SMART Policy Podcast
Podcast by the UT SMART Initiative. Host Jeremy Kourvelas speaks with experts from across the recovery ecosystem - representing healthcare, prevention, law enforcement and more - about local, state and federal drug policy to find out what is and isn't working to make this fight against addiction a little easier.
SMART Policy Podcast
Data, Compassion, and Leadership: How Police Can Prevent Overdose Deaths
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You're listening to the Smart Policy Podcast, a production of the University of Tennessee's Institute for Public Service. When staff shortages and tight funding meet a rise in drug crime, you might not expect an overburdened police department to make extra work for themselves. Yet that is exactly what happened in Chattanooga in the mid-2010s, when calls to EMS started backing up so severely that the cops had to start shouldering more of the response than ever before.
SPEAKER_02Holy cow, this is a whole lot bigger than we ever thought it was. It's a whole lot worse than we thought it was. We gotta figure out what's going on. So it's the Chattanooga Police Department narcotics officers taking it upon themselves to volunteer extra work on themselves to create a difference.
SPEAKER_00Today I'm speaking with investigator Terry Topping of the Chattanooga Police Department's Narcotics Unit and Jennifer Baggett, senior data analyst for the Hamilton County government. As the opioid overdose deaths kept piling up, Terry, Jennifer, and other dedicated individuals on the force used three ingredients to start turning the tide. Data.
SPEAKER_01Terry and I came up with this spreadsheet, and I called it the repeaters. And it was literally anyone that had overdosed more than twice, and I, as the data analyst, literally watched through data heroin kind of fade out of the picture and all come under the same compassion.
SPEAKER_02It's weird for narcotics officers to end up being a friend to somebody that's suffering from the data. And they've gained a trust with us over the years that we don't have to go look for them anymore. They'll call at us and say, I need some help and leadership. You have to communicate with your collaborative partners about what it is you're trying to do. Hopefully they'll have an administrative or policy, but I've been lucky to have that. Allow me to run freely with this.
SPEAKER_00Chattanooga currently does not have a co-response unit, but their narcotics unit has been using the resources they have to get people that overdose in connection to harm reduction, treatment, and recovery court. And it's working. Not only are their deaths decreasing, but so is aggravated assault and burning.
SPEAKER_01Everything impacts everything, whether you realize it or not, in the in the world of crime and drug overdoses and community. Well, my name is Jennifer Baggett. I'm the senior data analyst for Hamilton County government in Tennessee. I know Terry because I was a crime analyst at the Chattanooga Police Department for almost 10 years. And he started needing overdose data at the time I was in the crime analysis unit. And in order to kind of get any data on a specific project, a detailed analysis, people had to put their request in. I remember he talked to his sergeants, his sergeants reached out to me, and that's where it all started. And then slowly, after a couple of years, there was an opening in the organized crime unit where Terry worked, and they were requesting a standalone analyst. And it was actually the gang intelligence analyst. And um, I put my name in the hat and I interviewed and I got the job. So then I switched buildings and I was right down the hall from Terry. And although I was the gang intelligence analyst, at the time they were reorganizing our gang unit. So during that interim, my primary focus was drug overdoses and working directly with the narcotics unit, primarily Terry, because he was kind of at the forefront of all the drug overdoses specifically that were deaths. And um, so we worked very closely for several years until I got this position with the county. Is that right, Terry?
SPEAKER_02I'm Terry Topping, work at the Chattanooga Police Department. I'm in the narcotics unit. I've been in the police department for 25 plus years now, and I've been in the narcotics unit for 22 of those years. So over the last 22 years, I've seen a whole lot of epidemics, a whole lot of things happen. This by far been, of course, the most tragic. And as Jennifer was saying, once we started recognizing that we're having a new issue that narcotics detectives aren't used to responding to, we found that we need to inject ourselves into the problem and try to figure out to fix the problem rather than just responding to the problem. So about 2017 is when I started taking over uh organizing a response to the overdoses. In 2017, it kind of grew and materialized into a program to where we had a system in place that we could attack both ends of the problem. We started very early in 2017, not only chasing after the drug trafficking, but also trying to interject ourselves into the world of addiction that we didn't know very much about at the time, and learned very quickly that we can be involved in that and redirect the addiction side of the problem into some kind of recovery process and working both ends of the problem. So trying to get the customer base recovered while we're chasing after the suppliers of the product and trying to quickly minimize the totality of the problem. I think we've been quite successful for the minimal amount of manpower we've had to be able to make that happen.
