of the sarasota police department i'm so proud to be able to present to you the sarasota police department's homeless outreach team model we think this is a great program that your agency can implement within your organization to help you reduce homelessness and i'm going to be frank with you there's no way you're ever going to be able to eliminate homelessness near your community but what you can do is help reduce homelessness and help individuals one of the time get into resources and programs to help them get off the streets this is good for your police officers it's good for your community it's good for your elected officials because what it does is it takes homeless individuals with police officers engaging with them and helps pair them up with social services to help them get out of homelessness on the street and into the help that they need as a mayor for the city of sarasota on behalf of our city commission and the entire city of sarasota this want to say a special thank you to the international association of chief of police and thank you for welcoming chief b of the police department and her team that's making the presentation that your conference folks and reading with people in the streets that a high percentage of those on the streets are suffering from serious mental health challenges substance abuse challenges and we have to create a system and 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 home assad regime is i think partnerships with case management 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 see familiar faces faces of hope faces of encouragement they slowly warmed up to law enforcement case managers and began to accept services strategy has evolved to educate the chronically homeless tune into 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 it force or code so the three e proved to be very effective in 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 itself so i think that shift was critical i think that also transformed this policy makers the way that we addressed issues in terms of blaming the victim as opposed to being a partner in the solution and what our law enforcement officers in our case managers in our community partners  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 well ations with our business community and safety issues with the drivers in terms of approaching cars and panhandling and those kind of things