The community oversight committee tasked with overseeing Denver’s Support Team Assisted Response program will facilitate their upcoming monthly meeting, rather than city employees, after tensions overflowed last month when an employee in the Denver Department of Public Health and Environment made the singular decision to shut down the meeting.

The STAR program launched in June 2020, and sends pairs of mental health clinicians and paramedics to low-level, non-violent calls instead of police and works to connect people with crisis services. It has received continued funding from the city and has been praised for its success in diverting calls away from police.

But strain between the community oversight members and the city has been growing over members’ perception that the Denver Department of Public Health and Environment has pushed aside the committee’s voice in how the program operates.

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Committee members, mostly people of color, say they are frustrated by the city’s attitude toward them because they have been involved with discussions about alternative response programs for years and represent communities heavily affected by policing and police violence.

The Denver Department of Public Health and Environment has operated STAR since early 2021, taking it over from the police department.

Last month, DDPHE behavioral health manager Dani Peters shut down the oversight committee meeting when a few members brought up for discussion an email Peters sent to members that they saw as racist and offensive. The email in response to the committee’s request to be involved in the interview process for a STAR program specialist. She said the issue had already been addressed in one-on-one conversations and the committee meeting wasn’t the right forum to discuss it.

In the email, reviewed by The Denver Gazette, Peters said she would agree to one committee member participating in the interview process, and named two members she said she would be comfortable with including. Peters wrote she did not “feel comfortable with where we are at in our functionality and relationship to include this framework into a candidate interview at this given time,” adding “I need to ensure that our internal interview panel and my team feels safe as well, and given some of the remarks made by this Committee – I do not feel like we are there yet.”

Ana Cornelius, a member of the committee, took Peters’ comments as an implication that she didn’t feel “safe” with committee members of color participating in the process.

“I weigh about 95 pounds, and I’m five feet tall. And to be categorized as a predator or a threat to my community — when I’ve been doing community work for over 40 years — from a woman who I’d never met before? It’s a white supremacist system staring right back at you.”

DDPHE said in a statement to The Denver Gazette that Executive Director Bob McDonald met with members of the oversight committee to apologize for abruptly ending the July meeting.

“We take the concerns of racism seriously, and it was never the intent of anyone on our team to promote a racist agenda. DDPHE is committed to working together with the committee on ways we can constructively move their ideas and recommendations forward.”

Vinnie Cervantes, the organizing director of the Denver Alliance for Street Health Response, said Friday after a follow-up meeting with McDonald that the committee hopes to “implement a new structure within the program that gives more trust and influence to the advisory committee” and will facilitate the next meeting, rather than DDPHE.

He also provided a community statement supporting the committee, including several dozen organizations and individual people who signed onto the statement.

The next oversight committee meeting is scheduled for Aug. 24 at 4:30 p.m.

He said Peters’ characterization of allowing a committee member to participate as a compromise felt insulting because the committee didn’t agree to the position’s creation in the first place, feeling it would diminish the committee’s ability to have influence over STAR – a pain point since the committee’s inception.

“It felt more like someone stabbing us with an olive branch rather than someone offering some kind of peaceful resolution,” Cervantes said.

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For Cervantes, the feeling that the committee’s ability to influence STAR has been hamstrung feels like a slap in the face because of his and others’ involvement in STAR since its start.

DASHR launched in 2018 with the specific goal of launching a community response program, and he has been involved in local discussions about the development of an alternative response program for several years before that. Around the same time DASHR launched, Police Chief Paul Pazen — formerly a district commander — was developing the idea for a city-run alternative response program.

Cervantes and other community organizations eventually agreed to collaborate with the city to develop one program – modeled after the CAHOOTS program in Eugene, Oregon — knowing that the city’s involvement would mean access to more resources.

But oversight committee members’ concerns over the direction of STAR have grown, and the committee’s voice in the program, since its operation moved under DDPHE. Among their frustrations have been the exclusion of “community-driven control” as a core value from STAR’s charter, as well as some instances where police have shown up to encounters along with STAR – which members say directly contradicts the purpose of the program.

“We built this thing, and it’s being taken over by people that really don’t have the original vision or the values in mind for why we created this program,” Cervantes said, “As well people who are just learning about it who are claiming some level of authority, when we’ve been involved with this for years.”