SPEAKER_00You know, it might surprise some people to hear that narcotics officers might have some uh not be used to respond to a particular narcotics-related issue. What exactly do you mean by that?
SPEAKER_02It was very different for us. You know, the typical narcotics officer, investigator, is uh, you know, pretty much the the high adrenaline guys that like to chase the worst of the bad guys that create a whole lot of violence in the world of drugs. And we get in that mold that we're constantly doing that. That's who we are. We when this came up, it's a it's a whole different direction to investigate, it's a whole different direction to respond, it's a whole different attitude. And it takes a special perspective on how you're seeing the problem, on how you can best handle it. Uh, we've been fortunate to have a few investigators here that understand that it's not something that we can respond to and have any success with. It has to be something we are proactively out there trying to prevent from happening instead of dealing with it after it happens. Uh, unfortunately, we do still have everybody has more fatal overdoses than you'd like to have, but we're confident in the fact that our numbers aren't as high as many other cities of our same population that we're doing something right. We've been able to create relationships with people in the last seven, eight years that prior to that, there'd be no way we'd be having a conversation. So between narcotics investigators, going from working strictly drug cases to working uh death cases was a drastic change in how we go about police work. And then also opening doors to communicate with the hospitals, the recovery centers, the health departments, uh uh harm reduction people, all these people who everybody stayed in their own lane back then and wondered how police could help. Once we all got a good understanding of having that conversation, everybody kind of understood we all working towards the same goal. The conversations came easier, and we began to plan together on how to attack the problem. And it's been quite successful.
SPEAKER_00So, what is the difference from a police perspective of responding versus preventing?
SPEAKER_02You start off with the investigation of just the drug trafficking. So, on that, we're ejecting ourselves into a situation where diving into somebody's life and watching them create havoc within a community. And the the driving force behind a narcotics officer for that is to be able to stop it and put this guy who thinks he can rule the streets and is free from incarceration, is that's the rewarding part of that. So the adrenaline part of narcotics work on that is what drove a lot of investigators. Now the adrenaline can't be there. Now it's more passion and compassion as the driving force. So now you have to be passionate about wanting to fix the problem. We didn't expect deaths to be involved with the drugs. You know, prior to 2017, we didn't know about the overdose test in our office. Our homicide unit would respond to what they assumed might have been some overdose tests, but none of it was tracked. Once it became on the forefront that people who we were investigating were dying and we're trying to figure out what's going on there, then it became obvious that it's a drug problem. We're the drug police, we need to do something about it.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so that's interesting. So the so the police did not have the overdose data, they just knew drug seizure data and drug trafficking data. You know, I'd imagine local hospitals had a very different picture of what was going on, for example. Like you mentioned, everyone being in silos.
SPEAKER_02That's right. We did have that communication.
SPEAKER_00Jennifer, we've talked about this before, but uh how did the role of data change this whole landscape?
SPEAKER_01I was there back in 2017 and I didn't track overdoses. I didn't even know it was a thing until I was asked to start tracking it. And in order to track it and understand what our community was really dealing with, I pulled historical data because you don't know what you don't know, kind of, you know. And so I started pulling historical data and um getting with Terry because in 2017 he had slowly started tracking what he was seeing in terms of heroin overdoses. Well, at the time we thought they were heroin overdoses and they were. We didn't realize the fentanyl issue too much until a little bit later on. But looking back, we realized it was fentanyl slowly getting into the heroin supply. We started our overdose death rate and just overdoses non-fatals started drastically increasing. And I, as the data analyst, literally watched through data heroin kind of fade out of the picture and fentanyl come onto the scene in Chattanooga. In other cities, it was already kind of widely prevalent back in 2015, 16, 17. But in 2017 is where I think Chattanooga really saw it. And that's where we started really tracking it and we're able to watch the whole rise of fentanyl and the dramatic increase in overdoses in Chattanooga.
