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Police agree on jail diversion pilot
The Seattle City Council doesn’t have much time left to take its final vote on the panhandling law that Mayor Mike McGinn vetoed on April 23. The city charter says the council must vote again within 30 days of a veto, which makes Monday’s full council meeting one of the last chances for an override that no one expects, given the council’s original 5-4 split.
In the meantime, the Racial Disparity Project of Seattle’s Defender Association is hoping, by year’s end, to launch a project that would do more than give poor people tickets for begging. The Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program, or LEAD, would actually deal with a bigger issue cited by downtown residents – drugs – by offering users immediate treatment, including allowing police to take low-level drug offenders directly to treatment services after an arrest.
The Racial Disparity Project has been working on the project for more than a year with city and county officials and their discussions of the need – or lack – for a new misdemeanant jail that Seattle and the county’s cities has been canceled.
LEAD would be similar in nature to pilot programs that the city currently funds in the Central District (GOTS) and Rainier Beach (CURB), which use peer outreach workers to establish trust with drug users and help get them into services. The Racial Disparity Project is hoping to start two LEAD pilots by year’s end in Belltown and Skyway, if the group gets a much-needed starter grant.
The group has already drafted a set of principles and goals, says defender Lisa Daugaard, that the King County prosecutor, city attorney, mayor, Seattle police chief and sheriff have agreed to in concept. Among them, according to a white paper on the project: 1) Today’s drug enforcement isn’t working because police can only move a fraction of users off the street a fraction of the time, and then they return, still addicted, with criminal records that make getting a job or housing that much harder, 2) offering treatment is cheaper than putting people in jail and addresses the actual problem, and 3) the War on Drugs disproportionately locks up people of color.
The pilot would require specialized training for officers and a crisis drop-off center to open for the mentally ill by the year’s end, similar to the one that King County is currently working. But the benefits, the Disparity Project says, would be giving drug offenders a way out while actually saving money on public safety resources.
Comments
No more of that Phony-Baloney 12-Step Religious Cult Treatment nonsense. The homeless have already been through 20 “TREATMENT” programs. The homeless need IMMEDIATE REAL HOUSING, REAL TRAINING, and REAL JOBS…NO MORE PROGRAMS!
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