extraordinary situations,” said Liz Sysak, resolve’s senior director of clinical services. Saying she’s “incredibly proud” of resolve, she added that, “when we show up, we do great work. But yes, there’s some limitations to us showing up.”

‘They didn’t mention resolve’

When Amanda Papa was grappling with post-miscarriage depression and anxiety in early 2018, neither she, nor her family, knew about resolve.

On May 30, 2018, her father, Michael Papa, called 911 to seek emergency help for Papa, who said in a recent interview that she had been cutting herself and expressing suicidal thoughts.

Coraopolis police officers arrived at her home.

Though Papa’s parents and her husband Garret Wassermann had expected an ambulance and asked the officers to help them to involuntarily commit Papa to a hospital, the officers instead placed her under arrest.

“Then the police took me, and that was it,” Papa said. “They didn’t mention resolve.”

Following Papa’s arrest, she said she was unable to use the station restroom and urinated in a holding cell. (Police, in an internal report, wrote that she was “trying to flood [the] joint,” and “acting like a fool” and “pissed on [the] floor.”)

Papa was charged with resisting arrest and institutional vandalism, held in the Allegheny County Jail for eight days, found guilty and sentenced to a year of probation with mental health treatment. She has appealed the conviction. She has also sued the borough and the officers, claiming false arrest, negligence and malicious prosecution.

Coraopolis’s police chief did not respond to requests for comment. On Nov. 13, an attorney representing the borough filed an answer to Papa’s lawsuit, including a blanket denial of all of her accusations, and adding that the officers “conformed to all applicable laws and regulations” and are entitled to immunity because they acted in good faith.

Not until after the 2018 incident did Papa learn of, and connect with, resolve. Papa found their staff to be friendly. “I think it helped me,” she said. “And I stopped going because I was feeling a lot better.”

But given the efficacy of resolve’s services, Papa questioned why her crisis — one that she said resolve could have readily handled — instead resulted in a years-long saga involving cops, courts, probation officers, and an ankle bracelet.

“Police came in my case, but they didn’t really need to,” Papa said. “It would’ve been a fine case where they could’ve just sent a mobile crisis unit.”

“The whole thing could’ve just been stopped, and we [would] probably pay the therapist way less than these officers, these courts, all the staff, all the records — everything,” she added.

Resolving the ‘flow chart’

Resolve was created, at county government’s behest, to make it easy to get professional help in a behavioral crisis.

Prior to the unit’s inception, a confusing network of around a dozen separate teams offered behavioral crisis services in the county, according to resolve’s Medical Director Dr. Jack Rozel.

“The joke was that by the time you worked your way through this flow chart, the kid had aged into the next bracket,” he said.

In 2007, the county Department of Human Services contracted with UPMC’s Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic [WPIC] to provide behavioral health crisis services to residents, and WPIC established resolve.

Resolve’s mission is to respond to mental health disasters and traumas, divert unnecessary emergency and inpatient care, reduce incarceration and assist those seeking to involuntarily commit another person. It also explicitly requires “being cognizant of the stewardship of public funds.”

Resolve currently operates a 24-hour telephone hotline, a walk-in center, residential services, and a mobile unit that addresses crises throughout the county, face-to-face. Its clients pay nothing.

DHS pays UPMC around $1.6 million a year for resolve’s mobile, residential and walk-in crisis services. Resolve also bills the state and private insurers for services. From mid-2018 through mid-2020, county dollars covered between 18% to 28% of resolve’s quarterly costs, with state programs covering most of the rest.

While no one interviewed for this story argued that mental health crises are declining, over the past two years, demand for resolve’s services has dipped.

Sysak attributed the decline in the number of mobile service dispatches to the natural “ebb and flow” of community need. “I’ll just add that this is also, I think, a marketing shortcoming for us that a lot of people simply don’t know about what we offer, and the extent that we offer it.”

