EP 57: 'We Can't Arrest Our Way Out of This'
A little while back, we began talking with police chiefs for a video series on what they're doing to tackle the surging opioid problem locally -- and sat upright at the different approaches of chiefs Tom Bashore in Nashville, N.C., and Bill Hollingsed in Waynesville, N.C. They're seeing results, even as one of the chiefs said this approach initially was out of his comfort zone. So we made an episode to explain it all, step by step. (This joins with the video series and other resources now available in the N.C. League of Municipalities' Opioid Solutions Toolbox at nclm.org/opioidsolutions.)
Top Keywords
- program 0.012
- waynesville 0.011
- treatment 0.009
- community 0.008
- police 0.008
- chief 0.008
- overdose 0.008
- heroin 0.007
- opioid 0.007
- detox 0.006
- lead program 0.006
- drugs 0.006
Transcript
On this episode of Municipal Equation.
It's it's truly been an amazing journey. I've learned a lot. I've been a police officer for a long
time. This initially was a concept that was out of my comfort zone, but I am optimistic
about doing something different. We're talking with two police chiefs about the programs they've put in place locally to change their town's stories of opioid abuse. We're gonna look at this step by step and find the takeaways. My name is Ben Brown, and this is Municipal Equation, a podcast about cities and towns adapting in the face of change from the North Carolina League of Municipalities. Episode 57. So the opioid crisis isn't breaking news. This this episode won't be a history of the crisis or a rundown of of who's suing whom or a big conversation about drugs in America or anything like that. Something else. Something much more zoomed in. A while back, I started on a project here at the North Carolina League at what individual towns have done to turn the tide in the opioid crisis in a local sense. Like, here's what the crisis looks like in my town. Here's what we decided to do about it. It's working, and if you pay attention, you might find a way to adapt it and make it work for you in your town. That kind of thing. Like a how to. So the plan was to produce a video series, which I did to that effect, where the main audience would be municipal officials, but specifically police chiefs. What I found though, and what I think makes for a good podcast episode, is that it's a good inside look at how police chiefs are starting to see their roles in the opioid crisis, or even the broader issue of substance abuse, a change in approach, and different results. So that's what this episode is gonna convey based on the interviews I did with local police chiefs who give us insanely valuable information candidly. Again, this was originally for a video series I was working on, but there's no script, no rehearsal, or anything like that, just off the cuff answers. This involved road trips that I took to two relatively small towns in different regions of the state where the opioid overdose numbers were intolerable.
I had worked drugs years and years ago in in another state, and I'd always brag that we never saw heroin in my community. We never saw heroin at Waynesville. Two, two and a half years ago, that all changed. That's police chief Bill Hollingshead of Waynesville, North Carolina,
a mountain town of about 10,000 residents not too far from the Tennessee border. Yeah. I I worked,
narcotics for about eight years and, and it was pretty clear obviously then that, you know, I was expecting someone else to to kind of fix the problem of an individual that had a substance use disorder once I took them to jail. And that obviously wasn't happening because those same people were being arrested over and over again. And that's police chief Tom Bayshore of Nashville, North Carolina,
where about 5,600 people live on the western extreme of the coastal plain, kinda headed north of the center of the state. Chief Hollingshead in Waynesville.
About eleven years ago now, just at a at a staff meeting, it was brought to my attention as well as the others in the staff that we were having an inordinate number of, opioid overdoses and fatality overdoses mainly in our young people. And when I say young people, 18 to maybe 25 years old, we saw a, an increasing number of those individuals that were actually dying from
prescription pill overdoses. Chief Bayshore in Nashville.
So, mostly heroin, but it's interesting in talking to the individuals that come in through our program. A good seventy five percent of them started with prescription opioids. So it's it's a problem that kind of progresses from a prescription that, that was prescribed to them by a doctor and they maybe ended up abusing it or they were getting it on street. And then when they when they got too expensive, they turned to heroin, which is much cheaper.