SPEAKER_02Me and my partner at the time, Roddy Prophet, we we were responding to most of the drug calls at that time, that street level activity. So we were the first time we were introduced to the AHA mommy, like what's going on, we responded to another medical call. There's our medical calls really increased. So it's backing up EMS. Not really knowing what the problem is. The aim is takes off the patient. Police really didn't know what the situation was. We noticed it started really increasing. We went ahead and responded to one of those calls one time. That's probably even before 17, might have been 15 or 16, but there was a girl who'd overdosed in a parking lot at the bank, and we didn't know it was an overdose at the time as a medical call. So she's in the parking lot, she's in the ambulance. The EMTs pretty well sure that it was not gonna be a survived overdose. They were treating them. We were just kind of standing around as they were working on the patient. We just started noticing people coming up to the ambulance, you know, just people that you could tell were in the world of drug consumption and just kind of hanging around, just hanging around the ambulance. The ambulance were working on the girl in the ambulance. And uh after about five, 10 minutes, the girl had sat up in the in the ambulance and said, I'm fine, I'm good to go. And we were we were freaking out. We was like, What just happened? We don't know what's going on. The people who had crowded around the ambulance waiting for that to occur, apparently they knew it would, started asking the girl, where did you get those drugs? They wanted the same thing. So right then we realized that this addiction is so strong that these people are willing to go to the edge of death to be able to fix that addiction or feed that addiction. Holy cow, this is a whole lot bigger than we ever thought it was. It's a whole lot worse than we thought it was. We got to figure out what's going on. It was at that point that we started realizing the heroin that came back. We were hoping we're gonna miss that drug here.
SPEAKER_00So clearly, what had happened is she'd been revived with some naloxone spray of some kind and uh reverse the opioid effect. And uh, but what you described there, people asking, where'd you get that drug? Where'd you get that drug? Well, I I've heard that across the state from law enforcement, that it's just not like it used to be. That the the fentanyl, uh the potency of it is just so high that the level of addiction is is just not what was dealt with maybe even in the early aughts or 90s or before that. It's just it's a very different situation now. That you said you're at the aha moment in 2017. That that if that correlates with fentanyl, that makes perfect sense.
SPEAKER_02That's right. And that's when we started really diving into learning about addiction, about the drugs themselves, and how we as law enforcement can play a part in correcting the problem, not just responding to the problem. It's weird for narcotics officers to end up being a friend to somebody that's suffering from the addiction.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_02And it took a couple of years, but we we dove in there, we're out in the community, we're working with them. They know that if we have to, we'll take them to jail. But if we don't have to, we're gonna try to find them some help, we're gonna treat them fair, we're gonna treat them right, and they've gained a trust with us over the year that we don't have to go look for them anymore. They'll call us and say, I need some help. Can you take me somewhere to get some help? You know, it's just a whole new world for us.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's huge. I I was gonna say, are you doing this in uniforms or were you having to do a lot of plain clothes to get that trust built?
SPEAKER_02We're playing clothes, and in the beginning we did it only in plain clothes. Now we're getting a lot of buy-in from our patrol officers who also want to help. So we'll bring along patrol officers too. And I think it's a good thing for them to see a uniform as well as a plain clothes guy that are willing to help them that just helps grow the trust between the two groups. Uh, it's worked out so well that for a long time I'd I'd I'd respond to a situation in that a lot of people were together. We'll use a hotel room as an example since that's primarily the location. I walked into the room after the event had already been initiated by another patrol officer, and everybody starts giggling. And I knew half the room. I was like, What are y'all giggling at? And they're like just shaking their head and nothing. And and then a couple days later, same thing happened. I went out to the scene, I walked in, and they start giggling and say, the sheriff is here. I said, Sheriff? I said, I work for the city, I don't work for the sheriff, you know, there's nothing wrong with the sheriff's part, but you know, we take pride in who you work for. They kept giggling and giggling. Well, you know, as a an effect of an opiate is that you get the nods and you and you kind of fall asleep, mid-sentence, you wake back up, right? And so amongst themselves, they decided to start calling me the sheriff of Noddingham. They could take off from the movie there. Oh, and so they have done that. So for them to be able to come up and have fun with me and have this kind of relationship back and forth, they can communicate with me, maybe feel pretty good. I said, Y'all can call me whatever you want. I think that's better than some things you used to call me in the past. So that just was uh that was some evidence to me that the relationship is there, that they do trust us and they respect us. They know that you know we still have a job to do, we still have to intercept the trafficking, that we will not stop chasing the trafficking of the drugs, but we will offer help to those who are willing to receive help or those who don't quite yet know they need the help but willing to give it a try.
