Insights From the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) Program
“Anybody who’s seen a criminal history sheet has seen that many folks come back through the system, and are caught in a cycle of booking and release — only to get out and commit similar crimes for myriad reasons…. If you’ve tried the same thing over and over again and it hasn’t worked — it’s time to try something new.” — Grace Wiener Ritter, Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorney and Former LEAD Prosecutorial Liaison
Seattle’s Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program is the first known pre-booking diversion program for people arrested on certain narcotics and prostitution charges in the United States. Launched in October of 2011, LEAD is the product of a multi-year collaboration involving a wide range of organizations, including the Public Defender Association’s Racial Disparity Project, the ACLU of Washington, Evergreen Treatment Services, the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office (KCPAO), the Seattle City Attorney’s Office, the King County Executive, the Seattle Police Department, the King County Sheriff’s Office, the Washington State Department of Corrections, and others.
Grace Wiener Ritter, Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorney and Former LEAD Prosecutorial Liaison in the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, recently sat down with the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution (IIP) to discuss what she’s learned working with LEAD. The discussion accompanied IIP’s release of a new resource manual that gives prosecutors tools for increasing public health approaches to criminal cases that stem from drug use. You can watch the full conversation below:
In the interview, Grace shared a success story that stood out to her involving a young woman who was booked over and over again on car theft cases, and turned her life around through participating in LEAD:
“I was extremely concerned about her — I thought she might kill somebody if she was driving a car high, or hurt herself. This individual worked with the LEAD case manager very intensively, got stabilized in housing, received mental health and drug treatment — and it took a while — but she got stabilized to a place that she stopped committing crimes. She cleared up her municipal cases and ended up having three felony cases — because of the stabilization that she had created for herself in working with LEAD — reduced to misdemeanors. The negotiating prosecutors, in coordinating with the LEAD prosecutorial liaisons, knew that putting this person back in jail would derail the progress she made. It would result in her becoming homeless once again, prevent her from attending treatment and truly disrupt the progress that she had already made. That’s just one example of somebody who took advantage of the resources, and really turned their life around.”
“LEAD is essentially about stabilization; trying to get to the root cause of why people commit the crimes they do and trying to address it. It’s about connection and about community partners coming together and breaking down silos and communicating with the common goal of trying to lift people up and help them stabilize.”
“It was a new tool for prosecutors and law enforcement to try something new that might actually get to the root cause of why somebody is committing crime in the first place. En lieu of officers booking people into jail, they can do a warm hand off to an outreach worker who can work with the individual, do an assessment to see what their needs and goals are, and try to help them with those.”
According to the LEAD National Support Bureau, LEAD participants were 58% less likely to be arrested after enrolling in the program. Further, their evaluations found that “[a]cross nearly all outcomes, we observed statistically significant reductions for the LEAD® group compared to the control group on average yearly criminal justice and legal system utilization and associated costs.”
In short, LEAD is making a measurable difference for a population that historically has not found stabilization through the criminal justice system. Locally, LEAD has continued to make progress and stay active even through the pandemic: as of November 1, 2021, LEAD added 198 new participants for the year, an increase from 190 total new participants added in 2020. In total, as of November 1, 2021 there were 913 LEAD participants.
“It was exciting for me in the sense that, it is something that could inject more humanity into the criminal justice system — which I think is deeply needed.” — Grace Wiener Ritter
Learn more about the LEAD program HERE. For more information about the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office involvement in LEAD, please reach out to Leandra Craft, Vice Chair of General Crimes Unit: lcraft@kingcounty.gov.
