directly into health and services. our anchor programme and service's centre are the cast which is a partnership with usf averaging 125 unduebl 125 unduph each day. our focus is on the root drivers of this these behaviour that are keeping somebody in the system. our inclusive environment is one of respect for differences in age, race and culture, gender, religion and sexuality. we don't tolerate disrespect towards peers, nor do we terminate somebody from our centre. our services are based in cognitive behavioral interventions and social emotional learning. they include intensive case management for people with complex behavioral health symptoms and re-entry case management forepeoplfor people g

help. we regionalle launched a distrin programme and this includes medication distribution and monitoring and access to injectable medications that may work better for people who have difficulty with medication protocol. there's a monthly calendar that includes about 27 different classes and they focus on the kneneeds of trans manufacture wn anof trans-women.in addition ton engage services at the cask. dpa are on site to coordinate entry into residential and outpatient treatment. people can meet with hsa staff to enroll in medical to get vouchers and a replacement i.d. there are monthly celebration and recreational outings. through a partnership with the national park service, they are taking a group of people to mere

woods this month. adp funds 150 beds primarily for people under supervision. we created a re-entry -- a recovery pathway to prioritize housing services for people who successfully complete residential treatment and one of our programs, participants collectively staved $98,000 to support their transition out of our programs. one of our clients was recently able to purchase equity in a unit at the marcus garvey apartments. they were ask to take on the oversight of a programme that ran out of the mayor's office, the ipo employment programme for people originally 18 to 25, now 18 to 30 who are at high risk for crime and violence in their neighborhoods. through a partnership with hsa, community partners, young community developers, we provide year-long jobs and personal development opportunities and

after-care support for people once the programme ends. in between the lines of this presentation are the stories of the daily struggles of our clients. finding stability in a pattern can feel like a needle in the haystack and the chaos can be regular and when it erupts, it's not a little blip. it's chaos with a domino effect. the network of support from city to community is imperative to the health and safety of our clients. so i'll close out with thoughts on how to be helpful in this conversation and recommendations for system improvements. recent research indicates that for high risk and/or high need's justice involved populations, a coordinated supervision and community-based health and re-entry services has the potential for deeper impact on recidivism and life success. adult probation supervision and reenvy services model mirror

this struggling to intervention without law enforcement support. it's open to any justice-involved resident 18 and older. if someone is not on probation, we complete a basic-needs assessment and work with the pen on a service plan. five keys which operates, which originated in the sheriff's office and of courses out of the hall of justice in addition to other community-based sites provides support and w. in a newly established partnership with a group created in fullsome prison, the inside circle, we're launching a new restorative programme focusing on honesty, responsibility and empathy and continuing existing process groups with leaders from the philmo are e, eli crawford and other groups. we welcome the opportunity to collaborate and expand our

collaborations to engage people in a comprehensive service's plan that recognises the need for variety of option and touch points. lastly, a few recommendations. the view of incarcerated people at the table, we have to create more pathways for previously incarcerated people to meaningfully participate in public safety conversation and planning. it would be interesting to pilot a few meetings of members of the bored of supervisors public safety committee with previously incarcerated people and people in recovery to discuss strategy for positive change. transitional housing, we have to collaborate on ways to spout sut long-term treatment success. they can stay for a year longer. however, we don't have the funding or the capacity to extend housing services when someone gets off probation and we cannot have a system in which somebody needs to be on probation and we need to

establish collaborations between providers to ensure continuity. supervisor haney, when we recently spoke to your office, i think it might have been your aide, abbey, who highlighted the possibility of culturally community-based street level engagement with monlingual spanish speakers who need support. i wanted to echo the importance of the strategy. i was at a meeting lead by an angelicamark aider and they provided a profile of a highly need's person and who was not amenable to support. through a harm reduction and approach, staff developed trust with this person. through consistency of going regularly to the bart station, they developed a respectful interdependency. they are seeing progress.