“Everyone knows 911,” Rozel said. “Resolve, people know, but maybe not quite as well.”

Rozel added that the social service approach to behavioral health crises may get a boost in July 2022, when, under the National Hotline Improvement Act, the number 988 becomes the national suicide prevention and mental health crisis hotline.

In the meantime, the COVID-19 pandemic has posed additional challenges for those seeking face-to-face behavioral health services. As people avoided in-person interactions, resolve’s mobile team dispatches plunged in the spring.

resolve in the post-Floyd world

While resolve’s mobile team dispatches dove, George Floyd died, in May, under a Minneapolis officer’s knee. His death followed a nonviolent incident that may have been related to drug use, and energized interest in behavioral crisis management.

While Floyd’s death occurred five states away, Allegheny County has also seen behavioral crises turn tragic. Over the past decade, police were involved in the deaths of at least three county residents —  Jennifer Piccini, Gary Beto, Bruce Kelley Jr. — who were in the throes of apparent behavioral crises, according to lawsuits filed by their estates. The first two cases settled, for $1 million and $500,000, respectively, while the third case is ongoing.

Speaking at a Dec. 1 virtual meeting of Mental Health America’s [MHA] Regional Policy Council, Rozel said he sees the current “crisis” as an opportunity to address behavioral health incidents more effectively.

“This is where we actually have the political will, and maybe the resources” to make big changes, he said. “Now we’ve got an opportunity to make a leap to be where our communities need us to be.”

Resolve, though, hasn’t been at the center of the discussion in its community.

The county in September held the initial meeting of its Crisis Response Stakeholder Group, which featured a national expert in the justice system’s interactions with people who have mental health, substance use or homelessness problems. Group members came from the county Department of Human Services, police departments, foundations, community organizations, the city, academia and various agencies — but none from resolve.

It’s not clear why resolve wasn’t initially invited. County officials have, since September, repeatedly declined or ignored PublicSource’s requests to discuss the stakeholder group.

Sysak said in a November interview that resolve is now “actively participating in the stakeholder meetings and stakeholder work groups.” She said she’s “optimistic that we’ll hopefully come up with some ideas that may work, or at least that we can pilot and sort of tweak as we go forward.”

The City of Pittsburgh, meanwhile is creating a new Office of Community Health and Safety [OCHS]. Its proposed budget of $5.3 million includes money for a contract with Allegheny Health Network’s Homelessness Outreach Program, aimed at shifting some of the work of helping the displaced from the police to social services.

“We do absolutely see interactions” with resolve, said Laura Drogowski, the city’s critical communities manager, who is leading OCHS. “At this point, we’re trying to figure out how to continue to improve the communication and relationship.”

No guns needed

When one of Cori Frazer’s roommates had a mental health crisis last year, and ended up playing in puddles, in a nightgown, in an alley behind their home, someone apparently called 911.

“I look out the back, and there are a bunch of police in the back,” said Frazer, the executive director of the Pittsburgh Center for Autistic Advocacy, and a member of the City-County Task Force on Disabilities. “The police did not call resolve.” They were instead “just shouting a bunch of things,” until Frazer calmed the suburban officers and coaxed the roommate back inside.

Frazer imagined a more proportionate response. “Someone could’ve asked her, with a calm voice, quietly, ‘Are you OK? Are you safe? Do you live around here?’”

“If we had a competent trained mental health response … the police never needed to show up,” Frazer added. “Nobody with guns needed to show up.”

As someone who is often engaged with people who have mental or behavioral health diagnoses, Frazer has crisis management experience. In another case, Frazer called in resolve to address a dispute between a homeless couple and people who had taken them in.

Arriving at a scene in which one of the homeless people was “laying in the street screaming,” the resolve team “was able to really assess risk in a way that was very impressive to me,” and deescalated the situation, said Frazer.

The downside: It took resolve close to an hour to show up, Frazer recounted, calling that “terrible.”

