Four panelists gathered at the Edmonds Waterfront Center last week to discuss how their organizations work together to address multiple factors that affect community safety — from crime to mental illness to addiction to poverty to hunger.

The bottom line for those speaking at Edmonds Civic Roundtable’s  May 2 program — “Beyond Policing: Overlap Connections and Gaps”: Many of these factors are interrelated and addressing them often takes a coordinated effort.

Those speaking included Edmonds Police Chief Michelle Bennett, Sandra Mears of the Jean Kim Foundation, Verdant Health Commission Superintendent Lisa Edwards and Edmonds Food Bank Marketing and Communications Manager Kellie Lewis.

Moderating the panel was Edmonds Civic Roundtable’s Allan Townsend. He set the stage for the discussion by sharing a year’s worth of statistics from the police blotter in My Edmonds News. That data includes 2,660 incidents of police activity with the top offenses being theft and domestic disputes.

Townsend then gave each panelist five minutes to discuss the roles their organizations play in the community and how they collaborate with each other.

Michelle Bennett, who has led the Edmonds Police Department since March 2021, talked about how law enforcement approaches public safety challenges related to mental illness, drug addiction and homelessness. When she began her police career 35 years ago, not much help was available for those experiencing those issues, Bennett said. Now, police have more tools for addressing the underlying factors — mental health and addiction — that can contribute to individuals being unhoused and committing crimes.

Diversion programs — which are aimed at diverting people away from the criminal court system so they can get needed care — can be helpful, but sometimes the threat of jail time is what pushes people to get the help they need, the police chief said. In talking with people who have turned their lives around, “sometimes the thing that actually got them help was, ‘I was arrested for my fifth theft and I was told…with this diversion program I could either go jail or choose treatment, and I chose treatment.’ So that’s what works. Sometimes there has to be a consequence.”

Since mid-2022, the City of Edmonds has had a contract with nonprofit Compass Health to provide a trained mental health professional who works with city staff and police to jointly conduct community outreach. But Bennett said that the police department learned last week that Compass was ending its contract with the city, as of May 31, “which is really a bummer,” Bennett said. That means that the city for now will be working with Snohomish County’s Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program.  Coordinated through the county prosecutor’s office, the program offers options to criminal court for those who commit “a low-level crime — theft, vandalism, things like that,” Bennett said. “If you don’t complete it (the program), then there’s a consequence.”

(Read more in our related story here.)

The chief then addressed a question often raised in the community. Is there a harm related to people doing drugs or having mental illness? “The harm is to the individual if they are living unhoused,” Bennett said. “There’s needles and garbage…and it’s cold and people dying,” adding that 1,000 people died last year in King County from fentanyl overdoses “and we’re experiencing that in Snohomish County as well.”

Increases in retail theft are often connected to these issues, as people commit such crimes “to get a quick buck” so they can get their next drug fix, she said. “Oftentimes, having worked a lot of years of patrol, addiction and mental health issues are the underlying cause…of a lot of what we do,” Bennett added.

Lisa Edwards then provided an overview of the Verdant Health Commission, otherwise known as Public Hospital District No. 2 of Snohomish County. In 2010, Verdant entered into a 30-year lease of the former Stevens Hospital to Providence Swedish, “and we take the revenue from that property lease as well as other properties that we lease, and we use that to make investments in the community,” she said. In the last 10 years, that investment equates to almost $80 million. “In relation to mental health, since the inception of Verdant we have invested $21.5 million” — $7.5 million in the last two years alone, Edwards said.

That money is used to fund community resource paramedics who are working with South County Fire to address mental health calls. It also has funded social workers embedded with the Lynnwood and Mountlake Terrace police departments and a portion of the salary for a community resource person in the City of Edmonds. In addition, Verdant provides money for the Lynnwood-based Hygiene Center operated by the Jean Kim Foundation, local food banks and food pantries. “We know that people who are hungry and utilize the food banks are up 36%,” Edwards said. Verdant funds counselors, psychologists and therapists in the Edmonds School District, along with high school-based health centers so students can receive health care onsite. And it provides money for community-based health clinics like Community Health Care of Snohomish County and Sea Mar, as well as mobile health clinics.

Another program funded by Verdant is CHART (Chronic Utilizer Alternative Response Team). It involves command-level staff from local police departments and South County Fire — along with officials from Swedish Ednonds and Verdant — working with those patients who are heavy users of emergency services.

“We recognize that this is a multifaceted, multi-layered issue that takes all of us colletively working together,” Edwards said. The challenges of homelessness also impact the hospital system, she said, noting that between 25 and 27 emergency room beds at Swedish Edmonds Hospital are occupied by unhoused people. “That means when you go to the ED (emergency department) it takes you five to seven hours because there are people there who have nowhere to go.”

“I always think desperate people take desperate acts,” Edwards continued. “One of my staff said to me today as I was preparing for this, ‘You know, Lisa, people who are hungry and homeless and desperate, they don’t care about their health care and so then we also  — Verdant — help fund at the other end, for when those people do need to care about their health care.”

The next speaker was Sandra Mears of the Jean Kim Foundation, which runs the Lynnwood Hygiene Center operating out of the former auto emissions testing faciiity located next to Lynnwood’s Gold Park. Created in partnership with the City of Lynnwood and the Verdant Health Commission, the hygiene center began offering free showers and restrooms to the homeless community in 2020. Those using services at the hygiene center can also obtain clothing and food, and medical care is provided by Mercy Watch. The facility also works closely with the Lynnwood Police Department and their social worker, who visits regularly.

The hygiene center serves about 50 people daily with 10,600 showers provided last year — a number that has been increasing. Most of those people who use the center are single adults but sometimes the center sees families as well.