So it became a a matter of economics for a lot of people. The pills remain relatively expensive. When there was that big demand for an opioid, somebody filled that demand with the supply, and that supply happened to be heroin, and that has rolled into fentanyl. And so now our overdose deaths are we see more heroin and fentanyl overdoses, than we do to,
prescription pills. Yeah. It touches everybody. I mean, there's no one, socioeconomic group that it gets or, or race. It doesn't matter. Clergy, nurses,
it's it gets everybody. It really is an equal opportunity addictor. It, it affects the young, the the old and everybody in between. A lot of the addicts that we see, people that are addicted to to opioids, they started, with a legitimate medical prescription due to a surgery, a sports injury, car crash, whatever the case may be. And that addiction to that opioid, to that pain pill, has now rolled into an addiction to heroin and fentanyl. 2015,
I started looking at the data that was across the nation, and I could see up in the Northeastern Part of The United States, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, New Hampshire, they were having some real problems with the opioid problem with people overdosing. And so it hadn't really struck down here with a vengeance yet, so I really was just trying to be proactive and try to get something in place before it got out of hand here.
What Chief Bayshore put in place was a diversion program or an angel program as some call it. In Nashville, it's called the Hope Initiative. Basically, if somebody with an addiction encounters police and says, look, I need help. Here's my stuff. I'm addicted to it. I need help. If that happens under this program, that person isn't going to face arrest, if those are the circumstances. It's not gonna be a crime and punishment issue at that point. It's gonna be more about what can we do? What actual steps can we take starting now to turn your life around. It's interesting because not all of the police departments that are doing these types of angel programs,
are exactly alike. And so they can be tailored to whatever your community, needs.
Nashville was the first in North Carolina, as far as I know, to launch a formal program like this to connect people with substance abuse issues to help without arresting them. The HOPE Initiative launched in early twenty sixteen, which is what made Chief Bayshore an important man to talk to. His program has some history behind it at this point, and he's a great resource for other cities and towns to speak with. So
being able to to talk to somebody else and know that they've already kind of trudged through the the mud and the muck to to get rid of all the landmines, or at least to let you know where they are before you step on them. Chief Hollings said. Several years ago, we had heard about a lead program out in Seattle.
One of our detectives through a grant opportunity flew out to Seattle just to kinda see how law enforcement assisted diversion programs worked. Again, Seattle, the community of Seattle is not the community of Waynesville. So we learned a lot out there what would work and what would never work in Waynesville.
So knowing what'll work for a specific community means getting buy in from all the right people. Here's Chief Bayshore.
Yeah. First of all, I had no clue what I was doing. But, one of my first, meetings with was with the local district attorney, Robert Evans, and he was very on board with what I was trying to do. One of the tenets of our program is that if you come in and you have drugs or paraphernalia on you when you come into the program, we don't charge you or ask you any questions about where you get your stuff from. And so he was fully behind that, to allow people to get in with unobstructed without having to worry about charges or anything. And right now, I think when we started our program, there were probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 programs across The United States, and we were the first one in the state of North Carolina to do it. But now there's over 500.
Chief Hollingshead.
We want buy in from the community. We want if we initiate a program here, and I think the community is well educated in the dangers of opioids, but a program like LEAD, where we're diverting individuals from the criminal justice system into treatment, we want there to be community buy in. Where Seattle may say you can have up to seven grams of heroin and still go into the LEAD program, we knew that would never be acceptable in Waynesville, and it would we wouldn't get buy in from our own officers. So, we looked at what they were doing out there, took what we thought that would be acceptable here, and came back and and then looked at Albany, New York, Santa Fe, New Mexico, some different, places that that had initiated LEED. And again, took, portions from each of those programs to try to tailor it to a program that would work here in Waynesville. While Nashville's program at this point has some history behind it, Waynesville's program is just laying it down
with the first participant having come through in July. So it's it's a it's a gradual thing we're doing now as far as just getting a few people in there. And here's where it's important to point out that drug enforcement doesn't go away with the implementation of diversion programs or angel programs.