it's been said a couple of times, we need more residential treatment facilities and more treatment modalities contingent oon a person's needs. nor can everyone manage a clean and sober approach. options are needed. more than two stays and treatment are needed and barrier needs to be mitigated. thank you. >> thank you. i want to bring up the folks from glide and then ken, paul and janet, i think you'll

present as a group and after that, the district attorney's representing christie barry. i'm the coordinator for the law enforcement assisted diversion programme. as such, we work in close collaboration with the san francisco police department, the san francisco sheriff's department, adult probation, public defender's office and district attorney's office and bart police. to divert people from incarceration to case management services. so as such, in that position, i'm firmly committed to working

towards alternatives to further criminalization of poverty and i think that the issue of open-air drug markets is one of poverty for our citizens. i would like to point to some successful strategies that have worked in portugal and europe, related to criminal alienization of drug and socialization of the criminalization. in the '80s, in portugal, they experienced a heroin crisis that rivals very much what we're currently experiencing here in the united states with our opiate crisis and at some point, in that historical crisis, they realized they couldn't solve the problem through further incarceration, further criminalization and continued marginalization of people who use drugs. so the solution was to

decriminalize consumption and people who at that point in the community who came up against law enforcement for behavioral issues in the community, that were obviously related to their drug use were provided education about treatment options and education about harm reduction practices, right? as a result of shifting their strategy to one of humanization of poverty and decriminalization of drug use, they experienced a dramatic reduction in crime, a dramatic reduction in incarceration, a dramatic reduction in underage drug use, but most importantly and related to germane to this meeting, the street value of drugs actually decreased so dramatically that open-air drug markets were no longer and attractive

alternative to people living in poverty, right? so i mean, i think that we can think in san francisco as being the vanguard in the u.s. of examining some of the strategies that are evidence-based practices with proven results, that these things have worked, the scaffolding is there and we've seen successes in denmark, germany, with decriminalization and -- >> i would like to add to that. i work with the glide center for social just and we do community work and we support the idea of ongoing long-term convenings at multiple levels, levels can exit if they're a user if they sell drugs or places where folks and go and feel like their input will be safe and the reason we want this to be long-term is

because this is part of a cycle that is very long term. this is a 30 or 40-year-old cycle of drug war policies that have unintentionally in large part and with a lot of people trying hard created assistance that make people come back out again and again and fail to address what's happening, which is that people are suffering from poverty. people are targeted for a variety of reasons and unable to get their needs met in ways that are better. in portugal, if the drug trade was diminished it's no longer lucrative, can you think about employment options in general. people dealing drugs are not making a lot of money. there's been studies on this and less than minimum wage and it's dangerous and you end up going to prison or jail at some time. so all of these conversations take a long time. everything that we're doing here took years in the making. the lead programme we're piloting here was years of work

in washington state to prove case management would be better than incarceration for low-level offense and safe consumption sites, five years ago we could never have that conversation. years and years of international efforts to try to make sure people could understand the frames that see outside of the drug war. so we really want to support the idea of coming together, whether it's a task force or numerous convenings and we want to emphasize that we can do this in a spirit of research and understanding and working together. if we go too fast, we risk doing the same thing in the past, which is just defaulting to the solutions we already know. and that's what we can't do, because all of us harbour inside of ourselves a strong stereotype of what a drug dealer is and what needs to happen around that. and when we look outside of that, we see all of the reasons why somebody might be selling drugs, all of the reasons someone might be buying drugs and all of the ways to intervene to work better. so there's a saying goes, you go

fast and you go further when you go together. thank you so much. >> i believe -- are we don? thandone?do you have any questi? i think the next speaker is from the d.a.'s office, kristine deberry.

>> i think a lot of things have been said about how do we go to a new place around the work. we know the tenderloin has long had this challenge. it has morphed in different ways over the years and so we are dealing with some of that now in these days but we have been having this conversation in the city for many years.

we want to set the stage to talk about what we know works. there's a lot of research in this area already and as supervisor haney mentioned, the enforcemenenforcement strategiet adequate to get us to a new day for district 6 or the rest of our city around drug use and sales. so this slide will reference several efforts that are already underway, but really in our point of view, the two things on the enforcement end that work the best is really a high visibility of police in the area. if we want an enforcement approach, it's our presence that makes them feel safer and just at a higher level, investigations and enforcement. as we've heard and you'll here in our presentation, we certainly can respond at the individual level to arrests of a person for either the possession or sale of drugs, but the outcomes and the consequences

