California Church Tells Congregation to Stop Calling Police

The church especially wants to avoid calls to police over homeless individuals who are in crisis due to mental health problems, intoxication, drug overdose, or some combination of the three.

The First Congregational Church of Oakland, CA, has asked its parishioners to try to stop calling police — especially on people of color — according to KQED.

The church especially wants to avoid calls to police over homeless individuals who are in crisis due to mental health problems, intoxication, drug overdose, or some combination of the three.

Church leaders are hoping to “create a volunteer force of community and church members trained in conflict resolution who can be on-call, if anything happens,” the KQED report said.

One of the church’s leaders — Nichola Torbett — told KQED, “One of the things that gets lost in Christianity in this country often is how Jesus was positioned in the society that he lived in. He was part of an occupied nation, a colonized people. A brown-skinned man, who was surveilled, targeted, harassed, finally arrested, beaten, and killed by state forces.”

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