Explanation
BACKGROUND: The City of Columbus has been awarded the Law Enforcement Diversion Program Grant Award from the State of Ohio Attorney General’s Office for the 2025 fiscal year. This program provides funding to support increased treatment, new tools for law enforcement, and expanding prevention to combat the opioid epidemic. This grant award will allow the Columbus Division of Police to maintain peace officer engagement with the Columbus Division of Fire’s (CFD) Rapid Response Emergency Addiction Crisis Team (RREACT). The project’s goal is to reduce the number of narcotics-associated police calls for service within the City of Columbus areas experiencing the highest rate of overdose calls, from data collected by CPD and CFD. This project involves partnering CPD Crisis Intervention Trained (CIT) law enforcement officers with CFD paramedics, social workers and trauma specialists to provide multi-disciplinary outreach services to survivors of an opioid overdose and their families within 72 hours of overdose, specifically for individuals who initially refused transport to clinical treatment facilities. The project objectives are to get said individuals into treatment at a target rate of 60%, to gather necessary intelligence for pre-emptive narcotics enforcement and future overdose prevention, and to stabilize households by providing necessary assistance and/or referrals to treatment options, recovery support, counseling, and mental health treatment services in an effort to reduce barriers to accessing treatment for the substance user. Therefore, the Public Safety Director is required to sign a grant award on behalf of the City.
Emergency Designation: Emergency legislation is necessary to make the funds available as soon as possible for the grant award and to use all of the funds allocated for this project, as the grant start date was of July 1, 2024.
FISCAL IMPACT: All appropriated funds will be reimbursed by the grant award. The grant appropr...
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