Stay in place.

Council conclusion.

Would you lose in the uh way further thing we might work for me if you're gonna run it for everything?

Maybe do the first board price professional board.

I break from the first responders to work out decision with the board.

The decisions that we made for city conferences are making it.

Phil, would you like to lose the clothes blue buttons?

We'll call the meeting of uh sign-off city council for Monday, July 20th to order.

Um recognition, got the call.

Oh Zale with police and fear.

First, I want to thank Chief Bass for inviting us to come tonight.

I need some whole as Long Individual and Long-Term Recovery, and I have the great honor of getting to serve the community on our program called Police and Peers.

Um Peers is an innovative approach to forging a powerful alliance between law enforcement, the West Virginia Office of Drug Control Policy, and the substance use service providers.

We are a federally funded initiative through ZMSA through the end of September of 2026, and this is at no cost to the jurisdictions we serve.

We are currently seeking grant funding again through Office of Drug Control Policy is actively seeking additional funding to continue the program.

We also are seeking it at the state of through the state of doing it, first foundation money and county level.

So hopefully we have good news on that soon.

The importance of diversion and deflection is programs have been proven to reduce recidivism, which is the likelihood of repeating a criminal offense.

The program can reduce the number of days sent in jails, hospital states, and reduce total criminal legal system costs.

How do we do that?

We are able to minimize contact.

Our program aims to minimize contact with the criminal legal system.

It deflects and diverts individuals away from arrest, prosecution, and incarceration into proven treatment methods.

Rather than expanding the reach of the criminal legal system, police and peers focus on addressing the underlying problems that led to the criminalized behavior in the first place.

These problems may include substance use disorder, food and housing insecurity, lack of educational resources, and unment mental health needs.

As coaches with the police and peers program, we provide connections to quality treatment centers and providers.

We utilize substance use education and counseling resources, provide connections to job skills and training resources, connections to housing and food resources, connections to education providers, and we support the client through the journey.

So we're going to walk with them.

We work very hard and very closely with these individuals to help them identify their own goals and self-directed life to a path to wellness and what barriers they're seeing as they're trying to get on that path.

We'll find out that there's a much higher success rate when it's uh individual seeks treatment, when their family's trying to support them, if we can get everybody involved.

So we provide families and uh support to the families as well.

And then while we're doing that, we're offering the individual with choices on their treatment options that fit their needs, so that they are going somewhere where it both provides higher success rate as well as meets all of their needs.

So if it's somebody that is currently unhoused, we want to look at a inpatient treatment facility.

If it's a father and he has a job and he's providing for his kids, we may look at an outpatient system, and we say that these individuals, because we are grant funded, we don't build Medicaid, even while they're in treatment, while they're doing all these things.

We're able to walk that journey with them, and most of our individuals stay with us for two years or longer.

And we can provide them as their goals grow and their dreams grow.

We get to help them with new resources to help them meet those.

We reduce repeated interactions with individuals committing drug-related offenses and improve community relations.

We easily pursue alternatives to incarceration for minor drug-related defenses.

And Jared's passed out a paper here.

If you look, this is the 2025 annual numbers.

So we did 71 intakes.

That was 71 new participants.

And this is 90% of that.

So while we are Canault County, we work primarily with St.

Albans and Nitro police departments, but 90% of our all of our interactions take place here in the community of St.

Albans.

So we had 71 intakes.

With those 71 individuals, we did 599 coaching sessions throughout that year.

We were able to distribute 653 kids in the Lockson to community members.

That's anywhere from the banks.

We've gone into the banks and done trainings.

We do training life day here at Gateway Church.

We try to help with the go marks and speedways and things like that, places where community members are coming across somebody that has overdose and they're able to.

But primarily we get it into the hands of the individuals that are in it within a community where overdose happens.

We see that by providing the knowledge and free of charge that we are able to help reduce the risk and numbers of the overdoses happening.

And we're really lucky in this community because most of these individuals, if it occurs, they're self-reporting to us.

So I don't have to wait for somebody to say, hey, I had a flip-up.

This happened.

They're calling and saying, hey, this happened, I need I need to go back to treatment.