SPEAKER_00I want to put a pin in that, not not knowing they need help yet. Uh is a really I just think that's a difficult window for a lot of uh police departments and even EMTs, harm reduction organizations. I mean, though the whole, the whole spectrum of it, I think that's a very difficult window. So I definitely want to come back to that in detail. But Jennifer, what kind of data were you collecting to facilitate this outreach, to, to, to improve these connections and trust to in the background of all these efforts?
SPEAKER_01Terry and I came up with this spreadsheet and I called it the repeaters. And it was literally anyone that had overdosed more than twice, and he was able to take that information if he saw, he would look at the spreadsheet and you know, for example, he'd say, Oh, they'd make a good candidate for a drug court. And so he would like send the names to the people over at the courts, and that repeater spreadsheet was vital. We were able to see every time someone overdosed where police report was initiated or where the police were called. It was striking. I mean, it was just it was very hard to see many, you know, seven, eight, nine, ten times. And I got to the point where I felt like it was not a matter of if, it was a matter of when. So, like intervention was, you know, really important in those moments.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, the crucial part of that log of tracking the repeat offenders. Yeah, you can notice when somebody is on a on a quick downhill spiral by building our relationships between the coalitions, the health department, uh, armed reduction people. I could contact any of them, let them know, hey, I got this. What I was calling then, even a spike. I got a spike on this guy right here. He he's in he's in a bad position, he's he may not survive much longer. Somebody go visit him. And if any of these groups that have anybody available, we would go out there and knock on the door. We've knocked on many doors, just trying to offer assistance. And we've gotten a lot of them into a program.
SPEAKER_00What do these visits look like?
SPEAKER_02Uh they can tell the difference when I'm there for help or I'm there for their in trouble.
SPEAKER_00Is it even a difference in posture?
SPEAKER_02That's right. Right. But in both situations, it it helped, it really helps in both situations. They're they're more uh more open to the conversation, whether they know they're in trouble or they know I'm gonna offer a bill. In particular, now that we've started an MAT pro program in our jail, if it's a go-to-jail have to situation, that we can get them started into a recovery program while they're at jail. And all these all these different things are coming together, coming to flourish that is progressing the correcting of the issue at a better pace than we were five years ago.
SPEAKER_00How did the city respond, the city leadership? Because it sounds like it was very internally directed by by the police department.
SPEAKER_02That's a good question. I think a lot of it is uh it's more office internally driven. So it's the Chattanooga Police Department narcotics officer has taken it upon themselves to volunteer extra work on themselves to create a difference in our community. We have a, like everybody else, a shortage of manpower. So it makes it hard to be able to pay it the correct attention that it needs. But whatever attention we can provide it, we have some pretty decent personnel here that are willing to do that. Um, and we pretty much do it on our own. All these statistics, uh, our reaction, our proactive activities, our collaborative efforts and going to meetings after meetings after meetings with various groups all across town. Really just do it on our own. We report back on the results of those to our administration, but there's not really an organized overdose response team. I have tried to get a specific overdose response team initiated here, wrote a program for it in 2018. And it's been quite intensive, and it's due to lack of manpower, we haven't been able to get that initiated here and funding. And uh, but I've seen some other larger municipalities who have started a very similar, if not almost exactly what we wrote up then, and have it enacted and watching how it has been successful. So I know the program can work if we can apply the right personnel to the problem.
SPEAKER_00Well, I mean shortage of staff funding, that these are very common barriers across the state, especially in rural areas. Um so I I I guess there is a takeaway from this is is what recommendations might you give to uh a small town police department uh or a rural sheriff's office looking at this kind of approach?
