Fulton officials: Police are jailing people who qualify for diversion

On Wednesday, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney told county commissioners that police officers have brought in an average of three people per day to the diversion center from the time it opened in January through May 31. That is far fewer than the 40 people the facility could handle each day.

Officials have said the initiative has the potential to divert more than 10,000 jail bookings each year.

“It’s not cheap,” McBurney said, alluding to the total of $5 million that Fulton County and the city of Atlanta have allocated to the initiative for this year. “I don’t mean to put something as human-affecting as this in financial terms, but we have to be realistic about it. If the county is going to continue to invest, we need to see the results that we came to you and represented to you would be there.

“Those results require more people showing up to the diversion center,” added McBurney, co-chair of the Justice Policy Board, which oversees the diversion center. “We built something that can do more.”

Atlanta Police Maj. Hajredin Zenelaj, however, praised city officers for bringing nearly 400 people to the diversion center from the day it opened, calling the number “extraordinary.”

As Zenelai and McBurney stood at the podium facing board members, Commissioner Mo Ivory pointedly told them that their differing perspectives show they’re not on the same page.

“I do respectfully observe that if one party thinks the numbers are very low and the other party thinks that they’re doing great at the numbers, then we have a disconnect,” Ivory said.

Credit: Olivia Bowdoin

Credit: Olivia Bowdoin

“I wonder if we could provide some incentives to our officers to want to do this more,” Ivory added. “It’s a celebration when somebody doesn’t have to go to jail.”

Several other commissioners also voiced support for the diversion center and noted that it has only been open for a little over four months.

“You have a diversion center; you need to use it,” said Fulton County Commissioner Khadijah Abdur-Rahman, who sits on the Justice Policy Board. “We have to do it right. It’s going to take money, it’s going to take education and it’s going to take us working together.”

Robb Pitts, chairman of the county’s Board of Commissioners, said in an interview this week that he was shocked to learn how few people police officers were bringing to the diversion center each day. He held a meeting last week with police chiefs from departments across Fulton County to educate them on the initiative.

“I even talked with one of our police officers — Fulton County Police — and they knew nothing at all about it,” Pitts said.

Pitts said the program should be serving at least 22 people per day.

“I was told that in some cases the officers just were not bringing people who were eligible to the diversion center,” he said. “The bulk of the prospects were city of Atlanta people.”

McBurney said APD is the only department that has brought people to the facility so far. As of Wednesday, the number of diversions had grown from 399 to at least 450, Zenelaj said.

Credit: Miguel Martinez/AJC

Credit: Miguel Martinez/AJC

Michael Collins, senior director of Color of Change, an organization that promotes racial justice, blamed APD for failing to use the center more often.

“APD does not fully utilize diversion. They don’t believe in it,” Collins said in an interview this week. “APD is not holding up its end of the bargain. Officers are not being held accountable. People are not being incentivized to use the facility. There are no consequences for not using it.”

Zenelaj disagreed.

“Based on our numbers I think we’ve shown our level of commitment,” Zenelaj said after Wednesday’s Board of Commissioners meeting. “I think we’ve shown that we are a full-throated partner in this initiative.”

He added that one incentive for officers to use the diversion center is that it only takes a couple of minutes to drop someone off there, allowing officers to quickly return to patrolling the streets. Booking someone into jail can take hours.

The diversion center, which is in the city-owned Atlanta City Detention Center, is open 24 hours a day but only serves people who are brought there by police officers. Participants can stay there for up to 23 hours.

Some of the data McBurney presented Wednesday suggest that police in the city of Atlanta and across the county could be diverting more people instead of arresting and jailing them.

He said police officers booked people 187 times in February and March who faced “divertible” charges, which include disorderly conduct, public indecency, drinking in public and shoplifting, among others. In about 30 of those cases, the police could not have diverted the suspects, however, because the individuals had active warrants out on them, Zenelaj said.

APD was responsible for 42% of the 187 bookings of people who faced solely divertible offenses, the largest percentage of any police department, McBurney said.

Other police departments at the top of the list were the East Point Police, with 12% of the bookings on divertible offenses, and the MARTA, Roswell and Union City police departments, which each brought 5% of those bookings.

About half those individuals were locked up for five days or less. But nearly 30% of them spent 6 to 20 days in jail, and others spent more than 30 days behind bars.

Moki Macias, executive director of the Policing Alternatives & Diversion Initiative, which provides case management services at the county’s diversion center, said the facility offers a “gold standard” program.

“Our jail continues to be overcrowded,” she added. “Fulton County is under a consent decree and we’re not yet scratching the surface of the number of calls that could be diverted.”

On Wednesday, the Rice Street jail held 1,860 inmates, according to spokesperson Natalie Ammons for the Fulton Sheriff’s Office. That is slightly below the facility’s operational capacity, but she added that 587 beds were “out of service.”

Of the inmates in the jail’s custody on Wednesday, 24 were being held solely on divertible charges that can qualify offenders to get help at the diversion center and avoid arrest.