Jacqui:Good afternoon. Welcome to our webinar, Building the Right Cross-Systems Team to Support Your Diversion: The Responder Model. My name is Jacqui Greene and I'm with the National Center for Mental Health and Juvenile Justice. I'm just going to go over a couple of housekeeping items for you before we jump into the content of our webinar today. First there are some poll questions that should be open on your computer. Many of you have started filling them out, but if you haven't, we would love it if you could fill up those polling questions.
They’ll be open for another, about 2minutes for us to get some information about you guys. We thank you in advance for filling those out. We wanted to let you know that we are recording this webinar and it will be posted to our website along with the School Justice Partnership website in a couple of days. We are going to take questions and answers at the end of this webinar. We would encourage you to enter your questions in the chat box.
As we go along the webinar, we're going to gather all those questions and hold them to make sure all 4 of our presenters have time to present their pieces for you and then we will go back to the questions and answers at the end with them. You can select chat with all panelists in that chat box to submit your questions. Please also free to use that chat box if you're having any trouble logistically in terms of accessing the webinar or hearing the webinar or anything like that and we'll try to help you along the way.
This webinar is brought to you through the School Justice Partnership National Resource Center, which is supported by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. The National Resource Center is led by the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, along with 4 core partners. We here at the National Center for Mental Health and Juvenile Justice are one of those core partners and are really happy [00:02:00] to be part of this work with you.
The first webinar that we held in this series is posted on our website and a link to it is also posted on the School Justice Partnership National Resource Center website. That webinar gives an overview of the responder model and how it's been implemented in Ohio and Connecticut. The main thrust of the responder model is to divert youth who have behavioral health needs out of school based arrests and into community based services.
If you're looking for some general information on what the model looks like in Ohio and Connecticut, we’d refer you to that first webinar, where you can get a good overview of what those models look like. Today we're going to talk with you about a really key component to launching a successful responder model and really any school based diversion initiative and that is assembling a strong cross-systems team.
We heard from the folks in Ohio and Connecticut about how important it was that they have law enforcement, schools, families and providers all supporting their initiatives and so today, we have folks from each one of those stakeholder groups who are going to talk to you about strategies and messages that work to engage police, families, schools and service providers. Stay tuned because there will be a third and fourth segment to this webinar series.
The third segment in April will be about identifying young people for a responder diversion initiative. How do you know if kids are at risk for juvenile justice referral? How do you know if they might have behavioral health needs? Once you identify them, how do you connect them to community based services?
Then the final webinar in this series is going to provide you with some concrete tools that you can use, if you're thinking about implementing [00:04:00] a responder model in your community. Please join us for all of them. All right we have closed our poll and we are ready to get started with the content for you today so I’m really happy to start out with Kevin Bethel.
He's a retired deputy police commissioner from the Philadelphia Police Department which is the fourth largest Police department in the nation with over 6,600 sworn personnel. Prior to his retirement, just very recently in January of 2016, he commanded patrol operations for the entire city. He’s presently serving a Stoneleigh Foundation Fellowship and is a senior policy adviser in the juvenile justice research reform lab in the Department of Psychology at Drexel University.
Kevin has done extensive work in the juvenile justice field. Most recently, he developed the school diversion program within the Philadelphia school system. The program diverts first time low level juvenile offenders by utilizing programs within Department of Human Services and after its first year, the program had reduced the number of school arrests by 54%. Kevin holds a master's degree in public safety from St Joseph's University and a Bachelor of Science degree in Criminal Justice from Chestnut Hill College. Kevin it’s yours.
Kevin:Thank you very much and I want to thank the National Center for Mental Health and Juvenile Justice and all the partners for giving me an opportunity to present today. It is my honor and pleasure to share what we're doing here in the city of Philadelphia with the rest of the nation. What I'll talk about today is just those key areas, elements that we saw in our process of building a police and school collaboration.