SPEAKER_02Well, hopefully they'll have an administrative or a boss that have that I've been lucky to have that allow me to run freely with this. So I I I still have to work cases. I still work cases and I help other officers work their cases, and I pay attention to this overdose stuff. I appreciate the freedom they're they've given me to be able to do that. We've been able to help a lot of people. And as far as a small community goes that has even less manpower, and I'm sure has equally the per capita problem, they'll have to really start the same way. Somebody somebody gives someone who is willing and able to organize a response. I I don't like the word response. I don't I don't want it to be a response, I want it to be a uh a proactive work. I I we don't want any deaths. If you dream it, you can make it happen, right? Without dreams, you can't have progress. Without progress, you can't have success. So uh to be able to make it successful, you gotta dream that you can make a difference, you can't make a change. You can start with one person trying to fix the problem, and others will buy into it, and you'll have a group helping you before you know it.
SPEAKER_00You know, I tell you, uh I think you put it best when you just said we don't want any deaths. Uh that that that's something I keep encountering in these conversations, is is it doesn't matter who you are, where you come from, whether you put on a uniform or not, everybody wants fewer dead Tennesseans, and that does seem to to be a big part of why it seems attitudes are changing. Because I mean, you've been on the force over twenty years, you said, and and it's really only been the last half decade that there's been significant shift in that way. What has changed then even further now that we have these national settlements coming in? And it and it's not just the money. I've noticed that this is Changed conversations. Uh, county governments, city governments are now assembling task forces made out of community members. And finally, you're having all these people in the same room at the same time. Uh, again, you've mentioned we used to be in our silos, and now you're having medical personnel, first responders, prevention organizations all in the same room talking for the first time. I mean, is uh Jennifer, your your position is directly related. What effect is is this having, you think?
SPEAKER_01Back in 2017, to like you said, the last five years, the rate at which people were overdosing and dying, it was happening faster than we could even realize or keep up with. And then all of a sudden, bam, oh goodness, look, we have this huge problem. And I think everyone, like you said, doctors, harm reduction, you know, uh, coalitions, health departments, we all were kind of like, what do we do? And even on the analyst side, which is a very small portion of all of this, we're like, how do we even track these? Like everything happens so fast, in my opinion. That is why I think people are trying to be proactive on the end now instead of reactive. And I've always admired Terry because he's always, yes, he's thinking about right now, we don't want any more deaths, but he is always trying to think of ways to streamline everything and the way that we respond, but also thinking about not just what this can look like right now, but what can this look like a year from now, five years from now? Thinking strategically and broadly, this is the reason why we're doing this right now, is so we'll see the results of it in five years, kind of thing, even a year. And I think all types of agencies should be thinking that way because it's such a massive problem. Yes, we're trying to, you know, put a band-aid on this horrible wound right now, but also we need to be thinking about what it's going to look like even a year, five years, three years, 10 years from now.
SPEAKER_00What are some of the barriers you're facing?
SPEAKER_02You know, it's sad that it comes down to it is financial. You know, it's I like to break everything down as small as I can. So although we have a statewide epidemic going on, we have a nationwide epidemic, but to get it to that level, it has to start as low as the community. I think the financial side of it could be best utilized when it's directed to the smaller communities than the state programs as a whole. So if every little community can fix their little problem, then our state problem will follow suit. It'll all be fixed. With that being said, I'd like to be able to utilize some healthy order abatement money to increase our ability to correct the problem. And the shortage of manpower is where the issue comes in, particularly on our civilian side, the co-responder would be the first thing I would like to do. We were able to initiate a co-responder program, but strictly in the mental health field, not initially in the drug field. About the time we did start a co-responder unit there, you can see there was a difference probably in the mental health side of the world and the drug addiction side of the world. But a couple years later, it's two of the same thing. They're not so much separated. It's uh it's you know, dual diagnosis. We need to have a response not only to the medical calls for mental health, but the drug-related calls for drug overdoses. If we get some co-responders there, get the referrals into the programs quicker, get some more uh on-scene treatment and follow-up treatments wherever it may be, whether it's at the MAT program at the jail, MAT program in a recovery center, wherever it's at, utilize our assets more effectively to streamline from the scene of the incident to the scene of a recovery house.