for that behaviour are minimal and don't lead to large-scale system reforms we're hoping for. as we all know, there's an endless supply of individuals consuming drug and an endless supply of people willing to sell drugs and makes for a very difficult problem to solve on a case by case basis. to the extent we have an ability to influence the types of investigations that are done into drug sales, we definitely place an emphasis on looking at mid to upper level individuals in that process and we've encouraged over time, multiple investigative ideas with the police department about things we thought would be more fruitful in terms of what we are able to have success on in the courtrooms. we continue to do that. obviously it is their prerogative to conduct those investigations but we're always

available to consult with them and offer our feedback and input on that. we've had some very good conversations around that. tom osily is here from my office and the neighborhood prosecutor that's assigned to tenderer linkedin and in frequent conversations with the captain and others to try to think about the kinds of cases that may have more of an impact than the more basic arrests and prosecuteses that we see. prosecutions we see. i think this was covered by the budget analyst and this was the percentage of our cases, both in midsmisdemeanors and felonies ad what their estimates are in terms of our budget. and then here, also, in the budget and legislative analyst

report, this just snow shows the fiscal year, the number of cases brought to us and the percentage of those that we took action on. so we had an over 86% action rate on the 750-ish cases brought to us. sounded like there were questions that were largely answered by the police department about people that suffered repeat arrests. but i would just say that we do file the vast majority of what is brought to us in terms of consequences that are administered by the court or through our pleas and that varies. we do try to offer diversion to many of the people that come in on the first cases and that can look like young adult court. it can look like drug court, behaviour health court, many of the collaborative health courses

to provide people with services to four them to make different choices for their futures. and that meets with limited success, unfortunately. we don't have a high rate of successful diversion completions but we do continue to offer them as an important entrée point and hard to know which cases will be successful and it feels important to make those efforts as somebody is coming into the system. i think the department covered this, as well, but this is to give a sense of the arrests and the vast majority are from tenderloin and from southern. most of the cases that we file are from those two police districts. in tems of strategies for moving forward, as i mentioned at the beginning, higher level investigations that would help

us understand. we do have a lot of information. the police department and our office, about who the individuals are, where they're coming from and it would be beneficial to have a higher level investigation that focuses above the street level dealing that's happening, as well as higher presence of foot beat to really help keep the peace in the community would be important. as we're talking about ways to move in a new direction around this work, the district attorney is going to portugal and germany this summer for the reason of trying to understand what other opportunities are there for us to have a bigger conversation. i went to vancouver last year to understand both safe injection sites but other strategies. those communities have in addition to the consumption sites and decriminalization, they developed supports and services around the individuals that are both using and selling that would benefit the conversation. and with that, i'm open to any

questions. >> i would have a bunch but i'm sensitive to the time so i'll ask one. so your sense is that the diversion programmes we have are not effective and have there been, especially for this population, do you have a sense of why that is and have you sought to develop other types of diversion programs in a sense that a lot of these cases go to probation, do you sort of work closely with probation to try to develop some sort of outcome for the individual that is most likely to have success? i mean, if you're seeing people who are cycling right back in and out, how do you look at the person in an individual way in light of the challenges around diversion to try to get them to a place where they're not going right back out there? >> it's a great question. i think honestly, we're struggling there, so we've developed a lot of great

diversions that work well for some people. young adult court is an amazing diversion and helps individuals from our community or from our area avoid very serious consequences of a felony conviction. it is much less successful for people that are here undocumented and engaged in drug sales. the incentives and leverages are dramatically different for those individuals. and it's very hard for us to in front of them, a job training or placement plan that says meaningful, as what they're doing on the ilicit market. so i think we need better strategies for that community. those cases are hard for us in court. you know, we're hearing about the large scale experience that the community have having, but when we're in a courtroom, it's one individual and so that looks different to a judge and how they're thinking they should response to that individual and they hear all of that individual's life experiences and all of the difficulties that they have had and the public defender will talk to you about

that and also true and legitimate. so we have a tension there around that group of people, which, as you saw from the police department, is a large part of who the sellers are at the moment. and so it create as real challenge for us to find a successful diversion. we continue to try to reiterate within young adult court and training programs for them. i wouldn't say we've arrived but we're open to dialogue and partnership with anybody who has thoughted on hothoughts on makie successful opportunity. >> i though we had a previous programme under the previous district attorney back on track and is that now folded into young adult court? that was specifically for people in drug deal something. >> dealing. >> that was for young people involved in drug sales and what young adult court has done is expanded the range of crimes someone is eligible to go for and that includes much higher level felony conduct and

ironically we see results for those individuals. even when it was back on track, the same challenge existed around undocumented individuals. >> colleagues, do you have anything? >> no. >> thank you, we appreciate you being here. the department of public health, angela ensnaya.