You know, if, the the lead program, if it's an officer referral, you know, enforcement, drug enforcement is still a major part of what we do every single day. I don't wanna achieve or a police department or a a a community to think, oh, well, they're doing diversion to treatment. Instead of putting him in the criminal justice system, they forgot about enforcement. We still enforce our drug laws very, very vigorously. If you're out here selling drugs on the street, if you're victimizing others, you're going to jail. You're going to prison. That's where you need to be.
Alright. So the basics so far. The opioid problem that's hit so many of our communities isn't purely a just say no to drugs issue, or one where we just have to lock up the offenders and hope that they learn their lesson. As both chiefs said, based on what they've seen in their towns, it's often everyday people who were prescribed a pain reliever and that quickly turned into an out of control dependency. All walks of life. So there's gotta be a different approach to helping them in the context of their lives and patterns, rather than just labeling them drug addicted criminals to punish. Chief Hollingshead said that even just a few years ago, he wasn't in the mind frame of this being a public health issue as such. Police chiefs maybe traditionally have been kind of hard line on drugs, zero tolerance. Where if you're caught with drugs or hooked on drugs and you're doing illegal things to support your habit, well, that's just your fault and you should have made better choices in life. I'm saying that in quotes. We know that's not really the face here. But if buy in is so important for these diversion programs to work, then how does that conversation start with all the right stakeholders?
We've had to get out of our silo as law enforcement, the health industry, the health department, the medical community, the substance abuse treatment, community. We all saw this within our own silos, and nobody was really really willing to cross those barriers to sit down and talk with the other, groups that this this affected. And, there are those that use opioids for recreational purposes. There's no question about that. But then we also see a very large segment of those addicted that again face that addiction or got to that point through a legitimate medical need. In November eleven years ago, we did our first community meeting here in Waynesville, inviting the community especially concentrating on the medical providers and the prescribers talking about the issue of, the overdose increases that we're seeing due to prescription pills. After the initial meeting that we had, I'd never really been a part of a lunch and learn, but that was the first lunch and learn that I had participated in. And it was mainly the medical community. From there, we rolled out and we really wanted to get all the groups that were affected involved in, kind of a community task force, a community group to look at the problem of opioids. So we got the medical professionals, we got the schools involved. We had a group of, individuals from the health department. We had people from substance abuse treatment. And then we had a table where we had parents that had lost children due to an opioid overdose. So we brought in, you know, all the different aspects of the community into one room and we met once a week for a long, long time. And again, just helping break down those barriers and get people out of their silos and talking and communicating.
Chief Bayshore.
What I did was I I brought to the table what I had looked at as far as statistic wise on what was going on across the country, especially up in the Northeast with this, and that I was trying to be proactive. And that two of my main goals was one, to be able to reduce incarcerations, and because the the district attorneys see a huge caseload every year. You know, most of those cases get pled anyways. So that was one of the goals that I approached him with. The other one was from a safety standpoint for my community, because a lot of individuals that have to end up supporting a substance use disorder are going to be committing crimes in your community. And so those can lead to much more serious charges, breaking into cars, breaking into people's houses, shoplifting, those are the kind of crimes that I wanted to be able to reduce. So one of the things that I did also early on was I contacted a group out of Massachusetts called PAARI, it's P A R I, the Police Assisted Addiction Recovery Initiative. And so there was some police departments up there that had already started these initiatives, and so they were very, instrumental in helping me do press releases, a little bit of funding to start, and when I say a little bit I mean it was a small amount, but it's better than nothing. And just being able to to be able to call another police chief who had been through this process and and wanted to do something in his community to be able to bounce those ideas off of. And really what we tried to do initially
was educate. We tried to educate the community. So we were in every church, every school, every civic organization. Whoever would listen to us, we stood up in front of them and talked about the dangers of opioids. You know, I've got PowerPoints and presentations in my computer dating from ten and eleven years ago that we've done to whoever would listen.
