Spokane’s Safe and Healthy Task Force was created last year to find new remedies to the region’s homelessness, mental health and substance abuse problems.
The group hired a Florida-based consultant, retired Miami Judge Steven Leifman, to assess Spokane's health and public safety systems and recommend ways they could better work together.
Leifman recently presented his group's findings. We talk with task force members Angel Tomeo Sam and Matt Albright about how the group will proceed from here.
Matt Albright: You are seeing impacts on delayed care and the crisis response system where that needs to be reserved for things like heart attacks, strokes, aneurysms, trauma, and that's, for us, the real part of the crisis. We know the majority of these community members can be serviced in the outpatient space. We have an amazing system of care and a lot of it is just around more integration, maybe possibly some more funding...It's a matter of really kind of supercharging that work.
Angel Tomeo Sam: It's been really kind of a relief as somebody who's kind of been on the sidelines in this effort to see the things happen for Spokane that will provide pathways to public safety, to caring for people, to making sure that the jail isn't overflowing with folks, and that people don't go back, that we have everything here, we have the recipe. It's just a matter of like putting it all together and executing it.
