Pilot Effort Fails. Who’s To Blame?

A celebrated city experiment in pre-arrest diversion for low-level drug offenders appears to have fizzled out because of … well, it depends whom you ask.

The public health specialists who led the program lay the blame at an enduring attitude among police officers and community members that substance abuse-related crimes should be punished by the law.

The city’s police chief pointed to a uniquely permissive state criminal justice system that is already rich in competing diversionary programs.

And watchdog legal and public health activists described the pilot program’s fatal and foundational disinterest in listening to the community it purported to serve.

Those are a few key takeaways from a final report on the city’s ill-fated Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) pilot program. 

The report found that a grand total of two successful diversions took place out of 590 arrests during the first eight months of the pilot. The city’s current social services chief said that only six successful diversions have taken place since the program launched in October 2017.

The final report also found that participating police officers were skeptical of acting as ​“social workers” for those who commit crimes because of substance addiction, and that eligible participants routinely rejected the program because of the already low penalties that the state’s criminal justice system imposes for non-violent, substance abuse-related offenses.

Based on a ​“harm reduction” program originated in Seattle and adopted in cities ranging from Albany to Las Vegas, LEAD is designed to redirect people engaged in low-level drug offenses and prostitution away from the criminal justice system and towards a suite of substance abuse, mental health, housing, and employment social services. The program exchanges voluntary participation for police declining to arrest and press charges against eligible offenders. Former Mayor Toni Harp’s administration sought to replicate the program here in the wake of community protests over arrests of street prostitutes (and not johns).

The 23-page evaluation report about LEAD was published this past Friday. It was authored by Yale School of Medicine Postdoctoral Fellow Paul Joudrey, former city Community Services Administrator (CSA) Dakibu Muley, LEAD Program Manager Cynthia Watson, Christina Nelson, Kelly Lawson, Kenneth Morford, Emily Wang, and Cindy Crusto. 

The report analyzed a host of arrest and diversion data collected by participating patrol officers during the pilot’s first eight months, from October 2017 to July 2018. It also excerpted and analyzed interviews with 19 LEAD-trained patrol officers and case workers that were conducted between August 2018 and June 2019.

Click here to read the full final report.

Reyes: ​“Not Right Program For New Haven”

One of the report’s key findings is that participating city police officers did not receive adequate training to sustain the program over the course of its two-year pilot. It also found that participating officers did not sufficiently buy into the core idea that substance abuse and associated crimes should be treated primarily as a public health problem and not a criminal justice problem.

“To adopt the LEAD program, the NHPD [New Haven Police Department] leadership and other key LEAD stakeholders must commit to and promote a view of policing that extends beyond enforcing laws through punitive action,” the report reads.

“While a degree of diversity of opinions is expected regarding complicated questions about the ideal societal response to addiction, NHPD leadership should decide if they wish to commit the culture of their department to novel and more expansive views of policing of people with substance use disorders which acknowledges that substance use disorder is a chronic health condition.”

Police Chief Otoniel Reyes strongly disagreed with that assessment during an interview with the Independent Monday afternoon.

The police department is not to blame for the pilot program’s failure, he said.

Top brass joined then-Mayor Harp and a nearly a dozen other city officials and activists on a fact-finding trip to Seattle in 2016 after protesters decried a police sting that resulted in the arrest of 14 prostitutes and no johns.

From the program’s launch in the fall of 2017, city police trained 32 officers in the Hill and Downtown neighborhoods to practice LEAD’s arrest diversion techniques.

Over the subsequent months, neighborhood top cops and beat officers routinely promoted the program at community management team meetings alongside community liaisons who were hired for the project. And officers invited partnering social service providers on ride-alongs to encourage closer communication between law enforcement and healthcare and housing specialists.

“We committed ourselves to it,” he said. ​“We gave it a chance.”

Reyes said the program’s failure lay in part on a lack of funding coupled with the lack of a clear plan for success presented by the program’s managers in City Hall. The two-year pilot was funded through a $200,000 state grant awarded to the Cornell Scott Hill Health Center and a $75,000 federal grant awarded to the city.

More consequentially, Reyes said, the program proved to be an inappropriate fit for New Haven because of the wealth of existing diversionary programs already offered in Connecticut as well as the relatively minor penalties (and frequent nolles) for low-level drug offenses currently imposed by the state court system in comparison to where the LEAD program originated in Seattle.

“The way that LEAD was working in Seattle was not something that could easily be replicated here,” the police chief said. ​“The biggest issues that we were dealing with is that, in Seattle, it was very much a ​‘carrot-and-stick’ program” where the arrest deferral represented a distinctly positive and attractive proposition in comparison to the potential fine or prison time.

Supervisory Assistant State’s Attorney David Strollo made that same argument at a LEAD community meeting in October 2018. He pointed out that the program was off to a slow start largely because the city already doesn’t put people in jail for low-level drug offenses.

“Part of the culture of New Haven is, there’s not really a jailable offense that they’re worried about,” Strollo said at the time about why so few people had opted into the voluntary program instead of being arrested.

