Transcriber: Fresa Jacobs Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
"I wanna help people."
Now that more than likely is the answer you would hear
to some version of the question:
"Why do you want to be a police officer?"
if you sat through any new hire interview,
anywhere in this country.
Now, I'm Matt Lennick, and I'm a police officer
with the Billings Police Department.
I'm been an officer for just over 11 years,
and I've had an array of different assignments.
I've patrolled in a rural county, and all over this city.
I've led community watch groups,
participated in the Adopt a Cop Program,
and been a field training officer.
But at the end of 2013, I was given what I believe
to be my most meaningful assignment yet.
I was awarded one of the positions of a Downtown Resource Officer.
Now, this position allows me the ability
to patrol within the downtown District of Billings
which encompasses approximately a 200 square block area.
Now, I do this using a community policing model.
Just so we're all on the same page,
community policing is when I use a partnership approach
to deal with certain issues.
So, when I as a police officer respond to a call for service
or I realize it's an ongoing issue,
I do not just show up and make the decision on my own
on how it's going to be resolved.
I talk to everyone involved,
we learn about the problem together,
and then together we make the decision on how best to combat the issue.
Now, when I started, I did the most logical thing possible.
I went out there and I spoke to as many people
as I was going to be working with as possible.
I needed to know what the issues were,
and what they expected me to do about it.
Now, I won't tell you that I'm shocked by what I heard.
But sometimes when you take the time to talk to people,
and learn how certain issues affect them in their day to day life,
what you hear can be surprising.
Now, what they told me was that the major concerns
revolved around transiency, street disorder, public drinking,
loitering, and trespass;
what we commonly refer to as quality of life crimes.
What I noticed was that the people that were telling me about these things
were beaten down, exhausted, and fed up
with constantly trying to figure out ways to coexist with these issues
yet still feel safe and successful within their businesses and homes.
Now, I thought about it, and I talked it over with my partner,
Officer Nichols, who's that guy on the right there.
And we thought, this can't be so hard.
There's laws that are being broken, and we're police.
Let's go out and fight crime.
And so we did!
We went out and we arrested, and we wrote citations,
and we wrote warnings to everybody that we found violating a law
that revolved around one of those quality of life crimes.
And at the end of the year,
we had written 618 open container citations,
and we had arrested 474 people.
But what was odd was that as the year progressed,
we were not seeing the impact
that we thought we initially were going to have.
When we came to work in the morning,
we were still getting the same calls from the same businesses.
And they were reporting the same crimes involving the same individuals.
It was then we realized we needed to come up with a new approach
to deal with this issue.
Now, luckily for us, we had an amazing team of individuals
who were willing to help us search the country
for successful models in dealing with this,
and finding that key piece that we had been missing.
Now, keep in mind, when we were looking for new ideas,
we were not looking for ideas that put more people in jail.
We already knew that that didn't work for us.
We had to deal with this problem at the root.
We had to engage the people we were dealing with on the street
at a whole new level.
We had to help them, and in doing that, we believed we would help ourselves.
Now, we started focusing our efforts
around the city of San Diego's Serial Inebriate Program, or SIP.
Their program over the last 15 years
has been successfully dealing with a population of people
that routinely suffers from alcoholism, as well as other addictions.
They do this by utilizing a criminal charge for public intoxication
as a way to incentivize people into treatment instead of jail.
They also use what's called a Homeless Outreach Team,
or what they call, HOT.
Now, that team goes out daily and engages people on the street
with the intent to link them into services
before they're dealing with the police department
for criminal behavior issues.
We had the opportunity to go to San Diego,
and got to watch SIP and HOT in action.
And I can tell you the very second that we realized,
we wanted what they had for our community.
We had walked into a room in the Mental Health Building,
with about 12 individuals sitting in a group.
Now, those individuals, when we walked in,
were well-dressed, well-spoken, clean, healthy individuals.
