A Utah-based harm reduction advocate once said to me, “I love cops.”
That surprised me — just a little bit.
If you aren’t familiar with the “harm reduction” movement and its philosophy, think of syringe exchange programs and safer-sex education. Basically, harm reductionists acknowledge potentially unsafe and illegal activities, such as drug use and sex work, as reality. With that understanding, harm reduction programs seek to stop the spread of HIV, drug overdose and other avoidable outcomes for people already facing difficult lives.
So, I shouldn’t have been surprised when my friend confessed a warm place in his heart for police officers. Who sees more suffering, day in and day out, or has more reason to embrace programs intended to end cycles of human suffering? Some police and prosecutors have even applied harm reduction to law enforcement itself. Possibly the most dramatic of these collaborations with harm reduction advocates is the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion, or LEAD, program.
LEAD originated in Seattle. Like many new ideas, it emerged from conflict. The Defender Association of Seattle and the American Civil Liberties Union had, for years, sued the Seattle Police Department over racial disparities in drug arrests. The public defense attorneys claimed that the police were targeting people of color in the downtown corridor while all but ignoring white people engaging in exactly the same activities in other parts of Seattle. The police responded that they were prioritizing the city’s most disruptive street-level drug market, not targeting people of color. To make a long and fascinating story fit within this column, let’s just say that everyone involved eventually got sick of the fighting and decided to find a solution.
Launched in 2011, LEAD diverts people arrested for violating drug and prostitution laws to supportive services.
Sound familiar? My guess is that it’s not quite what you might expect.
LEAD participants are diverted immediately after they are arrested — or, in some cases, even before they are arrested — for drug possession, low-level drug sales or prostitution. They are brought to the precinct, processed, interviewed and offered LEAD and assignment to a caseworker, rather than the usual: pretrial detention in the local jail, criminal charges, prosecution and incarceration. Most people choose LEAD. Many participants are poor and homeless and have long histories of drug dependence. Almost all have multiple past arrests — sometimes by the same officer offering them LEAD. A large percentage of LEAD participants (in very white Seattle) are people of color.
I mentioned that some LEAD participants enter the program before they are arrested. Very soon after LEAD launched, police officers asked if they could refer people they already knew to be engaged in drug use, drug selling and sex work to LEAD without waiting for probable cause to make an arrest. The officers’ reasoning was sound: People they had arrested many times in the past needed help, so why wait to arrest them again before offering LEAD? But, in an odd role reversal, the defenders resisted expanding LEAD to the non-arrest referrals. Their reasoning also was sound: This was an experimental program that needed to prove itself as a way of reducing jail populations and new violations. For this to be proven as an “evidence-based program,” there had to be a non-LEAD comparison group of people facing the same problems outside of the program.
That’s when something magical happened. (I’m not kidding. It still gives me a shiver when I think about it.) The field officers essentially said, “Bu** Sh**! We’re not waiting to arrest these people before offering them help. Find a way to do your evaluation of the program, but we’re referring these people to LEAD.”
You see what happened here, right? Coming from seemingly opposite perspectives, the two sides agreed to find a common solution. And, in the process, the public defenders got a sense of the box within which law enforcement had to operate — arrest, don’t arrest; prosecute, don’t prosecute — and the police (and prosecutors) became harm reductionists.
Belated disclosure: I was very involved in some of the early planning for what eventually became LEAD, but I left Seattle years before any of this happened. When I heard about it, I finally understood what my friend in Utah meant. Don’t get me wrong. I am horrified by and oppose the violence that people, particularly people of color, too often experience at the hands of police. But LEAD is a reason to also love cops.
Today, Seattle’s LEAD has already been adapted to local needs in Santa Fe, N.M.; Albany, N.Y.; and Houston. Earlier this month, the Obama administration gave LEAD a boost when the White House hosted 30 local jurisdictions interested in LEAD. And, as I write this column, I have been in Oregon for almost exactly one year. I love this state. If it can be the first place to adopt LEAD statewide, I will love it even more.
Andy Ko is the executive director of Partnership for Safety and Justice. PSJ is a statewide, nonprofit advocacy organization dedicated to making Oregon’s approach to crime and public safety more effective and just.