SPEAKER_00I've heard from uh other media organizations that this this criticism uh uh of law enforcement getting opioid settlement money, it's coming from the fear of, well, let's not do war on drugs 2.0. But when I listen to you here, you're talking about harm reduction and outreach for prevention purposes and MAT in jails and and so on and so forth. What might you say in response to the criticism that oh, we shouldn't be giving law enforcement uh uh too much of the settlement money and so on and so forth?
SPEAKER_02Well, the bottom line is we are the boots on the ground. We are the ones they call when they need emergency services. We're we're there in a moment of crisis. And we can take that moment and write it down on a piece of paper and turn it into our supervisor and be done with it. Or we can be active in the incident and try to correct it from happening again. With that, we could be better educating police officers and how they can best respond to those incidents for a better outcome. It's not just writing the report, it's not just taking them to jail. We got that that will not fix the problem. And if you don't fix a problem, it keeps growing to be a bigger problem. And we certainly don't want that either. Uh I I think it's mandatory that the police departments receive the opioid money and it's applied appropriately, we still have to investigate the trafficking. So we have to work on prosecuting the cases, we have to work on rehabilitation of the addiction. We have to have salaries paid to be able to do it the most effectively. Um, without using taxpayer money, I think would be the best way to spend the money. And then in the long run, all the associated crimes that come with addiction, as we lessen the number of people with addiction in your community, it lessens all crimes. Everything from shoplifting to breaking into your car, breaking into your home, business robberies, all those will also be reduced. Therefore, we'll reduce, we'll have lower callows, we'll have less taxpayer money spent on the court system, public defender's office, uh less money spent at the hospitals, taxpayer money spent in the hospitals for medical services. In the long run, that's where you'll initiate the best result of saving the money, not only spending money. And I hate for it to be a conversation about money, we're talking about lives here. So the better picture is we're making our community better, making it safer, we're rehabilitating people to be a productive citizen, reuniting families. There's nothing ugly about helping somebody get out of that life of addiction. Just in my opinion, I think that's where the money needs to be spent. Start small. Everybody had a little bit of the pie, the big picture will be fixed quicker.
SPEAKER_00So you can't leave anybody out.
SPEAKER_02Well, yeah, ideally.
SPEAKER_00Ideally.
SPEAKER_02But you know, if there's enough that could have a huge impact in our state.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I I I I it's over a billion dollars over the next 18 years. It's gotta go, it better go to something good, that's for sure. Uh Jennifer, I saw you nodding your head a lot uh when he was talking about if you reduce problems, if you deuce the frequency, the incidence of addiction, you do reduce downstream crimes. Uh, what might people not understand about that?
SPEAKER_01Well, he's a hundred percent correct because before I was, you know, in intelligence and organized crime, when I was just a regular crime analyst, I tracked what we call part one crime. It's um part one crime is what the FBI calls it and what they track. So that's your murder, ag assault, robbery, you know, rape, burglary, auto theft, and auto-burglary. And I can tell you for 100% fact, we saw tons of shoplifting incidents where the suspect was shoplifting to fund their drug helpment, who also had drug charges, were also arrested with drugs, um, sometimes with enough to get charged with intent to manufacture or distribute or sell. Um the huge catalytic converter um trend, trend that came through Chattanooga, not all of them, but many of them were to sell those catalytic converters to chump chumps or to individuals where they would get a you know a little cunt of the money, and that was to fund their lifestyle. This is, I feel like it's um crime and community 101. The less someone needs to go and commit the crime, um, then you're gonna have less crime, which makes your community safer, which makes people feel safer. It's a trickle-down effect. And everything um Terry was talking about, I mean, it's cyclical. Everything is connected. So certainly if you have someone addicted to drugs, it's likely they don't have a full-time job, which it's likely that they could possibly commit crimes to fund their habits. So I'm not saying that's the way in every situation, of course, but the majority, I would I would bet my paycheck on. I mean, how else are you gonna spend hundreds of dollars a day to get your drugs? Yeah, you you gotta get that money somehow. And it absolutely impacts your community. And like he said, so then it's gonna impact, oh, well, we're having tons less robberies. You don't need as many robbery investigators. You know, you're having tons less auto thefts. So you don't need as many auto theft detectives. Um, it's it's all cyclical and it absolutely impacts everything. Everything impacts everything, whether you realize it or not, in the in the world of crime and drug overdoses and community.