Reyes added that the city police department prides itself on partnering with other law enforcement and social service agencies to get at the root social, economic, and public health problems that lead to crime.

“The role of a police officer in the City of New Haven is one that focuses on partnerships and one that focuses on finding the best solutions to a problem,” he said. Just look at the department’s nationally recognized partnership with the Yale Child Study Center as well as its Project Longevity program, he said.

“Doing a diversionary program like this is in our wheelhouse,” he said. ​“But this was just not the right program for New Haven.”

He attributed some of the anonymous officer quotations referenced in the final report that were skeptical of the LEAD mission not to a systemic predilection towards punishment within the department, but rather to officer burnout at having too high of a workload in an understaffed department.

Cops As ​“Social Workers”

The LEAD final evaluation report cited several anonymous quotations from participating officers who found suspect the central conceit of LEAD. They argued that healthcare providers are better suited than police officers and judges to treat substance abuse and related crimes.

The authors reported that some officers in the department find substance abuse and addiction to be a moral failing and that ​“social needs and punitive criminal justice involvement were natural consequences of addiction.” That attitude represented a hefty barrier for the pilot program’s success.

“Officers who expressed such a view of addiction saw punishment as the primary means of addressing behaviors associated with addiction and this view of addiction is not compatible with the aims of the LEAD program,” the report reads. ​“The stigma of people with substance use disorders within the NHPD is similar to previous research finding evidence of stigma of people with substance use disorders among healthcare providers and within the healthcare system. Such stigma within the healthcare system is [a] barrier to treatment entry.”

The report’s authors grounded that conclusion in quotation after quotation from participating officers, who were rendered anonymous for the sake of the report.

“There is a reason why the majority of people are in the situations they are in because of life choices, personal responsibly, the goals they do or don’t have in life,” one officer is quoted as saying. ​“These are the consequences of those life decisions.”

“I don’t see what [LEAD] offers to someone who is already receiving Section 8 housing, Social Security Disability because their entire life is taken care of by the state,” another officer is quoted as saying. ​“They chose to – ​‘I want to do drugs.’ They had many opportunities.”

Still another anonymous officer quotation describes the program as asking police officers to be something other than what they are.

“Now, we are asking police officers to be social workers and outreach counselors. That’s not what we are. I know people want us to be that but we’re not. It’s – it’s not fair. I don’t ask counselors to come out and enforce laws and practical application of criminal codes and investigating crimes.”

The report also quoted officers saying directly what Reyes surmised: that they feel pressed by their workloads.

“We don’t have the time to go out there and start seeking social diversion contact,” one officer is quoted as saying. ​“Tell you the truth, not a lot of guys are going out there doing proactive work because we just don’t have enough time.”

And it quoted officers who reinforced what Reyes and Strollo said about the ​“carrot-and-stick” system in Seattle not applying well to New Haven because this state is already relatively lenient when it comes to low-level, non-violent drug offenders.

“The mission behind the program is the diverting people from being arrested, but if people aren’t afraid of getting arrested because they’re not getting any jail time, that sort of goes against the whole program,” one officer is quoted as saying.

“I haven’t been successful with the LEAD Program at all,” reads another quote. ​“At first, I was very excited about the program. Every single person that we came across was like, yes, we’re going to get one in there. Everyone rejected us. Everyone took the infraction.”

“I think a lot of people think it’s not going to work,” said still another officer. ​“To be honest, because they see that even their arrests don’t work half the time, because we just deal with such a quantity that a lot of times, people go in and out of the courts and nothing’s really done, then you see people doing the same thing over and over again.”

An anonymous member of NHPD leadership is quoted as saying that police attitudes about how law enforcement should interact with substance abuse-offenders are informed in large part by the communities they serve.

“You get some people some help and you clean up the area, the problem is, these people that are living here want these people arrested because nothing does happen. So, you have a community saying, ​“I want these people in jail because they’re making my life…” — And we’re sitting there wanting to extend help. So LEAD says these people are addicts, we’re going to give them help or offer them programs. But that’s where the lines are blurred. We’re offering help and they’re not accepting the help. Someone has to take care of your quality of life issues.”

Toward ​“Community-Based Harm Reduction Program”

Local activists and watchdogs who advocate on behalf of people struggling with substance abuse reiterated the report’s concerns with officer training and attitudes around addiction.

“The criminalization of homeless people, many of whom suffer from substance abuse problems, is just horrific” in this city, Sex Workers Allies Network (SWAN) founder Beatrice Codianni told the Independent Monday afternoon in a conversation about her response to the final LEAD pilot report.

Yale Global Health Justice Partnership Co-Director Alice Miller and Clinical Fellow Poonam Daryani agreed with Codianni, and praised the report for calling out what they see as ideologies within the police department counter to the ​“harm reduction” approach promoted by LEAD.

“There were clearly divisions in understanding and different philosophies about policing within the department,” Daryani said after reading the anonymous officer quotations.

Daryani and Miller pointed to another potentially fatal flaw that bedeviled the LEAD pilot from the start: that it never truly engaged the community it claimed to represent and serve.