Obviously, my town manager and then he briefed the city council, but everybody that we talked to, including the sheriff, no one brought up any opposition because I think part of that was that they could see also that there was a problem and it was coming, but because it touched so many different types of people. You know, the the county commissioners, the the local health board, all of those were,
you know, super supportive of everything that we did, which was a little bit of a surprise for me because I wasn't expecting that. So I think just from the community education that we've been able to do over the past ten years along with the help with the with the media, and some of these community organizations, the faith community, the school system, these parents that have been willing to come up and talk about how the the loss of their son or daughter has affected them, we do have community buy in. And that was important to us because without that buy in, we'd have never initiated the program.
Okay. So now we understand the concept behind diversion programs and who needs to support them in order to work. But how do they work, specifically? We get the concept, but what do these things actually look like in practice? Here's a step by step of the programs in Nashville and Waynesville. And I gotta say, I couldn't have done this correctly without the help of my colleague at the League of Municipalities, Tom Anderson. He's our in house expert on police issues, being a former police chief himself. He was with me on these interviews and he asked Chief Hollingshead, okay, if hypothetically an addict walks into your police station right now and says, hey, I'm addicted, I'm at my end here, I heard you wanna help people and I need help. What happens? Chief Hollingshead here gets pretty detailed.
If if somebody walks in my office or in the lobby and says, either I am facing this issue, I'm ready to go out and buy my next fix or whatever the case may be, or if it's a parent that comes in in and says, my son or daughter is in this situation. Can you help? What we would like to do in in the best case scenario, if that individual is here now, we would contact if it's Monday through Friday, eight to five, we would contact our case manager who is right here in the building. We would make that what we call a warm hand off right to that case manager, and they would get them directly into treatment. If it's a situation of an arrest where the officer says, you know what? This is basically a good guy. This is a good girl. You know, we we we've dealt with them in the past. We know how they got to this situation. We know that they didn't, wanna be here in the first place. The court system's not helping them. It's a low level possession. It may be a shoplifting charge, the reason they're shoplifting is for the sole reason of supplying their their addiction, then we can again make that warm handoff. At that point, they're not facing a criminal charge. If they fail to follow-up in their treatment in that fourteen day period, then we can go back and charge for that crime. So there is a little bit of a there's a obviously, there's a carrot there to provide treatment for the individual, but there's also that stick where if they don't follow through on treatment, then, we can go back and charge. Now that social referral, that person just walking in the lobby, that that mom that's coming in here, we will get them into treatment. If they decide that they're there and wanna walk away, that's between them and their treatment provider. We're not we're not involved in that aspect of it at all. Chief Bayshore.
So our program, there's two distinct features that we had set up here when we first started this. One was that it didn't matter what your drug of choice was. My philosophy was that if you're here to help someone, then those barriers shouldn't be in play. So it doesn't matter whether you have an alcohol problem or a cocaine problem or a meth problem or a heroin problem, we're gonna help. The second one was that, there's no residency requirements, so you don't have to be from Nash or Nash County or even the state of North Carolina because we've had individuals from all over come here. Individual walks in the front door, and then I do an initial assessment with them, and that lasts anywhere from fifteen to twenty minutes at the most. The most intrusive question we ask them is, when was the last time you used? Because if you have used recently, then you're probably going to need to go through a detox program. If you haven't used in say three or four days, then your body's probably already detoxed, then we can go to the next step. But if they do need detox, then I carry them to the hospital. We get them checked in and triaged, and then they get a behavioral health assessment. And from there, they determine whether they need detox or not. If they do, they go to detox, and then while they're there for that four or six days, then we work on placing them somewhere in a long term residential program. If they don't need detox or they don't meet criteria for detox, then there are other options such as outpatient, and we call our local management entity to set that up. It could be, Medicaid assisted treatment, methadone, Suboxone, Vivitrol, those kind of things.