SPEAKER_00Okay. I think this does perfectly bring us back to what I keep talking about uh uh in the background of what you said. What what advice do you have for people working on this space for boots on the ground, for engaging people who may not yet realize they're ready and it's time. What does that gray zone look like? And and what lessons can we get from Chattanooga?
SPEAKER_02You have to communicate with your collaborative partners about what it is you're trying to do. Understanding the the addiction part of it by being able to make rational decisions, you know. So the opioids affect that part of the brain where you cannot make a rational decision for yourself. Yes, you have a right to deny transport on that ambulance to the hospital, but is that a rational decision? And we as police officers, you know, we're not just police officers, you know, we're we're your preacher, sometimes we're your parent, sometimes we're sometimes we're your psychologist. By getting to know the people in our districts that we work, in our community that we work, we know most of the offenders, people involved in this world. You know your player is not making a good decision for himself, and you know what they need for them many times much better than they know for themselves. Thank goodness we have we have a fantastic recovery court program. We are able to, even though they may not be ready for recovery, if they're committing a small crime, a little misdemeanor crime, that we may or may not necessarily take them to jail. If we know that they're on a spiral situation or or they're just really, really need some attention, have some services provided to them, we may just go ahead and arrest them on that trespassing charge.
SPEAKER_00I'd imagine, especially if they have seven or eight overdoses already, right?
SPEAKER_02Correct. But now they've been introduced into the jail. We'll follow that up with a referral to the drug court program. We'll go and do an assessment of them on the spot, get them into an MAT program while they're waiting on the court time, and by the time they get to court, they're ready to uh divert their case into the recovery court program instead of staying in jail and continue down the path of repeat offenses and keep on going to jail and watching out for the police, they'll enter that program. And that is something really amazing to see. Some of the people that you think may never find recovery will always be addicted to this drug. To actually go on that program and find it, find recovery is is pretty uh that's my new motivation now. You know, watch watching that happen to people I I would not have expected it before I started working with the recovery core team. Is it just it's uh everybody needs to see that? And once you see that, you realize they can recover. And once they learn that they want to recover, it's a very productive avenue to take.
SPEAKER_00It does. You're describing this this thorough ecosystem. You have police uh that are integrating with community partners, harm reduction, prevention coalitions, getting to know the community members themselves, the the people using the drugs, getting to know them, getting to know their lives, not just uh a dictatorial, well, you use drugs, ipso facto, jail. This is uh you've talked about connecting them to treatment and having a recovery court program. So there are a lot of important pieces to this this broader picture then that that really are required for it for it to function.
SPEAKER_02True that. And we can't leave out the education part of it either. We're diving into that too. We're trying to get to as many schools as we can. And that's also a great partnership, our coalition here. And can the coalition assist us and we assist them and we do our own thing separately sometimes, but we'll we'll go into the schools and try to try to prevent the kids from ever saying yes when offered some kind of product. And uh, you know, we just got to keep it in front of them. Hopefully, uh it'll stick in their mind someday if they're ever presented with the situation and not ever go down that path.
SPEAKER_00Well, some of the data I've seen show that the kids aren't listening. I think they are. Does seem pretty promising. I would normally ask what's given y'all optimism, but I I would say just the story of seeing it that it can work with even the most severe cases is is is a pretty good example of that.
SPEAKER_02Well, that and having a child, having a kid will drive you too. So that's another part of my driving force. I have a young son, I do not want this presented to him. Uh I I try to not be selfish and and say that for myself, but I would like that for the whole community. I don't want anybody's kid to be presented with that option. It should be no option. We want to make Chattanooga, our community, undesirable for drug dealers. You can't make any money here if there's no customers here. They're all recovered. Go somewhere else. And if we keep every little community keeps pushing them out, they have nowhere to go.
SPEAKER_00I love that. No, that that's a great way to that's a great way to frame it. What policies at the federal, state, or local level would you think you'd like to see that might make this work even easier?
SPEAKER_02Laws are great, they're always good as they can be enforced. Policies are not as good as people will follow them.