(brief pause).

>> iapologize for that delay. i'm the director for forensic of justice-involved behavioral health services for the department of public health. i'm here with the programme manager for the law enforcement assisted diversion programme and i apologize to the supervisors and the public in advance. i have a site visit for a grant happening today. so i will have to leave before public comment but robin handler will be here to represent the department. so we've heard law enforcement assisted diversion come up multiple times today. this is a grant that we have through the board of state and community corrections that is based on a programme in seattle. it started in october of 2017.

we are currently in a no-cost extension for the grant and i know we have funds -- grant funds to go through at least december of this year. as part of this programme, we focus on the teno tenderloin emn districts. this is multiple city departments, law enforcement agencies including the san francisco police department, san francisco sheriff's department and bay area rapid transit police department, as well as community-based organizations. the overarching goals of the programme is to reduce recidivism, strength and collaboration between partners and improve health status between participants. i would note through this grant and through the programme, we have a policy committee that meets to discuss the programme, as well as impacts in the community, as well as a biweekly operational work group where all of our partner agencies are able

to come together to discuss cases and how to best partner to support those individuals in their recovery. so eligible charges under this grant include multiple charges, but generally fall under the possession or sale of substances wherein an individual is selling drugs for susistance living. being under the influence of substances, vandalism and theft. there are two different types of referrals for this programme that are made through law enforcement dis-cress. discretion. we work with the police department and bart police making referrals to this programme. all individuals participate voluntarily. the first time i type is preboon

which there is probable cause for arrest and a lead is offered as an alternative to that arrest. and there's also social contact referral which is a unique tool for law enforcement to offer services for an individual at risk of arrest or has a history of involvement whether being arrested for the eligible charges. in terms of the services that are provided, one of the things that seattle had is a limitation around working with individuals who had serious mental illness or were in crisis at the point of contact with law enforcement and so we thought it was important to make sure that there weren't barriers or limitations in the programme and ask that we have a dph clinician out of the community assessment and centre run by adult probation and the goal of being wherever it takes and whatever it takes so that they are able to go into the community to meet with individuals to conduct an assessment, as well as a

hospital, or at the cask, where an individual feels most comfortable. part is to assess multiple domains including behavioral health services, housing needs and medical needs. we also work with community-based organizations, glide foundation who works primarily with participants coming out of the tenor tenderld felton institute coming out of the mission district. felton institute has additional capacity for a clinical case manager to work with individuals who have significant mental health needs. this case management in working with the agencies is an integral part of the programme in providing harm reduction case management services. as we've heard, recovery is not linear, it is a slow process and this allows us to work with individuals where they're at and be available to them for the services that they're interested in, at the point they're

interested in them. these individuals also provide outreach and engagement in the community. i would also note through the kask and laura bell mentioned this, there is the opportunity for participants with housing assessments while they're there and connection to benefits and they're always welcome to come to the kask for any additional services and to meet with staff there, as well. so this is a numbers of referrals that we've had just in the tenderloin district and does not include information from the mission. most referrals have been social contact referrals, accounting for 68% of the referrals that have primarily come from the san francisco police department and 128 individuals have been connected to case management services of the 225 total referrals. i will note that this exceeded what we anticipated when we first applied for the grant and that's something we continue to discuss, is the ongoing need of

services and this low barrier, low threshold case management opportunities in the community. in relation to drug selling cases, we've had five felony cases that have been referred from the tenderloin that were all sales cased. the lead is just a small part of our array of services within the department of public health and a great opportunity to have this pilot and i mentioned we learned a lot about this programme and we have an upcoming evaluation through csu long beach that they're looking at the effectiveness of a lead in california, across the pilot site, as well as a local evaluation through the tabernick to answer more sanfrancisco questions. this partners closely with our prop 47 grant, there is funding substance use disorder, social detox and residential treatment beds for individuals who have contact with the criminal justice system. so with that, that is our information but i'm happy to