I think it’s all very important to understand the infrastructure that goes into putting these programs together. I’ll not present [00:06:00] myself to be this overwhelming expert, but I also believe through working with collaboration not just with the school based program were doing, but across the system, is an effective tool. When we look at the stakeholder benefits, one of the things we look at in trauma informed approach and addressing the root cause of behavior.
One of the things that we found-and it was beneficial to all of our stakeholders-was that with a trauma informed approach, you recognize the harm that is affecting our young people both in the community and how they bring that into the school and how that is a significant public health issue for all of us. We also recognize one of the things in policing and that I have always known, the trauma is often as a result of the violence we see in our communities, the abuse that are our young people are subjected to.
But one of the things we weren't doing was asking those questions why. We weren’t looking at the issue of trauma and why our kids were acting the way and how it was manifesting itself in the school, in the manner it did. When we also took that trauma informed approach, we also recognized it had no boundaries as to the age, gender, economic status. It really centralized us to make a really strategic and how the stakeholders can really get to the root of addressing that issue.
As we move through our program and part of our program we do a home assessment where we go to the home, the social worker. We pre-arrest and we go to the home within 72 hours. One of the things what our goal was, to identify those conditions at home that were contributing to that environment. We’re working with the providers and understand the benefits of that, looking at the physical environment, the psychological issues and more importantly the health issues in that family, is beneficial for us in policing and because again, it's not just about what's happening at the school and the root issues are the things that are actually happening at home and [00:08:00] how they contributes to the things that are going on in the school.
One of the other areas of benefit is particularly in the policing part was freeing up my officers to respond to high level offenses and not these minor offenses. We spent anunknown amount of time transporting and processing and detaining students. It takes about 2 and a half hours for us to process a child. Most cases, the district attorney's office has done a great job of diverting those kids post-diversion, but our pre-diversion model allows us to free up the time for our officers can do more work in the field and not be bogged down by doing, spending a lot of time in paperwork.
Lastly as you see on the slide, reducing the racial and ethnic disparity. All of our stakeholders and all of our collaborating partners recognize that this was the core of much of our work. A disproportionate number of our young people particularly African-American Latino students are being arrested not just in the school, but across the city and so it benefited all of us to move forward and address this issue so it had a significant impact both in the schools and across the city. As you look around and you look at the … I mention the key economic benefits.
There are those financial benefits that cost. What is the cost for us to process and the man hours that goes in that process? That’s pretty expensive. I saw a report from the juvenile Policy Institute and they did a survey of 46 students. I mean 46 states and their average cost for a kid staying in custody was almost $408 and $140,000 a year in custody. That cost and if the economy benefits to be able to take that money and move it into other sources, other areas, to benefit the child to the front end is beneficial to all of us and definitely a key message.
The other area is around reducing recidivism. By not arresting a juvenile for low offenses, [00:10:00] we recognize that when we do arrest them, a good percentage of those kids are coming back. Presently in Pennsylvania State recidivism rate is over 20%. We have or diverted up to, over the last since May of 2014 almost over 800 young people. Only 36 of those kids have come back and re-offended. Now for almost a 4.6% recidivism rate.
That, in and of itself tells you, the importance of how, if we don't arrest these kids as a first time offense, particularly for these low hanging offenses, we stand a very good chance of minimizing the number of young people who will come back to us later in life. I think those are benefits that all of us should be looking at. Particular as stakeholders as we look through our process and moving forward.
One of the things that give people pause and people put no stick and I know that's kind of a simplistic term, but our process was an approach that said, do we really need to stick. Do we have … We have these consequences of arrest where a kid has to admit and go through a process and or go before a judge to keep compliance. One of the things I challenge the process and our process here is I’m arresting a child for a fight in the hallway. There should never even be calling for police. Or I’m arresting a child who comes into a school with mace in his bag, who was only fearful that he was walking down the street and going from school to home and he used that mace for protection. At the end of the day, the child was still getting suspension.