But the group we were going to meet
was currently enrolled in their SIP program.
We sat there and we listened to these people tell us about
how they lived on the street,
how they battled their addictions,
and how this program had saved their life.
And that was it.
That was how a motivated addiction alternative program,
or what we refer to as MAAP, M-A-A-P, was born.
And when we got back, that's when our work really began.
The first thing we felt we needed was an outreach program.
Not having the resources that our mentors have,
we had, Officer Nichols and I,
had to learn how to walk the line between enforcement and outreach.
Knowing full well that the outreach could be just as,
or more than efficient to us in meeting our goals.
Now, it was at this time that our treatment partners
provided us with an invaluable resource.
They created the position of a Resource Outreach Coordinator,
or what we refer to as ROC, R-O-C.
Now, our ROC is a licensed addictions counselor
that began riding with us on the street in March of 2015,
as well as operating an intensive outreach treatment group,
that he still runs today.
Now, we quickly realized that our ROC's connections
to the treatment world, and his knowledge about addictions
was part, was one of those key pieces
that we had been missing.
And as our program progressed and as the months went on,
our outreach part was responsible
for getting 25 individuals voluntarily into detox,
with five of them moving through detox
and into some level of treatment.
Now, as our program progressed even further,
we partnered with our court system
to build a sentencing structure.
Now, this structure increased the penalties
of certain crimes, as well as set guidelines
based on the number of offenses in a 30 day period.
This allowed us to have
the incentivization that we were looking for,
as well as build consistency into our model.
Now, currently, MAAP only deals with 2 offenses
because our State does not have a public incapacitation law.
We deal only with city ordinance of open container,
and the State Statute for alcohol-related trespass.
MAAP went city-wide July 1st of 2015, and it currently looks like this.
I know it's a little hard to read, so we're gonna go over it.
Any time an officer investigates one of these offenses,
it's tracked in a tracking program
that the police department shares with our treatment partners.
Now, at the time of investigation, an officer must go back
and look at an individual's prior offenses
to determine the proper course of action.
At the time of investigating an offense,
if it is less than the offender's fifth offense
of one of these charges in a 30-day period,
the officer must allow the offender the option
of either speaking with a counselor about treatment options,
or receiving a citation.
If the offense in that same 30-day period
is the offender's 5th or greater offense,
they're incarcerated.
At the time of going in front of a judge
and being convicted for either an offense where an offender
chose a citation, or it was their fifth or greater offense
in that 30-day period, the judge imposes a sentence
based on the sentencing guidelines
that we've established for this program.
So if you look at this model, treatment is always an option.
The only people sitting in jail
are the ones that are not ready
to choose treatment as one of their options.
Now, as this program has progressed,
we've offered treatment to a vast group of people
who were in desperate need of help.
We've had just over 60 cases go through the court system,
with less than 10% choosing to sit in jail
versus attempt some level of treatment.
Group is still held today, with an average of 10 to 12 individuals that are active.
And as the year progressed, we watched our open container citations,
and other calls for service be reduced.
Now, more importantly than that,
is this style of policing that allows an officer the opportunity
to truly be a link that allows a person to make a life-changing choice.
I know of no other model
that allows an offender, at the time of offense,
to choose the course of action taken.
Now, this program is seven months old
and it's already responsible for changing people
on all sides of the issue.
One of our MAAP clients wrote us a letter
and this is what he had to say:
"I like coming to these groups, we get things done.
I could have taken the ticket,
but that wouldn't have solved anything just to sit in jail.
I've been to treatment before but I like this one.
Because we're all addicts and alcoholics looking for a better life.
You're trying to help us, and I thank you for that."
Now, I've seen the change in the individuals on the street.
And I've seen the change in the people working and living downtown
And I've seen the change in ourselves.
I think we've gotten back to what we originally signed up for,
when the answer to that question, 'Why do you want to be a police officer?' was
'I wanna help people.'
Thank you.
(Applause)