By Glenn Epps | For lehighvalleylive.com
The Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion Program, nicknamed LEAD, is an innovative policing strategy designed to get everyone on the same page about criminal justice reform.
An experiment by the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office and Prevention is Key, a Rockaway-based nonprofit, to reduce recidivism in Warren County is about to turn one year’s old.
Fewer than 100 LEAD sites exist around the world. They operate at varying scales of development and fidelity to the core model, according to the company’s website. Six facilities are located in New Jersey, including two fully funded programs, as of 2023, in Irvington and Phillipsburg.
“The program’s mission is to minimize the impact that arrests and convictions can have on the stability needed to sustain recovery and rehabilitation,” New Jersey Attorney General Michael Platkin said in a statement last year. Platkin’s office agreed to fully fund the program in 2023-2024.
Phillipsburg Police Department has conducted roughly 552 arrests in 2023 compared to 478 in 2021, as of June 2024. The graphic below which shows a negligible uptick in arrests since 2022.
Town of Phillipsburg Crime Data by Year
The data table details the summary of common incident types reported Phillipsburg Police Officers between 2021 and June 2024. The graphic also shows arrests and stationhouse adjustments and calls for service, as of December 2023.
The information displayed shows an fairly even distribution of criminal complaints issued by Phillipsburg Police Department since 2021. Crimes included in the chart include homicide, sexual assault, burglary and thefts. It also shows arrests, summonses issued and calls for service.
| 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Homicide | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Assault | 183 | 319 | 308 | 349 |
| Sexual Assault SA | 17 | 44 | 39 | 29 |
| Burglary | 13 | 29 | 37 | 29 |
| Thefts | 122 | 213 | 234 | 207 |
| Domestic Dispute | 359 | 598 | 643 | 625 |
| Narcotics | 38 | 50 | 47 | 49 |
| Arrests | 424 | 552 | 474 | 478 |
| Stationhouse Adjustments | 35 | 39 | 33 | 22 |
| Calls for Service | 28,888 | 29,236 | 24,950 |
The Phillipsburg Police Department began semi-regularly publishing monthly crime reports in 2021. Sums for 2023, 2022, 2021 and 2024, as of June 2024, are based on totals to date (Year to Date) recorded in PPD’s December reports. Stationhouse Adjustments refers to alternative methods that law enforcement agencies may use to handle first-time juvenile offenders who have committed minor crimes.
Coordinators for the center in Phillipsburg couldn’t give a total examined cost for the first year, as of July. Costs to operate the program typically range based on care and population, said Pamela Clark, project manager for LEAD in Philipsburg.
The LEAD program in Phillipsburg was approved for an 18-month period in January 2023 by the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General. The program exhausted its funds in June 2024 and has continued to operate via a no-cost extension from the state— meaning it may keep operating as usual without any additional funding. A request by lehighvalleylive.com for the total cost to operate the program in its first year was not immediately available, Clark said.
“Prevention is Key is floating us (currently) until the grant renewal process comes to bare,” she said.
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The costs associated with running the program in its first year can include case manager salaries, client travel/transportation costs, housing subsidies, flexible client funds, food pantry costs and general operation, administration and more, according to official program documents.
In the past, costs in some locations around the country were reported as $1,000 per client per year, in addition to operational costs which can easily total more than $300,000, documents state.
Sustainability is dependent on widespread interest by invested stakeholders in the community, those documents also say.
“Even a site funded by a substantial three-year state grant may find itself, late in Year Two, floundering to develop a post-grant sustainability plan if it has failed to elicit widespread interest and involvement among an array of essential stakeholders, influencers, and budgetary decision-makers.”
The Phillipsburg site is racing against the buzzer to sustain and build new investment in its second year.
The program currently assists roughly 40 clients, most of whom have a pattern of arrest and/or are unhoused. Many of the clients were referred by police or through outreach, case managers told lehighvalleylive.com.
Seventy-five percent of Phillipsburg Police Department officers have referred an arrest case to LEAD since the program’s inception, Clark confirmed.
After receiving training by case managers, at no cost, officers are permitted to refer low-level drug cases and non-violent crimes to the LEAD program where clients’ real needs can be addressed, she explained. By identifying people with substance use disorders, (behavioral health) trauma-related diseases and suffering from extreme poverty, with the help of police officers, the program is able to connect the most disparate in-need population with existing resources.
LEAD’s intervention can set the suffering on the path of civism and stability, and as a whole, reduce the number of residents who cycle in and out of jail through the punitive cycle, coordinators said.
The punitive cycle refers to the regular pattern commonly experienced by people who are repeatedly incarcerated or in the pipeline to becoming incarcerated. Each stage of the pipeline carries its own impact, trauma and shame.
Its stages include performance of some unlawful or illicit act, typically exacerbated by homelessness, mental illness, poverty, substance use, trauma or racial inequity. The act leads to an arrest, jail, prosecution, incarceration, worsened trauma and disruption. This is followed by release, then worsened poverty that leads back to the performance of an unlawful or illicit action.
To make the program work, case managers’ need to be flexible. Their responsibilites change from day to day to include escorting clients through the legal process or to a job interview; getting a client in touch with permanent housing, medical assistance, food or recovery options or simply driving them from point A to point B, said Mimi Blue, one of two case managers working at the site in Phillipsburg.
“We must meet people where they are and that’s our focus here,” she said.
Both Blue and her counterpart, a combat veteran for the U.S. Army and former Peer Recovery Specialist at Hunterdon Healthcare, Anthony Doran left their previous jobs just to work for the LEAD program because they were attracted to the opportunity to perform trauma-informed care and harm reduction directly.
“If someone wants to get help, they shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to get it,” said Blue.
Resources are already stretched thin to help the ever-growing population of residents facing extreme poverty throughout the state.
But for residents who are up against other forms of “disruption” — a word used to describe when a person’s ability to maintain equilibrium in their life and a constant environment is disrupted — living in a rural county where there is no permanent homeless shelter exacerbates the need for accessible and useful resources.
“There is a serious need in the Town of Phillipsburg, as well as the surrounding Phillipsburg area for non-traditional services for individuals with substance abuse and mental health issues,” said Kenneth Decker, an agent for the Warren County Prosecutor’s Office.
Glenn Epps can be reached at gepps@lehighvalleylive.com or glenn_epps_on X (formerly known as Twitter.com), Facebook and Threads.
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