“An hour? Somebody can OD or load a gun in an hour.”

Fast times, odd hours?

Resolve’s quarterly reports, which it submits to the county Department of Human Services, indicate that in more than two out of three cases, its teams are dispatched to the scene of a crisis within half an hour of the end of the initial phone call to resolve. The same reports show that the wait can be much longer.

For instance, resolve’s reports show a May 2020 call from a mother, concerned because her 14-year-old son ran away from home and had “plans to cut himself.” Because resolve’s mobile teams were busy that day, the team was still en route five and a half hours later, when the mother called and advised that police had found the boy and were taking him to WPIC.

Resolve reports to the county on its longest wait time for each month. Most months include at least one incident in which resolve arrived more than four hours after the call came in.

In 2019, a caregiver called resolve to report that a person “doesn’t want to live anymore and does have one prior suicide attempt,” and was refusing food and some medicines, according to one of the quarterly reports. resolve took four hours and 19 minutes to dispatch a team, per the report, which did not detail the outcome.

Rozel and Sysak noted that while police have sirens and lights, resolve teams are at the mercy of traffic. They said they are constantly trying to find ways to improve response times, like assigning mobile teams to geographic zones. In the end, though, it comes down to staffing.

“Let’s say we could get a mobile team to every request in 15 minutes,” Rozel said. “Well, we could do it, but it means adding a lot of teams,” some of which might have “more slack time” when calls are slow.

More teams means more costs. During an interview conducted via Microsoft Teams, Rozel noted that “as I’m looking at you, right above the camera is the crisis mission and vision statement that was written for us at creation by the county. And the final line of the mission statement is, ‘being cognizant of the stewardship of public funds,’ which I get, right?”

“The needs are so great,” he said. “The resources are quite finite. But the reality is that if you want to have more teams available to respond more quickly, you’ve got to have more well-trained staff available.”

He and Sysak acknowledged that, given resolve’s response times, it’s hard to see how its mobile teams could replace police as the first responders to most mental health events. “When a family or person is in crisis, and you need somebody there right away,” Rozel said at the MHA meeting, “it’s almost certainly going to be law enforcement.”

Police like resolve, but …

Ross Township Police Department Detective Sergeant Brian Kohlhepp said resolve has been a “great addition” to the department’s existing services and has had a “tremendous impact” by reducing repeat calls to the same crisis-prone people. Rather than convince the person to come with police to the hospital, he said, “All we have to do is convince them to have a conversation with people from resolve.”

There’s no evidence, though, that law enforcement is frequently handing the baton to resolve. Resolve has no data on the number of calls it received via 911 or from police, according to Rozel and Sysak. “I don’t think [the number of such calls is] substantial,” said Sysak, though some do occur.

The county also had no information on law enforcement’s interactions with resolve.

Pittsburgh Bureau of Police spokesperson Cara Cruz wrote, in response to PublicSource’s questions, that resolve is a “critical partner” to the bureau. The city has no data on the number of times police worked with resolve teams, but “is currently working on a project to gather more comprehensive data in this area.”

Pittsburgh police Officer Robert Swartzwelder, speaking in his role as president of Fraternal Order of Police [FOP] Lodge 1, said his interactions with resolve have been “pretty positive. … My only concern is response times, and whether they’re going to be there odd hours.”

Swartzwelder said that if society wants an agency like resolve to be the first responder when someone is standing on the edge of a bridge, it will need to consider the response times. “Police response time is 2-7 minutes,” he said.

He added that police get much more mental health training than they used to. “We have a lot of training in all of these areas,” he said, “but it seems, because of recent events, society does not believe that we do.”

Penn Hills Police Chief Howard Burton said that while officers “are not against working with social service agencies,” it’s often essential that the police be the first point of contact for individuals experiencing a behavioral health crisis.

