Police Intervention
Videographer: Perry Elyaderani; Interviewer: Perry Elyaderani; Editor: Jackie Pascale
When Nashville Chief of Police Thomas Bashore looked at the problems opioid addictions were presenting towns all over North Carolina in October 2015, he says he wanted to make sure his town of almost 5,500 individuals wasn’t part of the statistic. That’s the month they began developing their HOPE program, designed to help opioid users in the county find treatment for their addiction.
But starting HOPE wasn’t easy. Bashore says creating the program forced him and his officers to confront some harsh realities about the issue’s prevalence.
“I was pretty amazed at the number of times that EMS or the Fire Department would go to a overdose call and use naloxone to reverse an overdose. If I had to guess at the time just looking at national data, I would probably guess for the county it would have been 3 times a month, but it was actually 15 times a month. So it was a much bigger problem even locally than I was aware of.”
The HOPE initiative publicly launched in February 2016, aiming to stop the spread of opioid addiction in the town and serve as an example to surrounding police departments about how law enforcement could tackle the issue.
Ordinarily, In a town without a program like HOPE, if a user shows up at the police department saying they have an addiction, the police department would refer them to the emergency room. That user may also face charges if they were in possession of illegal or illegally obtained drugs and paraphernalia. With the HOPE program however, Bashore says he personally escorts users who come to the department to a the ER, where they are seen by a doctor and a behavioral therapist, and referred to a detox facility, all within the same building. After a few days, Bashore returns to work with the user to create a voluntary plan to fight their addiction- often landing the users in residential treatment facilities.
When the police department announced the program publically, they also wanted to make two things clear.
“One was that it wasn’t just for anyone who had an opioid addiction, if you had any type of substance use disorder; alcohol, cocaine, whatever it was, you could come here and seek assistance. The second one was that you do not have to be a resident of the town of Nashville or even the county of Nash to receive those services.”
Other programs, like the Angel program the HOPE program is based off of, do not have these provisions. Bashore felt it was necessary however, and says he’s been seeing incredible responses. In a little more than a year that the program has been in place, his department has had over 125 individuals suffering from addictions voluntarily participate in the program. Of those 125, Bashore says they’re only aware of 16 who have since returned to use, and only two that have died from an overdose.
“I still get calls and talk to the first person who came through this program,” Bashore says. “He now lives in Florida, got a job, bought a truck, he’s doing awesome and we talk on a regular basis.”
It’s these success stories that Bashore says makes doing the job worth it.
“One I always like to bring up is that we had an individual who struggled for a long time with an Opioid addiction, we had him sent to a long-term treatment facility…I put him on a bus, the next day his mother called me up and said she just wanted to say thank you because that was the first night that she actually slept all the way through.”
Bashore continues, beaming. “Those are the kinds of things that keep me motivated and to continue and do things for people who come through the program.”
