Matt Davis with the Portland Mercury reports on the controversial list used to target individuals on the streets.
On Jan. 7, the O finally picked up the piece as well.
Street Roots wrote about the controversial program back in April. Story is below.
Housing groups, police pool resources to target street ‘list’
By Israel Bayer
Staff Writer
The Service Coordination Team is a five-year old program that aims to reduce crime and improve the lives of people caught in a cycle of addiction and criminality.
The strategy of the program is to weave a comprehensive strategy by providing jail beds, supportive housing, and drug and alcohol treatment to Portland’s top offenders.
Bill Sinnott with the Portland Police Bureau heads up the program, while Officer Jeff Myers applies it to the streets where he has built a reputation for being persistent on homeless and drug abuse issues.
“The program has made a significant improvement in the livability of downtown and in the lives of the offenders receiving help for addictions,” according to Sinnott.
The coordination team works in a partnership with government agencies, the private sector and social service agencies throughout Portland. This includes a partnership with the City of Portland’s Project 57 – which purchases county jail beds and funds housing and treatment programs.
“The premise of the program is three-fold,” Myers says. “We target individuals for short-periods of detention for one to three days. We get them in and manage their addiction. We then outsource them immediately into housing and drug treatment. The third step is sanctions through the courts, often times community court sanctions where they do community service.”
The individuals targeted through the program belong to a list called the “Neighborhood Livability Crime Enforcement Offender List.” The list is made up of individuals that the city deems chronic offenders.
To identify chronic offenders the police bureau does blind data run on the top 35 repeat offenders in ten neighborhoods at the city’s core over a three-month period. The data runs target arrests for larceny, fraud, forgery, possession or distribution of a controlled substance, unauthorized use of a motor vehicle and probation violations.
Once an individual on the list re-offends, they can be picked up anywhere in Portland.
“Any officer in the city or in Multnomah County can bring them in,” says Myers “Which gives us the opportunity to manage their behavior beyond our borders in downtown.”
“From day one we’ve had lists of 35 people every three months for five years,” says Myers. “We’ve put every single person from that list onto a master list.”
The master list, which has drawn some controversy, now stands at 426 individuals.
(Organizations must sign a confidentiality agreement to participate in the program, yet it took Street Roots only three hours to obtain a copy of the list with the names of the individuals, sans agreement.)
Even if you rotate off the top 35, your name stays on the master list. Myers says the intention of keeping a master list is to go back and book people if they fall off the wagon and get people back into housing and treatment.
For the lower-level crimes on the neighborhood list, such as possession or distribution of a controlled substance, the coordination team uses Project 57 beds, among others, to facilitate what Myers calls a humane and cost-effective method to get people treatment and housing.
Because the program allows the police to detain people on the list for a one- to three-day holding period while they’re being charged for a crime, and then given treatment options, some critics charge that the program supercedes the normal criminal justice system and therefore strips individuals of their rights.
“My basic view is that it is extremely dangerous whenever a government decides to bypass the normal criminal justice processes and rights that have been in place for decades or even centuries,” says Metropolitan Public Defender Chris O’Connor. “People who are kept in custody because they are on a ‘special list’ generated by the city are being treated unfairly. There is no chance to contest being on the list, and no due process to challenge the designation by the police bureau.”
O’Connor also told Street Roots the preliminary analysis of the individuals on the list show an over-representation of African-Americans and minority groups compared to the city population.
Myers and Sinnott told Street Roots that before the program was developed that it was impossible to book individuals in jail for low-level crimes that affect neighborhood livability and were destroying people’s lives.
“Drug addicted people are a threat to themselves, and a threat to communities,” says Myers. “In the past people would be put on probation and a parole officer would say we’re going to have a bed for you in six-months. All you have to do is stay clean for the next six months, and not get in trouble and we’ll have a bed for you. If addicts could do that you wouldn’t need drug treatment, right?”
Myers goes on to say that in the interim, because people weren’t being booked and held for low-level crimes, they go right back out and get in trouble. “They use drugs, and are back at it. You can’t manage a person’s behavior for that long. Six months would go on into perpetuity.”
O’Connor charges, “(The city) believes that the system doesn’t work or there are not enough resources through the probation department, so instead the city seeks to create its own extra-judicial system for targeted people.
“One of the major problems is that being on the list makes every drug case a felony,” says O’Connor. “Why not simply make they resources available to the people on the list without involving criminal charges or the need for an arrest? If a person on the list walks into the Portland Police Bureau and asks for a place to live and drug treatment, the money is not there. The person has to walk in with a crack pipe and take a felony charge before he can access the resources. That seems backwards.”
“I suspect that the ‘usual suspects’ are behind this and that they are really seeking a way to clear out the undesirables from downtown by making it easier to arrest and control the homeless and mentally ill population,” O’Connor says, noting the large number of people on the list with severe mental illness or experiencing homelessness. “The list is created out of cynicism on the part of the city. The whole program is generated out of contempt for the court system on the part of the police bureau and city officials. It is sad that the court system is cooperating in this.”