Kellie Lewis from the Edmonds Food Bank spoke next. She explained the food bank’s mission of offering food not only through distribution onsite at its Edmonds United Methodist Church location but also by sponsoring various offsite pop-up events involving nonprofit organizations and schools. Locations for these pop-ups include the Latino Educational Training Institute, the Washington West African Center, the Coalition for Migrants and Refugees, the Korean Community Service Center. St. Alban’s Church and College Place Elementary and Middle Schools.

“We are trying to get food to the people who need it. We are only in one location and sometimes transportation can be difficult for people to get to that spot. Sometimes they can’t there in the hours that we distrbute food,” Lewis said. “It can be really overwhelming and daunting to seek food assistance.”

The food bank serves about 1,000 households a week. Food banks are experiencing an increase in customers, and a contributing factor is inflation. “Washington state is very expensive for graoceries,” Lewis said, adding that the state has the fourth-highest grocery prices in the U.S. Another factor in increased food bank use is the end of COVID-era assistance programs, meaning that “families and households are finding themselves in a harder spot.”

Moderator Townsend then asked the panelists to address how current mental health services support individuals at risk and the gaps that need to be addressed.

Bennett said if she could have a magic wand to fix issues related to mental health treatment, she would address the current lack of a coordinated approach among various agencies that are trying to address the issue. For example, each county could be a seat for coordinated mental health and addiction services. “So if your son or daughter or husband or wife suddenly is addicted to fentanyl, I know right where to go,” Bennett said. “I’m going to take my loved one down there and say, ‘hey what can we do?’ Here we have treatment centers, we have detox centers or we have inpatient treatment centers or transitional housing or whatever it might be that could help.”

“There’s so many gaps, “Bennett said. “There’s systems, there’s money, there’s processes. I just think there’s a lack of local coordination.”

“The need is greater than the resources currently,” Edwards said. “In our high schools, in the Edmonds School District, the current caseload for a counselor is 250 students. And the rate of suicide ideation among those students in those schools tripled during the pandemic and it continues to rise. Coming through the pandemic, one in three adults reported some form of depresssion.

“These numbers continue to grow and grow but we don’t enough social workers and counselors, and the burnout rate of counselors during the pandemic was phenomenal. Huge amounts of turnover,” she added.

When it comes to treating addiction, Edwards added, “it’s all about the window of opportunity for the person who wants to go into recovery. You have to have an open bed and be ready when the person finally says ‘I’m ready to go.’ And that can change within an hour.”

Mears agreed with Edwards that “you have to look at that window of opportunity because there is treatment resistance. Not everyone wants to go to treatment and so you have to be very patient. We’re talking about human behavior here and we all have the behaviors  — the procrastination, rationalizations. Mears also said that while better coordination of efforts would be helpful, simply “throwing money at the problem” isn’t the answer. She also said that while the goal should be to reduce homelessness, it’s not realistic to think it will ever be completely eliminated.

Lewis pointed to the “really strong correlation between food insecurity and mental health.” She defined food insecurity as when an individual has to make a choice between nutritious food and basic or essential needs.

About 10% of the food bank’s customers are unhoused, while the remainder “are making really hard decisions every week about whether they are going to pay their rent or their child care or a really expensive medication for their parents or a medical bill or food,” she said, adding that “it causes stress and anxiety when you don’t know where your next meal is coming from.”

Another aspect of the issue is what Lewis described as cultural food insecurity, “which would mean that you don’t have access to foods that are culturally familiar to you. And that’s a really big deal, as a country that is very diverse. We have a lot of different cultures and communities that exist in Snohomish County…to not have access to the types of foods that you are used to or that you like to make for your family or that your grandma used to make for you. There’s some strong mental health correlations with that too.”

Moderator Townsend then asked the panelist to reflect on trends they see that worry them most.

Lewis said it is important to be looking at the human stories behind the crime statistics. She shared a story about a woman who stole baby formula because she was waiting for her EBT (food benefits) card but her baby still needed to be fed, she added.

Bennett said that there is a difference between people stealing because they or family members are hungry and “crimes that are used to fund drug habits.” During the recent baby formula shortage, formula was a popular item to steal because  “it went for a lot of money on the black market,” the police chief said.

“We go to so many retail thefts and it’s people going in and stealing purses, people stealing multiple items from the hardware store,” Bennett said. “They are not using those items for something specific that they need, they are using those items as something to fence, to sell or to trade for narcotic material.”

Police are also seeing “what I would call a lack of faith that anything will be done with these individuals,” she said. “Many stores across the region don’t report theft anymore or they’ve told their people… just let them walk out, it’s the cost of doing business.”

Edwards said she is concerned about “factors that are compounding,” starting with food insecurity and then escalating to housing insecurity.

Current research has shown that within five days of experiencing homelessness, “you develop a mental health condition of some kind,” Edwards added. “It’s a compounding issue that goes from risk to bad to worse. And then it’s very hard to dig your way out.”

Mears pointed to the more severe, violent crimes in housing facilities, exacerbated by mental health and drug abuse issues.

Bennett stressed the importance of sending both police and social workers on calls involving behavioral health issues. “The problem is, often people who are addicted or on some type of substance, they’re not in their right mind or have a mental health condition that has escalated to where they’re not in their right mind,” she said. “To send a social worker who has no training with tactics or arrest, it’s like sending the lamb to the wolves.”

“I think the role of police is to render the scene safe,” Bennett added. “We arrive, we make sure that it’s safe, once it’s safe, we stand by and we can have social service folks come in and help address the core of the problem.”

— Story and photos by Teresa Wippel