And so there's a lot of other options for people to get into recovery. What we are seeing results in is part of our lead program, we also initiated, an overdose, follow-up program where we are being notified and responding to every single overdose in the city of Waynesville. And before, we would only really get notified if a fatality had occurred there at the scene. And if they were transported, we really never saw that. Working with our EMS, local EMS, we are being notified on every single overdose. The officers are responding. They're doing an overdose report form, and that report form is is used in two ways. Number one is enforcement. Those that are on the scene at the time of the overdose are often, willing to give us information about where those drugs came from. So that that that overdose form goes to the investigators to find out who's supplying those drugs. So it's used as an enforcement tool, but then that form is also going to a lieutenant here in the department and they are doing overdose follow-up. So when that individual comes back to the house, either from the hospital or wherever, we are having peer support people meet with, along with an officer initially, meet with that person and give them resources that are available to try to get them into treatment. And again, we don't wanna have to respond to the same house over and over and over. You know, we've administered Narcan to the same individual four or five times. We don't wanna we wanna break that cycle. And, obviously, that cycle is not being broken, in the criminal justice system on those lower end crimes. So if we can get them into treatment and to stop that cycle, then that's what we're gonna do. My colleague, Tom Anderson,
asked chief Bashore about prosecutions and if this has helped with pending cases.
Yeah. There's, it's interesting because the because we had the district attorney's backing initially, the the the local prosecutors, his team have helped a lot in individuals that have, let's say they have a possession charge of heroin, which is a felony no matter what amount. They can defer charges or they can make it a plea to a lesser charge or they can make it a part of their probation that they go and complete training. So it really, you know, depending on the circumstances, each one of those cases have to be looked at individually, but they've done that for us a number of times.
We get those individuals that again, find themselves just trying to support a habit based on they got there from some maybe a situation where they never asked to be addicted to this, but they had that car crash three years ago. We've stopped professionals. We've stopped people in every single profession, career out here. Again, remember, it's an equal opportunity addicter, but from that car crash three years ago, now they're buying pills from us in the CVS parking lot. Is the criminal justice system going to solve that problem? Is it gonna stop that cycle? You know, for a long time, we just keep arresting the same people over and over and over and with the same outcome. So we're hoping that lead with certain individuals and again we talked about that community buy in, if we've got that guy selling drugs down here on the corner to our school kids, number one, we're not gonna put that individual, we're gonna put that person in jail. But if we try to divert that individual, the community wouldn't accept that and we understand that. So we wanted that that community support.
So these programs are possible with community and leadership support, but they only work if the intended beneficiaries trust them. For instance, how do you convince a drug possessor that he or she can walk into a police station for help without getting arrested? How do you gain initial trust?
Chief Hollingshead. Sure. Anytime a police officer shows up at the door of somebody that's involved in utilizing drugs, whether through legal prescription or otherwise, if they've if they faced overdose, not real comfortable seeing a guy dressed like me walking in the front door. So that's why, we really see this program, being much more effective when we've got somebody from the LEAD program, a case manager, a peer support specialist going in. You don't have to have that though. You can partner with we partnered early on with some of our substance abuse treatment providers right here in our community to go with us and do that hand off, where we would go in as law enforcement as far as a safety issue. Once that person becomes comfortable with the person from mental health, or substance abuse treatment provider, make that hand off and they can have communication, from there. But it's important for us to get those two individuals together to try to get that person into treatment because again, we don't care what it takes. Just we want we just wanna stop that cycle of addiction because eventually that's gonna help us stop the cycle of crime and that's what we're here for.
You know, it it it started out really slow because it took eight days for the first person to actually come into the police department. And so, you know, by day three, I'm thinking, you know, where is everybody? They should be, you know, lined up at the door. Not recognizing the fact that their interactions with law enforcement previous has been handcuffs in jail. And so there's obviously hesitation on their part. But once that first individual came in, I think word started to spread around that we were living up to our promises about not asking individuals who their dealers were, not arresting them if they brought in stuff. And so that that kind of helped, the program as well.
