as a mayor for the city of sarasota on behalf of our city commission and the entire city of sarasota i just want to say a special thank you to the international association of chiefs of police and thank you for welcoming chief burdett paino of the service of the police department and h team that's making the presentation that your conference  emergence of the homeless are rich teams to try to give the community new tools to try to resolve cases and solve the problems and we've learned so much during the process we've learned from talking with the folks involved and meeting the people in the streets that a high percentage of those on the streets are suffering from serious mental health challenges and substance abuse challenges and we have to create a system in communities that can problem solve and bring the services to the people and see positive outcomes it's certainly a healthy way to approach it it's the compassionate way to approach it and it actually i think in the end saves taxpayers money in the homeless or rich team is i think a effective proactive way to counter the challenge and see positive outcomes one of the major steps that we took at the recommendation of law enforcement was the creation of hot teams and those are homeless out which teams where a law enforcement officer is we were able to bring services to individuals that were in need and for end of vegetables who had been chronically homeless it took several attempts but with continuing to say familiar faces faces of hope faces haven't current's met they slowly warmed up to law enforcement case managers and began to accept services strategy has evolved to educate the chronically homeless to include to what the services are that are available to them to encourage them to participate in that in taking advantage of those services and then with when all else fails and you know the behavior falls into criminal behavior we do force or code so the three e s have proved to be very effective  and that involves caseworkers working with law enforcement to actually understand what each individual is going through and we've also found and discovered that there is a way to actually solve this problem and get out of that cycle of the very expensive cycle of arrests courts or emergency room transports from the fire department to the emergency rooms in the hospitals all of which just kept repeating itself so i think that shift w critical i think it also transformed us policymakers the way that we addressed issues in terms of blaming the victim as opposed to being a partner in the solution and when our law enforcement officers in our case managers in our community partners do that what that individual says is that i have a value and that it's worth listening to the services that they have to offer and that i can do better and there are options and people actually care about me and it was pretty significant in terms of individuals who were living and sleeping on the streets i'm causing problems in terms of where lation says that their business community and safety issues with the drivers in terms of approaching cars and panhandling and those kind of things are so was pretty c well the homeless are rich seems a bit dramatic success here you know can't really invision a better way to approach it in that we have seen dramatic decreases the numbers of people on the streets and significant and those who are returning to a healthy lifestyle and of course are litigation has begun to decrease as well absolutely and citywide there's been a chronic induction in homeless individuals that are chronically homeless on the they qualify for services they receive benefits they might be veterans they have access to social security and we were able to connect them with case managers who could get them signed up and actually receiving services sometimes as a gap where they just need to be reaganite with loved ones and so we're able to provide financial assistance in getting individuals back to cities where their loved ones li