For 25 years, Lars Paul worked on the front lines of the war on drugs with the Fayetteville Police Department — making arrests for drug possession, responding to overdoses, leading the Narcotics Division and serving on a SWAT team that carried out hundreds of narcotics searches.
Over time, he saw arrests and jail time often amounting to an expensive revolving door, and not to meaningful change in the addiction crisis underlying many low-level crimes. Again and again, he said, people would leave jail only to return to the same circumstances and soon cross paths with police again. It’s a common cycle across the state and nationwide: About 60 percent of people in jail and prison have a substance use disorder, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
“I got to see firsthand over all those years that, ‘Hey, we’re not winning this. We’re doing the same thing over and over again, and things aren’t changing. People are still dying of overdoses. People are going to jail. They’re getting arrested and going into that revolving door,’” Paul said.
His frustration with that pattern grew, and it eventually compelled him to help spearhead a new approach to handling low-level, nonviolent crimes typically tied to substance use — one that emphasizes diversion over detention. Instead of automatically arresting, charging and taking someone to jail, officers could divert them to treatment and social services…