That's really important. Just that that sense of even if something's dictated to me that's, you know, like this is not we're not here to put the cuffs on you, there's still a degree of trust Yes. Especially if someone is not in their, you know, their usual state of mind. Do you know how that first person was informed about it and how they got the confidence to come forward? Yeah. I the there was an article in the paper that his aunt had seen and so he was a military veteran.
He had tore his ACL while he was in the military, was put on prescription medication, and then when his prescriptions ran out and he ended up leaving the military, he turned to heroin. And so she was like, I heard about this program, let's go down and talk to him. So by a leap of faith, I'm sure, you know, she brought him in here that day. And we spent seven and a half hours together in the emergency room waiting to get him into a room.
Wow. Yeah. So did that lead to some degree of success story? I mean, obviously, it's better than than
Yeah. He's, yeah, the the very first one, him, he came in and, and he's still doing well. We sent him to, rehabilitation and he's doing great. We paid for a plane ticket to to send him to a different state because I was still unaware of the resources that were available in the state of North Carolina. So I've since come to realize there are resources, but at that time I didn't know anything about them or where they were. And we were fortunate here that we have a hospital that has a detox facility right next to it. And so there was procedures set up with them to be able to get those individuals through that initial stage of triage and detox to be able to move them on to the next step.
And so the first guy comes through, it was still kind of slow at first or how did it build to where you Yeah.
Well, so in February I think we had maybe just two or three people that whole month that came through. And then by March and April we had started to see an increase. And so I think in the 2016 when we started this, we were still probably only at about 35 people that had come through the program, which at that time I thought was a tremendous amount. That was 35 individuals that were getting help that weren't going to be in the criminal justice system any longer, and from there it just kind of as word got out, it started to be twenty five, thirty a month. It was almost
one a day. This far into the study, you're probably asking how this is all paid for. Chief Bayshore.
Yeah. So, one of the things that we're we're kind of proud of is the fact that we don't use any ad valorem tax to fund this program. So no tax dollars are used to to help support it. The three funding sources that we have are donations, fundraisers, and small grants. And so that's where we get the money to be able to operate the program.
Is it difficult, when it comes to fundraising and getting people to to donate from the outside? How is that facilitated? Who controls that money? How does all that work? So, we we do have an account set up,
in the department that we can, pull those funds from. But the volunteers that we have so initially, we sent out a, a social media post asking for volunteers, and we got a pretty good large amount of volunteers to be able to come and help. And so they kind of took over the fundraising role, and so they'll do fundraisers to raise money for the program and seek donations, but I've had checks from all over the country come in. Why do we need LEED? Why did we want LEED?
We have we had an awful lot of people again in our in our department coming to this office that were saying that, you know, my son or daughter got to this point through a legitimate medical need. We don't have a whole lot of resources here in the Western part of the state as far as substance abuse treatment. We've got no options. What do we do? So LEED was an option that we could use because it's not only diversion from the criminal justice system as far as officer referral, we also have what we call social referral, where if a parent comes to us, we can get them into the program. So we had a groundwork laid, we had the basis for the program, so now we just needed to fund it. So we we started with the North Carolina Harm Reduction Coalition as far as looking at grant and, and other opportunities to try to fund that program. We were looking at it along with Fayetteville. Fayetteville got the first grant. They've been running their lead program for well over a year now. We spent a lot of time with captain Paul over in, Fayetteville to see how their program was operating. Again, what we could use from that program, what would work here in North care in in Waynesville, and maybe wouldn't be acceptable in Waynesville that is in, in Fayetteville. We don't have a whole lot of sex workers here in Waynesville where that's a a major part of their program. So we were fortunate after the Fayetteville program had started. We did get grant money from the Cures grant, which is federal money coming back into the state through the governor's office. We we did qualify applied for and qualified for a grant for the lead program here in in Waynesville.
