By David Porter

The CRESS program, Amherst’s unarmed community response team formed in the aftermath of George Floyd’s 2020 murder at the hands of Minneapolis police, could be close to naming a new director nearly four months after the first person to hold the position resigned. 

Town Manager Paul Bockelman and Pamela Nolan Young, director of the town’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion department, both told The Current that they expect a candidate to be submitted to the Town Council by the end of this month. The council would then have 14 days to act on the nomination, Bockelman said, 

Three of the four unnamed finalists for the job had met with CRESS’s interim leadership team by late last week and the fourth met with the team last Friday, Young said. 

CRESS, the acronym for Community Responders for Equity, Safety and Service, has operated for months under the direction of a team that includes Young, Police Sgt. Janet Griffin, Fire Chief Tim Nelson and CRESS implementation manager Kat Newman. The move to the interim team became necessary when then-director Earl Miller resigned in October, two months after he was placed on paid administrative leave. 

Bockelman declined to discuss what led to Miller’s departure but said the development was a clear setback for the program, which in the fall of 2022 had begun sending four two-person teams to respond to issues arising from homelessness, drug abuse, truancy and other non-violent situations that police normally would have had to handle. 

Young said Miller’s departure contributed to CRESS’s being temporarily “in disarray” but noted that three new responders had completed training recently and had taken the place of three original responders who had resigned. Also, in December CRESS began handling a limited number of calls placed to police dispatchers.

“They’re moving in the right direction,” Young said.  

A new director will need to balance public expectations for the CRESS program with what responders are able to do, Young said. Some residents and town officials have advocated for responders to handle noise complaints and disorderly persons complaints, for example; while CRESS responders have been trained in de-escalation techniques, Bockelman said those situations have the potential to escalate to physical confrontations and are better handled by police for now.

With an eye toward expanding CRESS’s scope, the plan is for the new director to use a $25,000 grant from the state Department of Public Health to visit other U.S. communities where similar programs have been implemented and which respond to a wider range of calls, Young said. 

David Porter grew up in Amherst and spent many years as a sports and courts writer for the Associated Press. He returned to Amherst with his wife, son, and cat.