“Even though these folks may be mentally challenged or may be in crisis, you just don’t know how violent they are,” Burton said. “If they’re going to have weapons or what the case may be, you really can’t just arbitrarily pick social workers.”

Not a hospital, not a jail

Davina Groover spent seven months in the Allegheny County Jail, in 2015, for disorderly conduct, because she could not post bail while awaiting hearings. In a November interview, she said that some of that time she was housed in the mental health unit.

The Perry South resident and restaurant server said she has since found better ways to address her bipolar disorder. She has had several stays at resolve’s inpatient clinic, and at one point this year was “using resolve services all the time. I was calling them on the phone, talking to them about my anxieties, I was calling them to my girlfriend’s house because we were having difficulties.”

Groover added: “They’re always really calm and responsive, and serious, but not alarming.” Best of all, resolve is “not a hospital, and it’s not jail.”

Her calls for mobile crisis support, though, revealed the service’s limitations, she said.

Once resolve sent a team to Groover’s girlfriend’s house. Since the girlfriend did not want to let them inside, the team talked with Groover for a few minutes, advised her to find another place to stay for the night, and left.

Another time, she called resolve about a dispute with a roommate, and the team arrived quickly. “And what I needed at the time was for someone to sit down with my roommate and I and hash some shit out, and devise a plan on how to live better,” said Groover. “But resolve doesn’t do that, really, unless all parties are on board.” They weren’t, so resolve’s team left.

Resolve’s limitations became factors in lawsuits stemming from a 2012 fatal shooting, by schizophrenic 30-year-old graduate student John Shick, at WPIC. The mobile crisis team had visited Shick’s apartment multiple times to commit him but he repeatedly refused to let them into the building. Survivors alleged that resolve was negligent for repeatedly failing to complete the process of having Shick involuntarily treated, arguing that if they had done so, the shooting would not have occurred.

Several of the cases were settled.

“Obviously, any traumatic event certainly propels change,” Sysak said. “Ultimately, we take those incidents, we look at what happened, we look at what might have triggered that, we look at our day-to-day interactions and we are always teaching on how we may respond to discord, and how we also may contribute to it.”

As society wrestles, again, with behavioral crisis management, discussion of expanding resolve’s mandate and powers would be “something we would love,” she said. “I think that is part of these dialogues with the mayor’s office, with the stakeholder groups. That has to be part of this.”

Rich Lord is PublicSource’s economic development reporter. He can be reached at rich@publicsource.org or on Twitter @richelord.

Amanda Su is an editorial intern for PublicSource. She can be reached at amanda@publicsource.org.

This story was fact-checked by Matt Maielli.

Mental health reporting has been made possible with funding by the Staunton Farm Foundation, but news decisions are made independently by PublicSource and not on the basis of donor support.

The post Resolved to change: Can Allegheny County behavioral crisis teams move fast enough to answer calls for reform? appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

Prior to COVID-19, nursing and personal care home residents could access the polls in a variety of ways, occasionally even by voting at their own facility if it was a designated polling place. Residents could also more easily receive assistance from visitors on completing their absentee ballots.

But now, with the November election fast approaching, pandemic safety protocols have restricted visitation and off-site travel and moved polling places away from nursing and personal care homes. A group of a dozen community organizations across Pennsylvania, including disability, aging, health and voting advocacy groups, argue in a letter sent to state officials Monday that these restrictions threaten to disenfranchise residents of long-term care facilities.

“Inaction will bar as many as 125,000 Pennsylvanians from access to what may be the most important election in their lifetimes,” states the letter, sent to Department of Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine, Department of Human Services Secretary Teresa D. Miller and Department of State Secretary Kathy Boockvar. 

In response, the Departments of Health, Human Services, and State wrote in an emailed statement to PublicSource that voting in Pennsylvania is now “more convenient, accessible, and secure” than ever before. The departments also wrote that residents of long-term care facilities can currently vote by absentee ballot or mail-in ballot.