Myers acknowledges that many of the individuals on the list are homeless and are mentally ill, but says the city is not targeting individuals, but behaviors. “We work very closely with Cascadia (Behavior Healthcare) and other social services to ensure that individuals are receiving the proper care.”
One of the concerns about the program is that the highly touted Multnomah County Drug Court, which offers a non-punitive approach for dealing with drug cases through the criminal justice system, has become irrelevant for repeat offenders on the neighborhood list.
“This program is really an insult to the drug courts,” says O’Connor. “It shows the contempt that the city and the police bureau have for the Multnomah County drug court program. The fact that the district attorney unilaterally made this policy change without the input of the public defenders office and the court show that the district attorney is aware of the questionable nature of this program.”
Myers says the drug courts are dealing with a different clientele.
Broad involvement
Government agencies involved in the Service Team Coordination program include the Portland Police Bureau, the Multnomah County Department of Community Justice including the District Attorney’s Office and Parole and Probation Office, the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office, and the private security firm, Portland Patrol Inc. (PPI).
“PPI’s security officers, as part of their regular duties, routinely observe and report criminal activity,” Sinnott said. “Often we find that those interactions include contact with our clients.”
Myers says the program is geared towards individuals with heroin and crack cocaine addictions. “It’s simple supply and demand economics. Our job is to interrupt the behaviors of individuals using drugs, and the crimes associated with drug use, and to cut off the demand side of the equation.”
O’Connor says his office is working with people from other law firms to craft a challenge to the new policy. “This will be challenged in court.”
Treatment
The money allocated for Project 57 is the primary funding source for the treatment side of Service Coordination Teams efforts.
Supportive housing organizations involved with the coordination team include JOIN, Transition Projects Inc., CODA, Cascadia, Project Respond, Central City Concern, and Volunteers of America.
Both Volunteers of America and Central City Concern receive the bulk of the funding for in-patient and outpatient drug and alcohol treatment, rent assistance, wet and dry housing and staffing. In addition, 12 inpatient treatment beds are administered by Multnomah County.
Each week, representatives from the organizations involved meet to discuss what Sinnott calls “acute problem subjects on an individual basis.” Sinnott says the collaboration efforts is changing lives for the better and is an example of how diverse organizations can work together to improve the community.”
One of the four teams of outreach workers with the Community Engagement Program (CEP) through Central City Concern called Rapid Housing Response program works specifically with individuals targeted through the Neighborhood Livability Crime Enforcement Program Repeat Offender List.
“What we do is immediately put (individuals) into transitional housing,” says Sonja Ervin, the CEP Supervisor. “The goal really is to reduce arrest, get them into permanent housing and have them move forward.”
“We have the ability to hold individuals and let them detox,” says Myers. “Once that happens,” Myers goes on to say, “We pick them up from the jail and we take them straight to drug treatment and housing. We don’t have to wait six months. We’re picking them up from the jail and delivering them to treatment. So all the problems associated with the broken system are being combated.”
Myers and Sinnott say the medical staff available at the jails treat withdrawal while the person is in custody. They are then released to a housing program.
“The jail calls us and we bring them into housing,” says Ervin. “We work with them in transitional housing and work to get them an income.” When asked if there’s enough housing available for everyone referred to them on the list Ervin admits it’s tough. “We do not have housing for all these folks. Sometimes there’s a wait list and we’re full.”
To date Rapid Response Housing has permanently housed 40 to 50 from the list, Ervin said.
“The intent has been to end the costly cycle of recidivism of these frequent offenders by treating the root causes of their criminal behavior, which are often drug and/or alcohol related,” says Sinnott. “With over 400 people having been identified by this program as chronic offenders, their collective recidivism rate has dropped 71 percent in the previous 24 months, demonstrating the success of this strategy.”
A shift in funding
Each unit in the county jail is made up of 57 beds, giving the moniker Project 57 to a program that reserves beds for city programs such as the Service Coordination Team. The city has been paying for staffing and associated costs to keep one unit open since November 2005. The unit is also used by other law enforcement agencies for crimes not associated with the neighborhood list throughout Multnomah County.
Last year, the city paid $1.3 million to support those beds, but when the county returned this year asking twice that much, the city responded by offering to pay for only the beds used by the Service Coordination Team. According to the mayor’s spokesman John Doussard, the city is budgeting approximately $400,000 for 10 beds for the team. Up to $2.9 million is being proposed in the city’s 2008-09 budget for drug and treatment and housing programs working in conjunction with the Service Coordination Team.
“Ultimately, the goal is to move people from recovery into permanent housing and to have them get jobs and have successful lives,” Leonard says. “Regardless of what happens (with funding), that can still be done.”