The main floor of the Portland City Council chamber was full one afternoon last week, and there was even a quorum of the City Council on hand, though the occasion wasn't one of the usual ones, and others attending were mainly cops, social workers and a few former drug addicts and criminals.
It was the graduation ceremony for a program that, if you've heard of it at all, was in the context of a dispute over the city compiling a list of druggies and chronic criminals to single out.
The mere fact of almost any kind of list -- even if it's a list of publicly available information -- sends the city's ample community of ideologues out looking for government bogeymen. So when city officials began putting together this one, for the use of the "Service Coordination Team," the usual complaints ensued.
It's hard to say now that there was any real substance to the fears expressed. The list singled out chronic, homeless criminals for priority housing and treatment for substance abuse. Instead of harassment, the city offered hope. And, on a small scale at least, it is working.
City Commissioner Randy Leonard and others had the idea of cutting down crime in the central city by stepping up enforcement and providing treatment for repeat offenders, who'd already spent plenty of time in jail. The city team's reasoning was that by case-managing the core group of offenders in the Downtown/Old Town neighborhoods law enforcement and social workers involved could make a dent in the petty and not-so-petty crime in the area.
The idea of a Service Coordinating Team, as it's called in its newest, 2008 iteration, has been around since 2003 or so, and the evidence shows it has reduced these crimes in the Old Town/Downtown neighborhoods and kept at least some of the 150-plus chronic offenders off the streets, out of jail and out of criminal activities.
Using housing services through Central City Concern, drug treatment through a Volunteers of America program, and social workers and police from nine other public and nonprofit agencies, the program has taken in 88 clients for priority housing at a cost over the past 18 months of $2.55 million.
That's not cheap, especially in the financial climate of local government in Oregon. Only 18 people have completed the full, difficult treatment course to the point where you could say they are in recovery. This is a lower rate than the national average for such undertakings, but it's still worthwhile. After all, if the five guys who graduated last week -- to the applause of their counselors, friends, police officers, families and city officials -- had gone to jail instead, they would have cost taxpayers about seven times the price of treatment.
Indeed, the five graduates who were celebrated last week had, in their lives, accumulated 77 years of jail time, which adds up to a cost of about $4.4 million. There's no doubt that spending the money this way is a better investment.
"The Portland Police Bureau," he said, "saved my life."