“The Wolf Administration encourages every eligible Pennsylvanian to vote in the upcoming election, and we support all efforts of long-term care providers to assist and empower their residents to exercise this right,” the departments wrote. “We appreciate the concerns expressed in the letter and will consider the suggestions. We are committed to ensuring that all residents of long-term care facilities are able to vote, and are supported in that right.”

Disenfranchisement worries

Letter author Paul O’Hanlon, who co-chairs the City of Pittsburgh-Allegheny County Task Force on Disabilities, said he wrote it after discovering long-term care facilities were limiting the entry of guests who could aid residents with voting. 

Normal visitation is prohibited in facilities with outbreaks and significant COVID-19 transmission and restricted in other facilities, depending on their success at keeping out the virus. The letter states that residents in some facilities have been warned not to leave or fear being locked out as a means to control the spread of COVID-19. 

Though the state has recently seen a significant increase in cases among younger Pennsylvanians, personal care and nursing homes continue to bear the brunt of the deaths, with residents constituting 67% of all COVID-related fatalities in the state. Across Pennsylvania, 977 facilities have reported having cases among residents or staff, including 102 in Allegheny County.

O’Hanlon, a retired disability rights lawyer, founded and leads an organization called Ballots for Patients that sends teams of volunteers into local hospitals to assist patients with processing emergency absentee ballots. Since its inception in 2008, Ballots for Patients has attempted to expand its reach to nursing and personal care homes.

“It’s not easy in the best of times to be able to enter these facilities and offer the kind of assistance that we did with the hospitals,” O’Hanlon said. “As this presidential year was coming around, we started thinking about how we could do a better job, not expecting a pandemic. And as the pandemic hit, it increasingly became clear to me that my volunteers aren’t getting into these facilities.

“As a person with a disability, I know that all the disability groups in the world are always saying we’re 20 to 25% of the population, we should be a big voting bloc, and we should be respected in the area of politics,” O’Hanlon, who uses a wheelchair, added. “But what I also know is that in order to be respected in the area of politics, you have to actually vote.”

Zachary Shamberg, president of the Pennsylvania Health Care Association President [PHCA], said Pennsylvania’s long-term care facilities have always and will continue to make concerted efforts to support residents in political participation. The organization’s members include more than 400 long-term care facilities and senior service providers across the state.

Facilities are starting to reopen to certain “ancillary providers,” including therapists, X-ray technicians, hospice care providers, and beauticians, he said. But some facilities still have tighter restrictions, which presents difficulties for residents seeking to designate a visitor to assist them with marking their ballot.

“If there’s any way that we can facilitate voting to make it as simple as possible for our residents, for our most vulnerable citizens, I think we should do that, whether it’s allowing folks in a long-term care facility to vote there in person, whether it’s ensuring that everybody has a vote by mail ballot or an absentee ballot,” Shamberg said.

Barriers beyond access

Beyond the issues of polling place access and voting assistance, residents of long-term care facilities face additional social barriers to electoral participation, according to Rutgers University professors Douglas Kruse and Lisa Schur, who research obstacles to voting for people with disabilities.

Kruse and Schur said they and other political scientists have found three major contributors to low voter turnout among individuals with disabilities: a feeling of inefficacy, a lack of economic resources and social isolation. The pandemic has especially exacerbated the latter two, according to Kruse and Schur.

“People who have more money and more education tend to vote more, and now a lot of people have lost their jobs,” Schur said. “We’ve found that people with disabilities tend to be often the last hired, first fired. Relatively more people with disabilities now have been hit by the pandemic and have lost their jobs.”

Kruse added that a number of studies have also found individuals who are more socially disconnected are less likely to vote. 

“And it’s just as simple a thing as a colleague or a neighbor saying, ‘Well, have you voted yet?’” Kruse said. “Social isolation is especially a big factor for people with disabilities who are more likely to live alone. And it’s especially a big factor this year with the pandemic.”

