‘THESE ARE OUR NEIGHBORS’
New community initiative brings drug addiction services to streets
STAMFORD — Bonnie Kim Campbell looks out at the city’s West Side, where she’s lived all 66 years of her life, and sees a diamond in the rough.
To her, the West Side is a tight-knit, diverse community of people, many of whom have called the neighborhood their home for generations. It’s a place of culture, beauty and potential.
But she admits the neighborhood is not without its problems.
Campbell describes “scenes of public drunkenness and disarray,” which she says includes naked individuals and public defecation that seems to plague certain parts of the West Side.
The issue has become so pervasive that one local business owner, who didn’t wish to be named, said ambulances are called to the area of Alden and Smith Street — a spot that police say has become an epicenter for drug use and homelessness for the area — about three times per day on average.
To meet the challenges, Campbell and another West Side activist, Cynthia Bowser, have used their standing on the city’s Community Advisory Committee to forge an alliance with Stamford Police Department and local social service providers to develop a solution that they say they believe avoids some of the pitfalls of prior efforts.
Their answer is the recently launched Shoulder to Shoulder Initiative, a joint effort linking the Stamford Police Department and the Community Advisory Committee with local social service providers like Building One Community and Liberation Programs, a nonprofit offering drug treatment programs throughout Fairfield County, to try and bring resources straight to the most affected areas.
In the past, Campbell and Bowser say, they’ve seen police respond to calls for drunk or intoxicated individuals to see the people taken away in handcuffs. While both commend police for their efforts to try and curb unsavory activity, they say they don’t believe such activity is a problem that can be solved by the justice system.
“These are our neighbors, and they clearly are suffering from behavioral problems, addiction and homelessness. We don’t want to see these people being arrested, we want to see them get the help they need,” Campbell said.
With Shoulder to Shoulder, police and the nonprofit organizations are identifying known “hot spots” of drug usage and homelessness in the West Side.
But instead of responding to the hotspots with sirens and handcuffs, Assistant Police Chief Silas Redd said police are coming from an alternative mindset, one he said he hopes will treat the underlying problem and not the symptoms.
“We need to walk shoulder to shoulder in addressing the needs of a segment of the community while also addressing the qualityof-life issues that this has brought to the community,” Redd said. “Having our officers come out here and execute some sort of enforcement action is not what we’re looking for. These folks are in need of resources, so the goal is to connect them with as many community providers who can provide them with what they need.”
Once hot spots are identified, Liberation Programs then teams up with other local social service providers like Building One Community to go out to the areas and try and connect individuals with resources.
The team goes to the locations in a van outfitted with a “prescriber and recovery coach,” who can provide referrals for treatment, prescriptions for Buprenorphine/Suboxone, Narcan, syringe exchange and other resources.
“The overall goal is really to have everyone who is providing
care in this community come together and be able to provide that care and meet the individuals we are trying to reach where they are and connect them to the resources that are available to them,” Maggie Young, chief recovery officer at Liberation Programs, said.
While the verdict on the program’s effectiveness is still out, Young said she’s already seen it make a difference in the weeks since it began in mid-July.
“It’s a win any time we even get to talk to one person,” Young said.
For Bowser, the program not only marks the first step toward a true partnership between community members, nonprofits and city institutions but also a step in the right direction for the West Side as a whole.
“If we’re going to move forward, we really need to encourage the city to forge a formal collaborative partnership between community residents, the Stamford Police Department and social service agencies,” she said.