What specifically, does the funding go to? Like, what what is actually paid for?
So the bulk of the money that we take in, 94 plus percent of it, is used to pay for long term residential treatment. Smaller amounts, we bought food or reimbursed gas for volunteers that have transported individuals from one facility to the next, and we've spent a little bit of money on admin as far as flyers or business cards and things like that. But the bulk of it goes to paying those, residential treatment programs.
Right now, we've got a lot of people wanting, to come help with the program. We're not soliciting people to come help with the LEAD program, but we're getting calls and emails,
every other day with what can I do to help? We've got people in the faith community. We've got people in all walks of life wanting to know what they can do to help with the LEAD program. You know, funding is always an issue. One of my biggest fears is to, you know, be in in this position and somebody walk in the door and say I need help and I have no resources to be able to to get them there. But I think we've we've done a good job of being resourceful, with the money that we've that we have received, and and spend it wisely. So, you know, we're still in the black, so to say, and we're always looking for new additional funding sources. It's truly been an amazing journey. I've learned a lot.
Are are your officers seeing results in the community?
Yeah. I think we, you know, early on we were starting to get calls of individuals who had overdosed. There was a particular incident where we got a call one night that there was a car that had ran into the brick building on the back of Walmart. When we got there the individual had overdosed, he still had the needle in his arm. And so those kind of calls had started to increase a little bit, but we've seen hardly any now, at least in our community. And so that's been good. Our first year that we tracked everybody that came through, we had a forty percent reduction in property crimes that were associated with substance use disorder. So all of that has been a a positive for us. I am optimistic. And again, Waynesville is its own unique,
place. What works out here in the mountains of Western North Carolina may not work in Fayetteville and vice versa. But based on what we see in other communities, we think that it, it can be successful. And, again, when you look at the map of the state of North Carolina and you look at those counties that are that are affected, it's you know, it may not be the most urban centers that you would think of as being the highest rate of addiction, the highest rate of drug use. It's often the most rural counties. So, again, we've gotta think outside the box. We've gotta do something different. We've got to get outside our comfort zones. Again, I've been a police officer for a long time, and this initially was a concept that was out of my comfort zone. But I am optimistic about doing something different because I don't want to be use this, term, this real cliche, but you know I finally come to the realization that we are not gonna rest our way out of every single problem. And looking at this crisis, I'm not I don't think that we're gonna arrest our way out of the opioid crisis. So we've got to look at what we can do as law enforcement, individual officers and agencies
to help stop this problem. I think people that walk in the door here, they they have come to know through word-of-mouth, that, you know, what we say we're gonna deliver. And and even if we've run up against a roadblock, I think we've built up such a resource that, you know, we can just open another door for them. Whereas if somebody came in here and I said, you know, I'm sorry I can't send you the detox because I can't tie up the resources or it's too far away or just come up with a lot of different reasons. Another simple one is we're a very small department. It's 17 police officers that work here. My lobby is open Monday through Friday eight to five. If you show up at 07:30 at night or like last night when I came out at 10:00, if I said come back tomorrow morning or Monday morning at 08:00, then the words are going to get out that you're not really trying to help people because they're not going to show back up. You have to be able to engage them when they're ready right then. So there's a very small window. So it takes a level of commitment to be able to do what you say you're going to do when you're when when it's needed to be done. And and that's something that I think, you know, we were fully prepared to do when we first started this and have continued to do that. I've been a cop now since I was 17. I was in the military as a cop and now I've been a civilian cop for twenty years. And when I think about all the lives even as a civilian cop that I that I have saved, literally saved pulling out of burning cars or overturned vehicles or running into a house, whatever that is, it's probably less than six in that twenty year span. And now over the past two and a half years, I've had the chance to to really affect some change and and I think save people's lives in the hundreds. So it's very rewarding.