There is a stick at the very beginning when he or she is getting suspended. We took approach that we would not have a stick in our case, but we're able to maintain the integrity of our program. 90% of our kids and families were after participating, who could turn away from the system, but 90% of those individuals are taking part in our program. One of my messages is, do we often have to look at this as a stick approach. Are there other ways to manage this process without oftentimes looking at ways to [00:12:00] really continue to lay on additional penalties on a child and particularly in our case a 10 year old child with the minimum age he or she can be arrested?
Finally the bullet that see a greater impact when all partner sharing development of approach. This is so widely important. You cannot have a process that without stake holders not having understand how we can work together and know the benefits and how they’re involvement is, in getting that done. We have to work as; the stakeholders carry expertise that I do not have. I am not a social worker. I am not a psychologist.
I don’t possess the skills to be able to do the things that make an informed decision about how I should be moving forward, so it can be widely important that you work with your partners so you all can maximize the impact of that. As you look at one of the key strategies that we used, using data was and continues to be the key. Data really drives home for us and in the process for the stakeholders, the magnitude of the problem.
We not only did that, we drilled down even further at the per capita numbers. To see in some cases we had smaller schools, who on paper appear to be few arrests, but when you look at their per capita numbers compared to their larger schools, we really found that many of those smaller schools were problematic, but the data allows us to want to one-track the outcomes both good and bad.
It gives us the ability to look at certain areas that we need to make decisions about as a collective group, it could be because we’re failing in the area and we also need to make real time information, will give us an immediate impact versus waiting down, months later when we know we could have made a policy decision that would have had a significant impact on how our program is going. That was the case in our regard when we start to find things that we can make adjustments to was important. [00:14:00]
One of the other areas is utilize existent collaboratives. I was blessed to be a part of the Juvenile detention alternative initiative. That program allowed me to take the work that we were, what my vision and the vision of the collective group into the JDIA collaborative where you had a high level of participants. There we can engage and get immediate contributions from all system partners. We all have a number of meetings, we have a lot of issues that we have to address, creating different collaborative and different areas where we couldn’t work together and have existing collaborative I think is key.
I’m clear that we don’t have that and you do have to start it, but I think there are those types of programs available on the collaborations already in place. You humble yourself in that process as I did. I did not need to lead the program; I needed to have people who help lead with me. One of the areas and I will emphasize strongly, is strong communication.
The benefits of a strong communication creates a strategy and that strong communication, everyone understands the big picture. Everyone understands their role. Everyone understands the partnership; working together can be productive and has meaning, a strong meaning. From that we get better leaders as we know. We build the trust which is widely important and needs collaborations.
In that continuous loop of information enables us to build that trust that often times is lacking in many of the collaborations that I have been a party to. Strategy to continue to, as we talk about that and particularly in our collaboration, system partners, you need to have high level involvement. Ideally you want somebody who is in the position to make those decisions. You cannot and I’ll be very honest. I’ve come from the policing world.
If my police officer is just sitting in the room, a part of a large scale collaboration, when he walks out that room, he has to talk to a sergeant and the sergeant has to talk to a lieutenant, lieutenant has to talk to a captain and it goes on. [00:16:00] You need to have that a high profile and a high level of decision making process and have those individuals in the room, who are really keen in all what needs to be done, can take that back to their department head and be able to make decisions real time or you’ll just be layered in time and never get anything done.
One of the key things for us is the memorandum of Understanding. That’s widely important. I didn't understand the importance of it when I started down this process until I was fortunate to be grabbed and someone say, “Hey you, you have to have this.” It really, really defines the specific roles and responsibilities of all the partners. It gets everyone to understand the purpose and establish and effective and clear mission as to what the statement is, what the scope of responsibilities are and more probably as I walk away as I did from the department retire, there is a MOU that drives how those individuals should and should not be working in their role in the process.
I'll come back to that because it can also hurts you. Keeping it simple and straightforward starting out. I think one of the things I was fortunate enough in working with those in my collaborative is … Many of the US work in very large bureaucracies that are very complex and bogged down. Keeping it simple or having strong clarity and focusing, we started the work on just low hanging offenses which represented almost 60% of the offences that kids were being arrested.