Problem-Oriented Policing: Where Social Work Meets Law Enforcement | Derrick Jackson | TEDxYDL

when you look at the badge what do you see do you see honesty and integrity or do you see brutality and disdain regardless of how you answer that question whether you're an officer or a resident the idea that I plan to share with you tonight hopefully gives you a different perspective of what's possible through law enforcement you see I'm a social worker that runs the police agency I'm the director at the Sheriff's Office and often times when I say that I get a strange look and people say well how that happened and really what I get to do is connect those two every day to create change within individuals but also change within various neighborhoods within our community I mean think about it as a young social worker I started out working at Olsen House working with homeless teenagers it was not uncommon at all for an officer to find a runaway or pick up a homeless kid off the street knock on our door and bring them and connect them to services or what about the mom who's just been abused and we respond to the domestic violence call we arrive to find her battered and bruised and it's not uncommon for us to be the connection to safe house or even the call we get about someone who's loitering downtown we arrive and find out that that man is homeless its frigid outside in the winter and we sometimes are the first connection to the shelter so imagine if we use that connection to not only focus on arresting people and solving crimes but if we also used it to focus on understanding the problem and addressing the root causes I think there's a fundamental problem with only focusing on crime and that is that a crime has to have been committed someone has to have been victimized before I take action why not understand the root cause of that crime and hopefully prevent it from ever happening the game and so I give you an example and one of our downtown areas we had a huge problem with prostitution we get business owners and family members complaining we put a sting together we'd make some arrests focus on the crime we push that problem to the city the city would get the same complaints they make some arrests they put a sting together and they push it right back to us never focusing on the problem but always focusing on the crime we pushed it back and forth between one another until one day one officer she's undercover as a prostitute for one of our stings she's trained she gets back up she has her gun and yet she's fearful and she asked herself the question what would make a woman do this and in asking that one simple question she went from focusing on arresting someone to trying to understand the actual problem and so she began to ask the women where you come from why are you here what do you do why do you do what you do and over the years what we found is every single one of them was an addict and I simply arresting them and putting them in jail had nothing to do with solving the real problem and so this officer yes we still do stings to this day but before anyone ever set foot in the jail those women go into a room with a group of social workers where they get an assessment that assessment is turned into a bond recommendation the ghost of the judge the judge uses that to sentence the women and while they're in jail they're actually getting services that is the difference when you focus on addressing root cause problems versus just on arresting people one officer one question changed the way we deal with prostitution and addiction in our community now when those women get out of jail they have an opportunity and the choice they can go back to the neighborhood and do what they were doing before they're free or they can go to the home of NuVision which has beds set aside just for the women coming out of our program to focus on and deal with addiction I'll give you another example heroin here on in Washington County just like in many places around the country has ravaged Arkham we as community members became aware of the heroin problem two summers ago when we had 12 overdoses in one weekend 12 ODS in one weekend do you know when officers knew we had a problem over four years ago so imagine if officers instead of only focused on arresting people for having heroin or using heroin if they were also asking a question of why are we seeing so much heroin in our community and maybe just maybe we in the community could have wrapped ourselves around that problem before it ever became an epidemic it's also said that in Washington County we have one of the highest rates of recidivism in the state of Michigan meaning someone commits a crime we arrest them we put them in jail they get out they reoffended we put them back in jail the cycle goes on and on and on now someone says because officers in Washington County do such a great job at solving crime and putting people in jail but we would actually say why how is it possible for someone to come into our jail 11 times not prison but jail if you've been in our jail 11 times you're not a violent offender or you would have already been gone to prison so why are you here is it because you have mental health challenges where you struggle with substance abuse or you're homeless or you struggle around educational issues or maybe it's employment and so one way that we actually decided to deal with this was to hire people coming out of jail in prison to work at the sheriff's office yes we hire felons at the Washington County Sheriff's Office I can't believe it myself sometimes but we don't hire them to sweep our floors we don't hire them to be informants to work with detectives we hire them to be the experts on the communities that they come from to be Street outreach workers to use their trust the street credibility and their relationships to help build up the neighborhoods to take one store down and so there's Julia who has 64 years old has never had a real job her first actual paycheck was with us at the sheriff's office and after years of living on the streets of prostitution and of addiction she came and she said derec I have two goals I want to reconnect with my kids and one day I want to own my own home two ideas that I thought sounded far-fetched at the time but thanks to Habitat for Humanity next month Julia moves into her own house we didn't give her that she earned that we simply connected her to her community she began to change herself and now she works every single day to change her neighborhood that is the power and the difference of focusing on arresting people and understanding the actual problem and then there's Ashton who had 14 year old years old from Ann Arbor became addicted to heroin and she was addicted for years and now she's been clean for years we didn't give her that she earned it but now she works with us to go back into the community to help those young people she used to get high with to pull them into recovery and then there's James our very first outreach worker years ago we sent him to prison for 15 years he went to San Quentin federal penitentiary no less and now he works for us he actually works to build up those communities that he once terrorized he literally works to pull kids out of the gang life that once he recruited them into I say again that is the power of focusing on solving problems and not just on arresting people and the day that I saw the undersheriff and James sitting in the under sheriff's office eating lunch together talking about how to change a particular neighborhood I realized that we had connected people in ways they had never been connected before they we had begin to change our community in ways that we had never thought about changing before and so I asked you again whether you're an officer that wears the badge or resident that fears the badge when you see it what do you think because I think about possibility to connect people to create change within themselves but also within our community thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 72,542

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Life, Community, Criminal justice, Government, Social Change

Id: wK8glFZuQw8

Length: 8min 59sec (539 seconds)

Published: Thu May 12 2016