So I mentioned this started out as a video series with the two chiefs, and you can find that. It's broken into quick little segments by topic. You can find that at nclm.0rg/opioidsolutions. Again, nclm.org/opioidsolutions. This podcast will be there too, along with some links to other resources. So it's kind of a toolkit, or a toolbox, that's what we're calling it. Of course, a big piece of this is knowing what treatment options you have in your community. And if you don't have any directly in your community, then what's the closest? Where are they? That goes back to what Chief Hollings had said earlier about getting as many stakeholders together as possible. So all of you know what you each have to work with and how you can bridge gaps. I hope you appreciate that in presenting this, I didn't want to get so specific that it sounds like it's just something that could work in Waynesville or Nashville. I want to leave enough sort of elasticity to where you could just pick up the basic concepts and elements of these programs and adapt them as you want to your community, if that's something you're interested in doing. Related to this, the biggest influence on this information gathering and sharing project was Michael Lazara, who's the mayor pro tem of Jacksonville, North Carolina, where Camp Lejeune, the marine training facility, is based. It's a big military town. Lazarra is also the twenty eighteen president of the League of Municipalities here. And before we go, I wanna highlight something that his city is doing that may be unique to most places in the country, certainly in my state. The local governments there are building their own crisis center. I was in Jacksonville recently and had a small voice recorder with me and asked the mayor pro tem about it.
It's it's not done anywhere that we know of. This will be sort of a first. So we'll have a 16 bed crisis center. Mhmm. I guess a seven to fourteen day stay. We're completely renovating a building that the county has. We have a board of directors that will be overseen. We put together we helped put together the RFP that Trillium put out because Trillium is the provider, so we had to go through them Mhmm. For a contractor. We got a contractor. We hope to be open in November, December time frame. But the beauty of all this is we've set some parameters and goals that have to be met for that provider to maintain their contract. Mhmm. So we're elevating the requirements, because what we found is that, you know, there has to be accountability. You know, people, you know, go in with a need, they leave. You know, what's the recidivism rates? You know, how long does a police officer have to stay when he brings somebody? You know, all the all the metrics that that are not done in other in other venues. And it will be done here, and we'll be able to control that and make sure that we're seeing positive results in those areas. So we're very excited about that. Number one, just to have a facility that that someone in need can go to here locally. I mean, we're a community. We've got a we're a military community. We're a county population of a 160,000 plus, and we do not have a crisis facility. And I just for the life of me, I don't understand it, but hopefully, we'll solve that problem here shortly. We can't have diversion programs because we don't have a facility. So we have all these things in place that soon as the facility is open, our director of public safety, Mike Nera, will already has you know, ready to go to start these diversion programs for first time offenders. Instead of going to jail, they can go to to get help. But it's, you know, it's all interconnected. You have to have a place to to take them other than jail or the emergency room. And so, you know, it's it's it's a it's a big problem, and and we're very excited about this. We hope that it'll work as we anticipated. And, and hopefully, it'll be a model for others to to deal with the problem.
We'll check back in on that, see how it's doing. Okay. So a podcast can't reach its arms around every nuance of this crisis. Just not gonna happen. But I hope you're able to take something away from this as it concerns the police element and how how a change in approach can change outcomes. Waynesville was just beginning its analytics, but Nashville is indeed seeing positives, as the chief said there at the end. If you have any feedback or questions or ideas, things that, you know, we really should have hit here that we didn't, Thoughts of any kind, email me at bbrown@nclm.org or tweet to me. The handle on Twitter is at muniequation. Thanks as always for listening. I'm gonna skip a couple weeks on the episode schedule. I'm gonna be traveling for a little while, but there's a lot ahead, some really great interviews that I haven't released yet on some very timely topics. If you have ideas for the show, send along. Again, bbrown@nclm.org. NCLM stands for North Carolina League of Municipalities, which brings you this podcast. We're online at nclm.0rg. We'll talk to you soon. This is Ben Brown.
