LEAD by Example
For someone growing up in the Hill neighborhood of New Haven in the last few decades, seeing loved ones struggle with drug addiction and fall victim to the court system is all too common. In a recent piece for the New Haven Independent, community leader Rasheen Murphy said, “For most of us, when we grew up, if your parents were not on drugs, you were special.” Being “special” meant avoiding arrest — the pervasiveness of drugs in New Haven neighborhoods like the Hill meant stringent police enforcement.
After a series of prostitution stings last year sparked public criticism of city policing methods, New Haven has been pressed to develop a new model dealing with low-level offenders. In response, an 11-person delegation of New Haven city officials and community activists was assembled in early 2017 to explore an alternative to locking up these individuals. The group travelled to Seattle last April to get a firsthand look at Seattle’s Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program. Some left convinced that they had found an effective model that spurs criminal justice reform and civic cooperation. When they returned, the group began to explore how the program might be implemented in New Haven. Now, six months later, a LEAD pilot in New Haven is imminent.
LEAD is a harm reduction-centered process for responding to offenses like drug possession, drug sales, and prostitution. Law enforcement officers in jurisdictions utilizing the LEAD model have the authority to divert individuals from the traditional criminal justice cycle to a network of rehabilitative services.
“This gives the police another tool to divert people from being arrested and going to jail,” said Dr. Martha Okafor, the New Haven Community Services Administrator. She was responsible for assembling the delegation that made the Seattle trip.
“People who are suffering from drug addiction or abuse should get the services they need,” Okafor said, emphasizing that treatment, not arrest, is the solution to substance abuse. “You can’t arrest people out of drug addiction.”
Caprice Mendez, a Strategy Program Manager for the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, agrees. “Currently, the practice of arresting individuals for substance abuse issues imply that they’ve committed a crime. Putting them in jail does not help solve the problem.”
This line of reasoning is crucial to understanding the LEAD program’s background. LEAD was launched in Seattle in 2011 as an attempt to reduce the sizeable racial disparities among low-level offenders affected by police enforcement and to move away from the policies of the War on Drugs, which called for the use of strict sentencing and increased militarization. A well-known goal of progressive criminal justice reform advocates has been shifting the national understanding of substance abuse from a criminal issue to one of mental health. Mental health practitioners understand that Substance Use Disorder is a medical condition, not a character flaw. Thus, advocates argue that the response should not be punitive but rather assistive, as attending to the needs behind substance abuse will put those individuals on the path to being productive members of their communities.
“People have trauma histories and childhood experiences,” said Keith Brown, the Director of Health & Harm Reduction for the Katal Center of Health, Equity, and Justice based in New York City. Brown is also the Project Director for Albany’s LEAD program, and he helps develop and implement LEAD in other jurisdictions. He explained that these experiences cause people to continue their unhealthy behaviors as well as making it harder to seek help.
“In general, LEAD is an answer to the question of what do we do next once there’s widespread consensus that the War on Drugs failed,” said Lisa Daugaard, the Director of the Public Defender Association. “We’re not currently in a position to decriminalize that economy based on the positions of our administration. So we have to answer the question of what are we supposed to do instead.”
While the standard criminal justice procedure for dealing with low-level offenders follows a cycle of booking, detention, prosecution, conviction, and incarceration, LEAD ushers these individuals towards a communal support system. The LEAD model is dependent on the collaboration between police officers, local prosecutors, health providers, service agencies, and business and neighborhood leaders. All these parties are stakeholders that play equally important roles in the collective goals of facilitating the sharing of information and making lasting commitments to helping those in need.
The LEAD National Support Bureau outlines core principles for certain parties to abide by in order to get the program running at optimal efficiency. Police sergeants and front-line supervisors have key roles in the program’s operational design. They should document the decisions to divert or not divert eligible arrestees and organize detailed training on social service barriers for the at-risk and indigent. Strong case managers are also crucial to the program’s success. They must center the participant’s needs in designing their Individual Intervention Plan (IIP), be intensive, and display cultural competency.
“We describe the case management as ‘guerilla case management,’” Daugaard said. “They have to meet these individuals in the field. They have to meet them after hours. They have to be very result oriented.”
In fact, one of LEAD’s essential components is that it draws its strength partly from the voluntary commitment and dedication of all the parties involved. This could be construed as a limitation — the various public and private sector participants all need to have an actively reform-minded viewpoint in order to buy into the LEAD model. If even a handful of partners are merely ambivalent, that could spell a breakdown in communication and management.
Fortunately, New Haven is well-positioned to take advantage of this diversionary model. “New Haven is lucky in that there’s a robust community of care that has soundly championed harm reduction principles,” Daugaard said. “That gives it a strong leg up, since other cities considering LEAD don’t always have this feature.”
New Haven boasts a variety of initiatives that suggest a willingness to support, listen, and humanize. There’s Project Longevity, which uses a community and law enforcement partnership to reduce serious violence in communities, and the Gang Resistance Education and Training program, which features a school-based, violence prevention classroom curriculum.
But compared to other programs and even other diversionary initiatives, LEAD is unique. “New Haven has a history of diversion programs, but this is the only one that is pre-arrest, pre-booking,” said Mendez. LEAD’s approach diverts people from the court system before they face charges, fines, and jail time. “You’re not getting a mark on your record, which I think is huge.”