answer any additional questions. >> so that the grant is going to be running out and is there a plan yet for how or if this will continue? >> so i know that all of the departments and the policy committee are committed to lead continuing and have made individual budget requests. >> got it. and in termed of the peer outreach, how exactly does that work? do you have people out on the street, directly approaching people who you think may be engaged in drug trade? >> so in terms of the outreach on varying levels, of course it's outreaching individuals that are existing participants, but as you mention, outreaching individuals that may struggle with substance use or interested in accessing care and building those community relations so that if the opportunity presents itself, we'll be able to quickly engage in services.

>> question? thank you. >> thank you. >> public defender. >> good afternoon. i'm the managing attorney of the investigation unit, the public defender's office and you know, i've been a public defender in san francisco for 13 years and handled hundreds of drug cases and staffed the drug court in part of 2017 and 2018. so as many today have stated, it's clear that we have several interrelated and overlapping crises in sanfrancisco. homelessness, an every growing divide, people struggling with struggle addiction issues

oftentimes both low-level drug sales and youth in district 6 impacts respected residents, fad small businesses. as public defender, we anguish about the indigenous clients. the tremendous obstacles that they face on a daily basis that lealead them in and out of the criminal justice system. over the past 20, 30 or perhaps 40 years, i think the city has taken a law enforcement approach to these issues franklin the from the comments today from the police department, largely, it seems that those same strategies are being employed which are arrestinarresting users and sels through the use of staying or by bust operations where undercover police officers pretend to be users and buy drugs and just so you're aware, these buy-bust

operations mean that as many as ten officers are deployed at a time. there are some that impersonate drug addicts and try to make a buy from someone. there are somes officers that are part of cover teams. there are some officers that are a part of arrest teams. then once the person is arrested and often referred to the district attorney's office for prosecution, the criminal justice machinery starts and there district district attorneydistrict attorney,bailie resources are at play after this occurs.

one was related to stealing narcotics from the henry hotel and when a lab technician was taling and using drugs. those have been the only real changes or inciden interruptione they went down. this was rather than the quality of drugs seized. this encourages the police to arrest and the prosecute proseco charge and desperate users selling their own stash to buy more for themselves. low-level street dealers selling small amounts includes many immigrants who are victims of human trafficking and are forced into selling drugs. rather than to focus on high-level drug dealers who actually sell in large qualities, usually behind closed

doors. these strategies disproportionately impact people's colour and people who have more bi morbid substance ad people who are homeless or sell drugs on the street rather than those who sell in private homes or other public locations that are less policed. now, i think that for -- when the police department showed images of large quantities of drugs that were seized in, you know, the last year, as a public defender, i can tell you that myself and my colleagues, we all have many, many more cases where we could show you a photo of one rock or two rocks. those are the majority of the cases that we see in the public defender's office. so we're targeting small street-level, nickel and dime dealers who are quickly replaced by others after their arrest rather than focusing on the source of the drugs.

the kingpins bringing if drugs to the sanfrancisco and making profits. when someone is convicted of a drug-relatedrug-relate offense,e dramatic consequences in eligibility for student loans, inability to get a job and really a life on the margins. you know, given the small amounts of drug taz ar drugs thd in these cases, the so-called war on drugs in san francisco has beehas been a war on crumbse late defender used to say. we understand that there are people who live or operate small business in these areas that are frustrated. they may welcome arrests. they want the city to pay attention to these issues. but arrests and buy-bust operations and prosecutions, i think would be a continued failure.

there are different ways to disrupt the market that will be more effective and long-lasting. we need a paradigm shift. it's time for science-based practices and health and human rights. first of all, we should invest in increased resources for and fortify front-end services, affordable long-term and safe and supportive housing with trauma-informed and culturally sensitive staff. community-based rehabilitation services and treatment on demand. like many countries, we need to recognise drug addiction is a complex help disorder that is treatable and preventible and not the results of moral failure or criminal behaviour. therefore, we should divert people out of the criminal justice system and into the public health system wherever possible.

