(Chicago) – Substance use treatment and other services must be available and accessible in the community in order for police reforms to be fully actualized, said Jac Charlier, executive director of both the Police, Treatment, and Community Collaborative (PTACC) and of TASC’s Center for Health and Justice.

Speaking as a guest on Louisville-based Landmark Recovery Radio, Charlier spoke about deflection and pre-arrest diversion, whereby law enforcement officers, instead of arresting individuals who have substance use disorders and related challenges, divert them to treatment. This practice can help prevent and reduce overdose and deaths related to opioids and other substances, while strengthening collaborative partnerships within the community.

“We in the United States must make an absolute commitment to the full-on expansion of community-based drug treatment and mental health and housing and services, including for families and children, or all these conversations will be for naught,” said Charlier. “We can have all the police reforms you’d want, but we’d better also be talking about full-on funding of drug treatment in the United States of America so people have ready access to it and the support that they need and their families need for the ongoing term.

“Absent that, these reforms will only add unbelievable amounts of pressure to an already underfunded at times, almost nonexistent treatment system in the United States.”

However, even amidst a national overdose epidemic that killed more than 71,000 people in the United States last year, states across the country—facing economic squeezes due to the COVID-19 pandemic—have been slashing budgets for treatment and opioid crisis programs.

At the same time, calls for police reforms across the country have highlighted the need for improved partnerships between law enforcement and the community, including access to substance use disorder treatment.

This is where deflection comes in.

“Deflection is a relationship between your local law enforcement….your local drug treatment providers, your local recovery community, your local housing community, your local social service providers, and the community itself,” said Charlier. “It’s a relationship then, when law enforcement encounters people [manifesting symptoms of substance use disorder], they move them away from the justice system—which means no arrest….no bail, no bond, no magistrate, no lock-up, no arrest—and instead, through a warm hand-off, connect them to treatment, housing, and services in the community. And then the police go back about their [other] work. That’s deflection.”

At the basis of deflection is the notion of community organizing, which Charlier described as a consensus-finding process: “What is the consensus path forward on the topic of how we’re going to treat, and take care of people and the families, and the children of the families of people who use drugs?” 

Deflection programs, he noted, are partnerships between police and treatment and community in a way that arrives at a consensus.

For example, said Charlier, "We do want to make sure that people who use drugs get treatment. We do want to make sure that their children and their families are cared for and have the attention and the support they need to break the intergenerational nature of addiction or cycle of addiction if that’s there, and we also want to ensure public safety. You can get a consensus viewpoint on that, and that is, in a way, what deflection is.” 

Listen to the full interview beginning at 34:30 of the July 15 episode.

PTACC is an alliance of practitioners in law enforcement, behavioral health, community, advocacy, research, and public policy, whose mission is to strategically widen community behavioral health and social service options available through law enforcement diversion. The purpose of the collaborative is to provide vision, leadership, advocacy, and education to facilitate the practice of pre-arrest diversion across the United States. PTACC is the national voice of the pre-arrest diversion and deflection field.

TASC’s Center for Health and Justice (CHJ)  partners with leaders and jurisdictions—from police to parole and all points in between—to develop results-driven strategies that make communities safer, promote equity, improve community health and reduce people’s involvement in the justice system.

CHJ was established in 2006 as a division of TASC (Treatment Alternatives for Safe Communities), which, since 1976, has helped tens of thousands of justice-individuals access treatment and recovery by offering clinical assessment, treatment matching, client advocacy, and specialized case management.

TASC and its Center for Health and Justice are national founding members of PTACC.