Moreover, LEAD is distinct because it understands that the road to recovery from substance abuse is a protracted one. Other programs, such as the Angel Program in Gloucester, Massachusetts, provide a similar diversion to a network of social services, but they also strictly punish participants for any infractions. If they relapse, even early in the process, they can be cut from the program. Proponents of LEAD would argue that this is unfair. Not many participants are able to become clean as soon as they become involved with a program. Understanding that the process may take months or even years, LEAD case managers are instructed to stand by their clients and provide reliable and forgiving support.
An unintended but welcome consequence of LEAD has been the improvement of community-police relations. Brown has received accounts from police officers that they no longer have combative relationships with people whom they routinely interact with. The LEAD model has given community members a different perspective on officers as well. The model’s emphasis on supporting and humanizing makes them look more like guardians rather than warriors.
“The difference is people scattering when an officer rolls up versus people walking up to them and saying hello,” Brown said.
LEAD’s results have been largely positive to date. Okafor said that a 2015 independent study of the program in Seattle found that LEAD participants were 58% less likely to be arrested after enrollment in the program, compared to a control group of individuals who went through normal processing. This showed a reduction in recidivism, which not only reflects positively on the program’s ability to rehabilitate and reorient, but also increases public safety throughout the community.
Additionally, preliminary program data collected by case managers indicate that LEAD improves the physical and mental well-being of people at the intersection of drug and mental health problems and extreme poverty.
With this positive empirical support, New Haven leaders are eager to develop and roll out a community-tailored LEAD program. Partners in the city are planning to launch a pilot implementation in the Downtown and Hill neighborhoods in early November.
“On Wednesday, October 4th, we had training of a team of about 45 people in New Haven involved with launching the LEAD pilot,” Okafor said. “At least thirty were police officers. Three were community liaisons, one for Downtown, one for North Hill, and one for South Hill, who receive stipends by honorarium.”
Community management teams select these community liaisons. While other LEAD cities have the case managers and staff doing the community work, the goal here is to give members of the participating communities an apparatus for representation. People on the management teams deliberate and appoint certain members of that neighborhood to have seats at the table with other stakeholders and a voice in the decision-making processes.
“We went down to the neighborhood,” said Okafor. “We asked, ‘Who will you see on Sunday at your church or at a block party?’ Those are the people we wanted to help out and potentially be community liaisons. We also provided a job description for that position to the community management teams for their recruitment efforts.”
She also said that LEAD implementation partners will be recruiting community engagement specialists. Columbus House, a non-profit housing services provider, will recruit one for Downtown, while Cornell Scott Hill Health Center will recruit another for the Hill neighborhood. Attaining a project director is also in the works.
The progression from studying LEAD in April to implementing it in November is relatively speedy, and has advanced with little resistance. The response has been largely enthusiastic; if anything, it’s been a bit too eager.
“There is interest in stakeholders, including Yale-affiliated people, to scale up LEAD immediately to a city-wide level,” Okafor said. “We recognize why people would want that. But there’s a great lesson to be learned when you start small and learn from the pilot what works and what doesn’t work.”
Learning what works and what doesn’t is precisely why New Haven LEAD proponents so highly value their community management team and community liaison system. The liaisons not only explain to the people in the neighborhood what LEAD is doing, but also report back to other local partners with input to alter how the program is conducted. Increasing transparency and opening lines of communication gives program leaders the ability to adapt the program as needed, Okafor and others argue.
Still, while there may be no mounted resistance to LEAD in New Haven, those who advocate for it do take into account its potential limitations. LEAD could be utilized more aggressively and expansively, opening the diversion eligibility to include other nonviolent crimes like prostitution more centrally in its support-provision model. The political choices made in communities the program operates in limit LEAD’s flexibility in accepting partners, spending funding, or dealing with individual cases.
More importantly, advocates make it clear that the nature of diversion, LEAD’s linchpin, deserves analysis. “There’s also a question of what people are being diverted to,” Daugaard said. “Simply not doing something harmful doesn’t necessarily mean you’re being helpful.”
One concern she put forward is that LEAD would be more popular if it provided places for people to live. She said that a lot of its participants in Seattle still live in tents due to lack of solid housing policy for people in their situations.
These problems are not necessarily inherent to the LEAD model, but rather stem from the communities LEAD operates in. Because LEAD relies on the community’s network of resources to be effective, if that community is not well-resourced or adequately supported by resourced stakeholders, then LEAD’s effectiveness is decreased. At its heart, LEAD is not the service supposed to address people’s needs, but a diversionary mechanism that helps individuals engage with services that are supposed to address their needs.
“LEAD is not a miracle worker,” Mendez said. “But what it does is provide a safety net that says society hasn’t given up on you. If you work with us, we’ll work with you.”
New Haven as a community stands in prime position to take advantage of the LEAD model. It is rich with community organizations and political initiatives and backed by a willingness amongst those involved to attempt something new. If LEAD catches on, then New Haven will have begun not only to improve the lives of afflicted and the public, but to position our communities in the vanguard of criminal justice reform.
“This only works in a partnership, where it’s owned by everybody,” Mendez said. “And everybody here wants to make sure this helps, not hurts.”
