Making the Most of Diversion Centers
Lots of places understand the appeal of diversion centers for the LEAD model. To maximize their impact, sites should consider questions of location, eligibility, population-specific needs, and ease-of-use for officers and participants.
The Need
The warm handoff – the process by which, at the moment of potential arrest, an officer instead diverts a person out of the criminal system by connecting them with a case manager who comes to the scene to accept the referral – is essential to the LEAD model. But many sites struggle to implement real-time, field-based diversions, which require that case managers have enough capacity to quickly respond and that officers can remain on-scene until a case manager arrives.
The Adaptation
To address this challenge, some sites have developed “diversion centers”: community-based sites, typically staffed with case managers, to accept warm handoffs from law enforcement. Incorporating a diversion center into the LEAD workflow can help sites manage the “warm handoff” question. Rather than waiting for a case manager to arrive at the scene of potential arrest, officers can instead just drop people off at the diversion center, where case managers accept the referral.
The Implementation
To make these centers as useful as possible, sites may benefit from considering several factors: physical design and practical policies that are responsive to the needs of both participants and law enforcement; geographic proximity to areas with high rates of LEAD-eligible arrests; hours of operation; and eligibility/accessibility.
Impact
The community-based Denver Assessment, Intake, and Diversion (AID) Center enhances its “warm handoff” value through the use of design elements that respond to the needs of both law enforcement officers and participants. We call this an “ease of use” innovation.
The Denver AID Center’s physical design includes elements that address real-world challenges for both officers and participants.
- Separate entrance: For officers, the Center provides a drop-off entrance that is separate from the entrance for general use. This separate entrance increases the Center’s efficiencies for law enforcement officers while also reducing anxiety for Center clients who may have trauma sensitivities to the presence of law enforcement officers.
The Center enhances access to services by expanding eligibility criteria.
- Eligibility: The Center offers self-referral and walk-in services; it accepts people brought in by law enforcement as alternatives to arrest and jail; and it accepts people with or without justice involvement or behavioral health issues.
- Legal status: The Center provides services to people who are subject to active warrants for certain offenses; in most cases, people subject to arrest for things like missing a court date are afraid to access even those services that could reduce their risk profile by addressing their underlying needs.
By responding to the everyday realities of the people it’s designed to serve, the Center’s physical design and programmatic operations increase the accessibility and impact of the services it offers.
- Pet kennels: Typically, animals (except service animals) are not permitted inside most buildings, but pets are a particularly important source of solace and comfort for many people living with complex challenges, including social isolation. Recognizing this, the Center provides kennels where participants’ pets can be safely held while people meet with Care Coordinators.
- Parents: Parents navigating complex challenges, including poverty, often confront practical barriers that keep them from connecting to services that were intended to help them but that have overlooked their practical needs. So, the Center provides both a supervised play area for participants’ children and a lactation room to support parents who are breastfeeding.
CoNsiderations
Diversion centers can enhance the operational ease and efficacy of a LEAD program, but in developing the plan to incorporate a diversion center into LEAD, it’s important to consider factors that can affect their utility. These include:
Hours of Operation
Law enforcement officers operate 24 hours/day throughout the year, but it’s rare for a diversion center to be able to match that schedule. So in the plan to incorporate a diversion center into a LEAD effort, it is important to work with law enforcement partners, service agencies, and other stakeholders to identify the hours and days that represent the greatest opportunities for officers to divert people away from arrest. This may mean building a diversion schedule that prioritizes evenings, overnight, and weekends, for example. Operating beyond traditional business hours is challenging, but engaging relevant stakeholders in determining how to maximize the diversion opportunity is an important opportunity for success.
Geographic Location
It is important to consider the impacts of a diversion center’s geographic location. Oftentimes, the locations are heavily influenced by circumstance, such as the opportunistic repurposing of an available building. But in developing the criteria for a preferred location, stakeholders should consider accessibility – for officers to readily transport a client, and for clients to navigate via public transit. Stakeholders might consider the location’s proximity to the precincts where LEAD-diversions are more common, and might consider additional factors, such as the proximity of additional appropriate resources.
Diversion Eligibility
The potential value of a diversion center for LEAD participants will be shaped, in part, by diversion-eligibility policies set by the local Policy Coordinating Group. If a PCG narrowly limits the list of diversion-eligible offenses, for example, it may limit the number of people that officers can divert to the center. In planning the use of a diversion center, stakeholders should work with local law enforcement to examine arrest patterns, prevalence and location of potential LEAD-eligible crimes, and ensure that diversion eligibility maximizes the value of the diversion center to advance public safety while reducing avoidable burden on law enforcement officers.
Community Outreach
A diversion center’s acceptance and use can benefit from early and ongoing communication with the broader community: making sure that their interests, concerns, and needs are considered in its design and operation. In addition, it’s important to develop methods for credible messengers to explain the center to the people LEAD is intended to serve. For many people, especially LEAD participants, being transported by an officer in a patrol car may be an experience they try to avoid; so it’s important to have credible messengers help people understand LEAD, the use of the diversion center as a place for warm handoff, and officers’ roles in transporting participants to the center.
WHY IT MATTERS
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