second, we need to reevaluate oversee and bolster prebooking arraignment programmes that people more people out of the criminal justice system. some of the programmes mentioned today, behavioral health court and often cases drug court, and even young adult court, those are often probation courts. so the other programmes, like neighborhood court and also lead are new, innovative ways that we can address these issues. so lead, like dr. alma -- a just spoke about, is a collaboration of all of the criminal justice partners. now, the programme, as she stated, is based on something that has been very successful in seattle, where an evaluation of the programme revealed participants were 58% less likely in a control group to be

rearrested. one thing i think that is problematic is that people who are arrested for drug sales, either sales or possession for sale are eligible under the current guidelines. and out of tenderloin station, that means we have some officers that are trained in lead or they're approaching people from that perspective of being engaging people in a more humane compassionate way and we have other officer and, perhaps within many more officers doing by bust, both out of the same place.

possession for sale or sale of controlled substances are eligible. where the circumstances indicate that the sale or transfer is intended to provide a subsistance living or afford drugs or his or her own connion. would the remaining people ineligible for lead, we should expand the guidelines in the collaborative courts like drug court, behavioral health court and community justice court.

one of the problems with having courts that are probation-based is that people are coming in and out of jail and from my esperance, staffing san francisco's drug court, i know people wait in jail for week and months to get into residential treatment and we must make people who want it, they can access it. the congestion wawe need to reme streets, but we are here today because we know that those approaches have failed for a long time. people are are subsistance sellers are not exclusive. in thinking about the actions,

we encourage the committee and partners to embrace a paradigm shift. redirecting resources housing, treatment and jobs. expanding current prebooking and rearraignment programmes reich leave. one of the things that i was noticing today as it relates to some of the statistics in the budget and legislative analyst's report is that as i understand it, since october of 2017, there have been only 11 his 11 hispan% of people have been -- only 11 people have been referred to lead, but meanwhile, we have 75 wheat peopl75white people. yet per the analyst's report on page 10, it says that hispanics make up 51% of the number of drug arrests and white people make up 16%.

so the referrals that are made need to be proportionate to the number of arrests. otherwise, we have communities of colour who are disproportionately impacted and continue to be impacted and aren't getting access to the diversion programs that are available. we encourage lead to be evaluated to ensure that those who are arrested for nonviolent offenses including sales and possession for sale like i've mentioned, that those people are appropriately referred to lead. we are calling for an end to the costly and ineffective buy-bust operations and an end to booking and charging all simple possession cases. as far as a task force, we welcome being a part of that to

address what solutions we can for these issues. happy to take any questions. >> thank you. any questions? >> chair? >> yes. thank you. programmeatcally i think i agree with what you said we should be expanding investments in but for this particular involvement, you are portraying a different for portrait of who is doing the drug dealing than the police. they're portraying someone not from the tenderloin and coming from somewhere else and not an addict. you're presenting him or herself

dealing with a substance abuse disorder. obviously, it's some combination of the two. i mean, i think for us in trying to figure out the right interventions and the right responses, it's important to figure out factually, is the population that you're talking about that might respond well to diversion that we really ought to be investing in their mental health and their health and get them out of the criminal justice system because that is not right. they have a public health need, you know, from what we heard from the police, that's a small percentage of what's going on and i don't know how to deal with the discrepancy between the factual description of what's happening on the streets. >> well, i think that we have some different categories of people, that's for sure. one group of sellers are certainly the people who are users themselves. and that is evidenced by the

number of cases that i've handled, my colleagues have handled where a buy-bust happens and what is found on the person is they've just sold one rock and often they have nothing else on them. if they do, maybe they have a few more. now there are some people who are, you know, maybe coming from other parts of the bay area, a population that has been touched on today that is important to talk about more are undocumented folks and, you know, i have seen many situations where there are undocumented folks who are victims of human trafficking, who are forced into selling drugs. i think, perhaps, initially at first plans, less controversial for people to digest is the idea that many victims of human trafficking are portione forcedo prosecution and equally, many

people are forced into selling drugs and a significant problem that i've seen is that these folks are often for good reason, especially from what they're hearing on the national news and the president that we currently have, they're scared. and they are distrustful and they are skeptical and so it's hard to get them to open up about these issues. when they do, they don't necessarily want those issues addressed in open court. even though there are times when the fact they're forced into selling drugs may very well be a defense to the charges. you know, these people -- these are populations that fear retaliation and retaliation is not abstract. retaliation is in the form of violence or death to themselves or their families. i think that we can and should and it seems like we are not based on the statistics having lead reach out to those people and say, we don't want you to go