“LEAD is supposed to be a community-based harm reduction program,” Daryani said. ​“From the start of LEAD, from the initial conception all the way through the design and implementation through today, there has been very little meaningful engagement of community perspectives, particularly of communities that would be impacted” by the program.

The LEAD community leadership teams established by CSA were too little too late, and never really gave community members power and oversight in the way that they have in Seattle and Albany, she said.

“There weren’t community groups coming to the table,” Miller said. ​“The LEAD program in Seattle, in Albany, in the places where it originated, it’s a balance of powers and interests. The mayor’s office is at the table, but they are not driving it. The police are at the table, but they are not driving it. The district’s attorney is at the table, but they’re not driving it. Social service providers are at the table, but they’re not driving it.”

The most successful LEAD programs have community members at the table from the start, invested with real accountability powers, she said.

“One of our concerns all the way through this is that the city started a project without having a clear understanding of what the needs were in the community.” Without a clear understanding of what housing and healthcare services are currently available to those struggling with addiction, and how those services can best be coordinated and deployed to address core social and public health issues.

“What we have seen is a well-intentioned but not terribly well-executed effort that only had partial fidelity to the LEAD program itself and that was never assessed as to whether or not it could fit in New Haven or Connecticut,” Miller said in summary.

She and Daryani praised the Elicker transition team for including in its report a sentence about prioritizing the re-thinking of LEAD, and about how social services are coordinated across agencies for this particular population.

“Those conversations haven’t happened yet,” she said. But the Global Health Justice Partnership and SWAN are committed to working together to make that community-sourced planning a reality.

2 Helped Out Of 590 Arrests

Whether LEAD suffered in New Haven from police and community aversion or a uniquely permissive criminal justice system or a poorly managed central office or a lack of community input, one conclusion emerges after reading the final evaluation report: the program failed.

According to NHPD records, the report reads, there were 590 ​“arrest events” among the 32 LEAD-trained patrol officers within the Downtown and Hill policing districts during the first eight months of the pilot. 

Of those arrests, 233 (39 percent) were eligible for LEAD diversion based on the associated charges. 

LEAD-eligible charges include breach of peace, larceny, and illegal possession of a narcotic. LEAD-ineligible charges include first- and second-degree assault, burglary, and robbery.

During that period, only two arrest diversions were ​“successfully completed” by the NHPD.

The report does not define what exactly a ​“successfully completed” arrest diversion means.

The city’s new Community Services Administrator, Mehul Dalal, told the Independent by email Tuesday that a ​“successfully completed” arrest diversion in this context most likely refers to ​“the process of diverting an individual who has committed a LEAD eligible offense from the criminal justice system to an Engagement Specialist.”

As of Sunday, the New Haven LEAD public dashboard indicated that the program had seen a total of 85 ​“opt-in” participants since the pilot first launched in October 2017. ​“Opt-in participant” is defined on the site as ​“an individual who agrees to participate in New Haven LEAD.”

Dalal said that, based on the data he has seen, there have been a grand total of six ​“successfully completed” diversions over the life of the pilot: one in 2017, two in 2018, and three in 2019.

That dashboard also indicates that there are currently four active opt-in participants: three men and one woman, three of whom are white and one of whom is black. 

One of those active opt-ins came to the program through arrest diversion, while the other three came through ​“social contact.” 

That latter term is defined as ​“the process of referring an individual who has not committed an offense to an Engagement Specialist for services. Social Contact Referrals enable police officers to refer an individual who is at risk of criminal justice involvement and has problematic substance use, mental illness, poverty, or homelessness to services without having to wait for them to commit an offense.”

Critics of the program slammed the city in 2018 for using ​“social contacts” to unnecessarily increase the number of interactions between police officers and vulnerable populations even before someone has allegedly committed a crime. The program’s backers defended ​“social contacts” as a preventive measure designed to help vulnerable populations as early as possible.

The report’s authors recommended that, if the LEAD program were to stay in New Haven, trainings ​“should educate officers about the science of addiction and introduce law enforcement to the similarities between addiction and other chronic diseases.

“Officers should be introduced to the barriers created to health among people with substance use disorders by poverty, trauma, other chronic medical conditions. Officers should be educated on the expected course of the addiction as a chronic disease. Officers do not need to function as healthcare or service providers but should be aware of the barriers people face in accessing treatment for substance use disorders and officers should be empowered to assist people when ready to make positive change.”

But it doesn’t look like New Haven’s LEAD will be lasting much longer. According to the most recently published LEAD meeting minutes from Nov. 8, 2019, funding for the program director’s position is set to expire at the end of March. While funding for the Cornell Scott engagement specialist position should extend through September, the Columbus House engagement specialist position has already been transferred away from LEAD because of a dearth of participants.

Dalal confirmed for the Independent that the pilot has been completed.

And yet, he said via email, ​“NHLEAD is an active program.”

He followed that with, ​“The Policy Group is working on next steps. At this time additional funding has not been secured.”