Deseret News
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Kristin Murphy, Deseret News
It wasn’t all that long ago that police in Salt Lake City would sometimes arrest people facing mental health and addiction crises and recommend charges that could land them in prison for up to 15 years.
“We would book them on that second-degree felony thinking that we had really solved the problem, and yet we were really just introducing them into the criminal justice system,” Salt Lake City Police Chief Mike Brown said this week.
He called the approach “the most expensive and least effective.”
The city took a new tack in 2016, hiring social workers within its police department and pairing them with officers in a “co-responder” model. The move was a recognition that simply booking people into jail wasn’t helping matters, Brown said.