The argument a lot of us are making through our work rests on a claim about the world: under progressive practices, the people running them will behave accordingly. When we say a mental health crisis doesn’t need a police response, when we say housing is health care, when we say decriminalization means meeting people where they are, we are not making a moral assertion—we are making an empirical one. We are saying this works better than the thing it replaces. That claim is put to the test every night, in buildings most taxpayers never visit, on shifts that end at 7:30 a.m., by staff you, me, or our neighbors never interview. And what gets tested is not just the people involved, but the policies we’re actually arguing for.
I want to be precise about the failure I’m describing here, because it isn’t one advocates talk about. Underfunding is real, and the case for more money is made constantly and well. This is a different thing I want to discuss, and it survives funding. It’s the gap between what a program is designed to do and what it actually does on a given night. None of that requires an opposition, none of it requires money, and none of it requires reform. Most of it is staffed by people who believe in the work. It’s got just enough funding to get from A to B. When nobody is looking, are you going to do what is right when it consistently demands a sacrifice? That is where the failure lies.
Here is where the instinct to protect the model turns on itself. The reflex, when something goes wrong in a progressive institution, is to keep it in the building. Don’t hand ammunition to people who want to close the place down. I understand the reflex; I’ve felt it. But follow the sequence. Unexamined practice doesn’t stay static; it degrades. Degraded practice produces outcomes—a hospitalization, a person who walks out and doesn’t come back, a death on the sidewalk two blocks away, a crime committed; at worst, a murder. Those outcomes become data. And that data does not stay in the building. It shows up in a survey, an incident report, a budget hearing, a news story, and it arrives stripped of context. At that point it is no longer our evidence. It belongs to whoever wants to argue that the alternative doesn’t work and that enforcement should expand to fill the gap. We didn’t prevent the ammunition by staying quiet. We manufactured it and then handed it over without the full story. The programs that have been lost in the last few years were not lost because they failed. They were lost in budget fights, in political turnover, in cities deciding somebody else should pay. But every one of those fights is easier to win against a program that produces more hospital bills, police calls, neighborhood disturbances, and so on.
The aide, the peer specialist, the case manager—they see it first because they’re standing there when it happens, and they’re the easiest ones to fire. That is not a coincidence; it’s structural. A residential aide, a community technician, a peer specialist, a case manager carrying more people than the caseload standard allows—these are the positions that hold the observations, because they are physically present when things happen, and they are the positions with the shortest distance to the door. Raise a concern in writing, and the response, if there is one, tends not to engage the concern. It reclassifies you. You become someone with an attitude problem, someone who isn’t a team player, someone who has trouble following directives. Because the substance is never considered a substance, it is never addressed. Furthermore, the majority of people who accurately assess the situation choose to remain silent and discover their own coping mechanisms because the cost of remaining silent is the job, and the job is rent. I don’t think less of anyone who makes that calculation. I think the calculation itself is the problem, and it is a designed problem that can be redesigned.
The coping mechanisms are their own tell. When you can’t say the thing, you say it sideways, provide the minimum work whenever possible, keep the door closed to not be bothered; the presence is technically present but functionally absent. It reads as burnout, and “burnout” is the word everyone reaches for, because burnout puts the problem on the worker. But nobody burns out from work that makes sense—they burn out from being made to enforce things that don’t. Leadership writes a policy that reliably agitates the people it’s applied to, the agitation gets logged as a client behavior, and the policy gets defended harder the next week on the strength of the incident it caused. Am I wrong!? Meanwhile, the training says to reduce stimulation, preserve dignity, and assume the behavior is telling you something. Staff are asked to hold both of those at the same time, underpaid, understaffed, and overworked; and when they can’t, the failure is interpreted as a deficiency in them, and/or the employee who approaches correctly is ostracized. Nobody is held accountable for that shit but the front-liners. A policy that makes the work harder and the outcomes worse isn’t an administrative preference; it’s a decision somebody made and keeps making, and the people paying for it are the ones with no authority to change it, on both sides of the door.
So with all that said, the asks are small and not radical. Get the policy in writing—the practice, the reasoning behind it, and your own account of what happened, dated, plain, the day it happens. If a practice is defensible, it will survive being written down, and if it doesn’t, that tells you something. Ask what a policy is, where it came from, and what it rests on, and ask in writing so the asking exists whether or not the answer does. And if you’re feeling burnt out, passive-aggressive, or a need to not be bothered at a job that can be life or death for somebody—that’s a reading on the environment, not a verdict on you. Criticize your supervisor on paper; normalize whistleblowing by creating a personal and contemporaneous log of events. None of this depends on permission—only will.
There is a possible price, and I’d rather be upfront with you about it. Front-line workers must make sacrifices, which could include being isolated from coworkers, working fewer hours, having an ungracious boss, and, in the worst-case scenario, losing your job. That price falls heaviest on whoever can least afford it, which is why the silence holds and why the silence isn’t accidental. But being on the frontline isn’t a matter of easy money. The job is supposed to be challenging because the people we serve have almost no leverage to begin with, and control-driven “policy” chips away at what’s left—directly or indirectly. Run the building how you need to, but human rights aren’t yours to spend. And it’s not just about rights. Every call, every hospital bill, every incident that didn’t have to happen becomes the case against all of this—proof, to whoever wants it, that we don’t actually make change. Somebody will say a little change beats none. Maybe. But we didn’t argue for a little. We argued this works better, and that claim only stays true if the system keeps getting better at being what we said it was. What really defines a front line is what you’re willing to sacrifice. And what stands, when enough of us hold it, is the difference between a system that works and a system that only says it does.
I want these programs to succeed more than I want to be comfortable, and those two things point in different directions. Alternative intervention is the argument. It’s the thing you point to when someone asks what you’d do instead. Which means the standard they’re held to can’t be lower than the standard we demand of the systems we’re trying to replace—it has to be higher. Not just leadership, but even our own interactions because we’re the ones claiming there’s a better way. Holding these institutions to account is not an attack on the model. It’s the only version of the model that survives contact with evidence. And the alternative to examining ourselves, doing the right thing when no one is looking, isn’t safety. The alternative is someone else doing the examining, later, on their terms, using the record we left behind with our silence.