On a recent episode of the Up-Close Show, host Gary Daigneault welcomed special guests from the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department: Captain James Porter of Community Service and Reentry Division, Sgt. James Marshall of the HOPE team, and Outreach social worker Diana Simmons.
With this trio of our county’s law enforcement outreach experts looking out for our higher risk neighbors, Daigneault asked Captain James Porter to repeat a statement he found particularly profound:
“The goal of the criminal justice system should be public safety. It should not end at incarceration; it should not end at arrest. It should end at making our communities better because most of these folks do come back to our communities. Our homeless folks live in our communities, so our goal should be to make our community safer by bringing services and needs to folks to help them get on the right track.”
Daigneault then asked Porter to describe what outreach means to these special law enforcement divisions, and what their teams do with HOPE (Homeless Outreach Proactive Enforcement) and InnROADS (Innovative Remote Onsite Assistance Delivery).
“HOPE is a team driven to provide housing first to people in need in the unhoused population and then we have a team called InnROADS which provides services first to those people when they’re unable to be housed due to things like mental health, illness, or substance abuse. So we have teams that provide those levels of care in the hopes we can stabilize and move to housing. These actually have been around for almost ten years but the larger division of the CSRD (Community Service and Reentry Division) has only been around for about three years, and we have brought in a lot of resources and partnerships that other law enforcement agencies just aren’t doing.
A quick example: the InnROADS teams don’t take those tasks on alone. When dealing with the most severely mentally ill folks out in the communities where most are homeless, we know our deputies are not clinicians, they’re not therapists, they’re not social workers, so every InnROADS team that works in our communities includes the deputy sheriff department, a behavioral health and alcohol and drug counselor, a Department of Aging and Adult Services, a social service practitioner or social worker and a Department of Public health registered nurse. We bring all the resources to folks who can’t or won’t go to get them elsewhere so that we can try to get them stabilized and ultimately get them to housing and that’s a very innovative approach.”
If you know of someone in need and are interested in contacting the HOPE or InnROADS teams:
- Contact HOPE: [email protected] or call (909)387-0623
- Contact InnROADS: (909) 387-7406