Schur also pointed to a persistent issue of election officials regularly discarding ballots whose signatures don’t match the ones they have on file, which could disproportionately affect the elderly and disabled residents of long-term care facilities. 

“If you have some sort of disability that can affect your ability to write, like cerebral palsy, or just weakness as you get older, your handwriting might not look very much like your handwriting five years ago, or even two years ago,” Schur said. 

The pandemic has also limited long-term care residents’ access to candidates, according to Shamberg. During past elections, many nursing and personal care homes would often invite candidates from both parties to visit facilities and inform residents about their platforms.

“That hasn’t been able to happen this year, unfortunately, so it’s a shame,” Shamberg said. “It’s a disservice to a lot of the residents who are unable to learn about those candidates.”

Calls for change

At the end of 2019, before the pandemic struck, Pennsylvania decided to widely implement mail-in ballots to make voting more accessible. 

However, disability rights advocates in Pennsylvania like O’Hanlon and Alisa Grishman contend that many long-term care facilities throughout the state have made insufficient efforts to assist residents with participating in voting by mail. 

“I think it’s great that suddenly we have this as an option because Pennsylvania’s voting system is usually really restrictive for absentee ballots,” said Grishman, founder of Access Mob Pittsburgh, an accessibility advocacy group that signed the letter to the state. 

“On the other hand, a lot of the agencies that normally should be doing voter registration for disabled people are limited in their reach at the moment because of health restrictions,” Grishman, who uses a wheelchair, continued. “I understand that these long-term care facilities are understaffed and underfunded, so I think there should be more of a government push.”

Many nursing homes and personal care homes that are usually polling places couldn’t operate during the primary election in June and “they most likely can’t be expected to do it in November,” Shamberg said. “And that’s for the sheer reason that they’re trying to keep residents safe, they’re trying to keep staff safe,” he said.

Shamberg added that the PHCA is hoping the Department of State or county election commissions will work with long-term care facilities to remove these polling locations as a measure to protect residents.

The signatories of the letter asked that the Department of State match long-term care facility census data with existing voting records and update mailing addresses. They also called on the state to automatically mail out forms for mail-in ballot requests to voters at the facility address; to register eligible, unregistered residents; and to send out applications for mail-in ballots to voters at the facility address.

The letter further calls on the Departments of Health and Human Services, who oversee nursing homes and personal care homes respectively, to issue an All Facilities Letter [AFL] to department-licensed facilities. The letter states that the AFL should formally instruct department-licensed facilities to submit a “plan of action” to facilitate voting by residents.

This should include supporting residents in requesting mail-in or absentee ballots and in receiving assistance with voting. Grishman noted, for example, that currently there is no means by which individuals who are both deaf and blind can remotely vote without help.

Accordingly, the letter argues that facilities must permit residents to designate a person of their choice to assist them in voting, with only narrow restrictions as allowed by the Voting Rights Act, and facilitate in-person meetings with designated persons, with reasonable safety precautions. Facilities should also remind staff that they are not authorized to determine residents’ eligibility to vote, per the letter. 

Kruse said that long-term care facilities must protect the idea of the “secret ballot” by guaranteeing residents a voting aide of their choosing to the fullest extent possible.

“When people need to have help with marking a mail-in ballot, it’s obviously not confidential,” Kruse said. “It seems very reasonable if you need help and your vote is not going to be confidential that you choose who your vote is going to be revealed to.”

Recognizing that many facilities may lack ample staff or funding, O’Hanlon said he believes the state government must make a “special effort” to increase historically low voter turnout of long-term care residents.

“Staff of these facilities are overwhelmed, and nobody’s going to get inside,” O’Hanlon said. “I frankly think that the likelihood that people in these facilities are going to be able to vote in this election looks pretty dim if something extraordinary doesn’t happen.”

Amanda Su is a PublicSource editorial intern. She can be reached at amanda@publicsource.org.

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