I would assume that if the mental health professional can't resolve the issue, then they would call the police to arrest them, no?
But that's... that's the point, right?
I get what you're saying, but the outcome people wanted was "conflicts that don't need to result in arrests should stop resulting in arrests." The goal was to reduce needless arrests and only have arrests in situations that couldn't be handled in other ways.
I mean, we can measure other things like long-term impacts on people's health, prevalence of crime, etc... but one of the questions I was hearing when this idea was first floated was actually, "can these situations be resolved without arrests, or are the police just going to need to be eventually called anyway?" And it does seem like this outcome goes some way towards answering that question.
Just as an analogy: if I introduce script changes in a support center with the goal of solving customer problems faster and having fewer calls escalated up the chain to upper management, and at the end of 6 months, way fewer calls are being escalated up the chain to upper management, then that's a statistic I care about. It's not the only stat I care about when figuring out if my changes were successful, I might also look at things like customer satisfaction and call time, but it is on its own a pretty important outcome for me to measure.
If a homeless guy is wandering around with no pants on, do the police really need to be there? Do they need to arrest him? Why? Is jail going to teach him wearing pants is a good idea?
Likewise:
- Overdoses
- Random shouting
- Sleeping in a Denny's parking lot
It works well because fundamentally it's less expensive, more humane, and less likely to turn violent. Let the police handle the situations where they are needed to protect people.
There's probably a more efficient method of that - but the current system sometimes works - county dependent.
Most successful rehab is voluntary. People need to first admit they have a problem. Simply making drug rehab programs more widely available without court intercession is likely to have a much bigger impact.
If people are released from rehab right back on the street, the chances rehab will be effective are even less.
Unless you at least attempt to fix the underlying issues, you are just pouring tax money out the door.
They work. Also, it's the same program - whether it's mandated by the court or volunteered for.
As someone who did exactly this and stopped using because of it, they can be quite significant.
Yes, but this is exactly the question. Were these situations 'resolved'? We don't know. The article doesn't say. All it says is that nobody was arrested. You can just as easily achieve zero arrests by doing absolutely nothing at all.