to get arrested or be a part of the criminal justice system. we want to give you options for diversion. we want to give you options to be able to make money. we want to give you housing and we want to steer you -- keep you away from the criminal justice system. so i, too largely if only 11 pee since 2017 have been referred to lead who are hispanic, than i think we are not capturing an important population. >> it just seems like it would be a different diversion. i'm not disagreeing with you. but it's a different diversion project that i'm not sure we have to take undocumented youth who don't necessarily have a health problem but need diverting in the more, like, you know, sort of common understanding of the word diversion into some other set of opportunities. >> well, and that's why i think that the legislature has specifically said in the stat

title et toustatutei referencedr people who are selling or possessing to sell in order to make a living. as the representatives from glide said, the mean are selling drugs, studies have shown they're making less than minimum wage and so, i think that there's one idea of diversion being along the lines of, ok, somebody is suffering from drug addiction and we'll get them rehabilitation services to tailored to those services but the law says that it could just as well be for sellers. so i think what we need to do is include in the next -- make sure that we fund lead beyond december of 2018, but in addition we have culturally

sensitive staff aware of the situations so they can steer them away from what they're doing and get more information and be sympathetic to the fact that they may be forced to be selling. and that's just as important of a diversion than the people who are users. because by doing that, we're not only shrink the number of users but the number of sellers. >> thank you. chair stephanie. >> yes. >> thank you, chair mandeelman. a lot of us would hope we could steer them into the lee programme and out of drugs and other life of being addicted or sell drugs for whatever reason they're doing that. i know a fair amount about addiction and i know it's not a choice but a disease and i also know that with addiction comes

so much denial on part of the person who is suffering. and i'm just wondering in your experience if you find that people that find themselves in these circumstances that do have interventions and do have ways to get the help, like through lead, if often they don't want that help or they deny it, they deny they have a drug programme. they don't want to stop using drugs. it's hard to stop using drugs and alcohol if you're addicted. and i'm just wondering, because i mean, this is so great if people would say yes every single time, we were presented with them, like right away with saw, oh, my gosh, this person has a drug addiction, let's get them into the right programme and help them. but if you of sat in a meeting, you know it's not that easy. i want to know what your experience is. what you're saying, obviously where we all want to go. i'm just trying to assess that with the reality of what happens

sometimes out there. i know, i was a prosecutor years ago, but i think that addiction is addiction and i do have a lot of experience with it and wondering if you find that sometimes people just don't want the help they're given. >> i think that there are people who are suffering out there and they want help and you know, i think that sometimes people may not be ready for help. but we need to be persistent and we need to be compassionate and we need to stick with it and know that our efforts, even if we do it, one, two, three or ten times it may not work. but sometimes somebody somewhere along the way, my experience has been that somebody will find a human connection with one of the people they're working with, a peer councillor, a case manager.

>> or a police officer, like that one story we heard. >> absolutely, a police officer, a district attorney, a public defender who helps them. the other thing that complicated things, when i said more rehabilitation services and access to treatment on demand, we have too future detox beds in san francisco. >> i absolutely agree with you. >> one of the things that was frustrating for me in staffing the drug court from the public defenders end is that we had people who are either advised by the judge to go to detox, people who wanted to go to detox or people who were ordered by the court to go to detox. and a lot of them were feeling with these other issues, hopelessness, mental illness and

some would have to be from at 8:00 to get a bed and some would have missed their opportunity because other people were ahead of them and sometimes people would try the next day. meantime living a life on the streets meant their belongings got stolen the night before or they had a friend who died the night before or all of the things that are just the real challenges of people who are living in extreme poverty. and so i think that despite their best efforts, some of it -- i think some people who may be in denial, but we should still reach out to them. there's other people who are not in denial, but aren't quite ready and it's just going to be a part of a process. i think that sometimes in the criminal justice system, there's a little bit of a feeling of well, if you don't want it now, this is your opportunity. otherwise, you'll go to jail. >> right. >> i don't think that's working. >> no, i hear you, definitely i