SPEAKER_01Terry, you could talk a little bit about the murder too statute. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Well, that's part of our trying to create the fear into the drug dealing that you sell drugs in Chattanooga and you cause somebody to die. We will come after you with all that we can to prove that and charge you with that second-degree murder. Uh, that really holds up a lot more in court as far as the sensing guidelines, so they're able to stay in jail a lot longer. Hitting them with the second-degree murders, hitting them with the selling deliveries, you know, anything we can do to prevent other drug dealers wanting to come here and sell drugs, we're gonna try to do. And of course, on the other side, it also finds closure for the families who are victims of that overdose death. You know, like I say, I would prefer not to have to charge anybody with that because we're not having any of this. But if there's a death and we're able to get some kind of evidence to prove how it occurred, we're going after it. We're gonna make sure it happens. That law has been very helpful for us. You know, I go back to our population here, our deaths per capita is quite lower than similar population cities in Tennessee. I think a lot of that is how we do go after those kind of cases. We'll charge the murder too. And then, of course, our trying to help in the addiction side of the problem as well. It's kept us from being at such a higher rate as other cities of the same population. So I think we're heading in the right direction. We're even lower this year than we were last year. So I hope we pinnacled and heading down, knock on one.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_00Has the second degree uh uh murder charges uh has that uh how does that play into the recovery court system?
SPEAKER_02Well, if you are charged with a second degree murder uh and you're an addict, so if you're also you're selling and you're an addict, once you get a violent charge like that or any kind of distribution, so you disqualifies you to be able to go through the recovery court program. Uh they do have some parameters that will allow you to enter and there's only there's a few that would be one, and second degree murder is one of them. So that would disqualify their capabilities of going into recovery court. And quite frankly, somebody who gets charged with something like that is not just a uh a co-user, like I helped you get your drugs so I could have some too, so that we're both feeding our addiction, it's more for the profiteer. So whoever's profiting from the sale of these drugs without any regard to whether their customers live or die, or the ones that we try to reserve that for the most.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so so you you for the bigger dealers, uh the one the the bigger distributors is where that charge is usually applied.
SPEAKER_02Well, yeah, we try to focus that. We don't try to do the the lower fruit the co-user. We understand that world too. That's a just because you bought them for you and your boyfriend doesn't make you a distributor. And but honestly, in the totality of the circumstance, you should not be charged with a city degree murder. You're not a profiteer. I think that's more designed towards the the upper tiers of the distribution problem. Everybody might have a different perspective of how to use that. That's how we can about it here.
SPEAKER_00Gotcha, gotcha. Okay, well, any any other final thoughts?
SPEAKER_01The data just here in Chattanooga has shown a baby decrease that was also on trend with 2023. Maybe that's a sign. I know that we've seen a decrease in EMS administering Narcan in our community. Granted, Narcan is now more widely available than it was even 10 years ago when it was just EMS kind of that had it. Now it's harm reduction folks, coalitions, uh, hospital, you know, everywhere. So every slight decrease is a win, in my opinion. Slow and steady wins the race. Baby steps equals big results.
SPEAKER_02We can't focus on one avenue.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02Both the harm reduction, the education, and the trafficking. So we'll always need to enforce the laws and hold accountable those who try to spread the poison while at the same time we're still trying to find help for those who try to get out of that lifestyle.
SPEAKER_00This is a really interesting conversation. I we've heard from a lot of law enforcement agencies that they uh they don't know how to get started. And I uh I really think that this example could be a guidepost, especially for smaller police departments, because I mean, as I said, that issue with low staffing, low funding, that's gonna be a pretty pervasive problem, I think, for the foreseeable future, even with the abatement fund. So it's uh and you're both so personally motivated in this. Uh I mean, Terry, you you let me know a bit about your own personal motivations. You don't want your own son getting into this, and I and I I know what you mean. I've got a daughter myself, uh so I'm thinking about the future in that um I don't know. You're both clearly motivated in this that's what we mean.
SPEAKER_01Thanks, Jeremy.
SPEAKER_00All right, well, thank you both for uh joining me on the Smart Policy Podcast. I really appreciate it. Yeah, that was awesome. For more episodes on in depth discussions on Tennessee policies related to substance use disorder by a range of local experts. Please subscribe to us wherever you get podcasts and visit our website at smart.tennessee.edu. I'm Jeremy Corvillis. Thank you for listening and see you next month.