For many years I have been meeting with a small group of friends to play cards. We come from a variety of backgrounds, outlooks, and political perspectives. We tease each other a lot, rarely talk politics, but we do discuss Island County issues and concerns that strike us as important. Topics like the homeless, the ferries, crime, traffic, visitors, the Navy and local businesses.

What I have noticed is the lack of information and answers we have about our concerns. The local newspapers are owned and managed by Sound Publishing, which claims 43 independent media outlets and was founded in 1987. Their coverage is limited and insufficient. “Whidbey Weekly” is owned and published by Eric Marshall as: “The island’s only locally owned newspaper and print shop.” Two local newspapers.

The Whidbey Camano Islands tourism website is funded by the 2% lodging taxes and other grants and: “…oversee a comprehensive marketing and public relations program.” The targeted audience is visitors. And we have Chambers of Commerce in Oak Harbor, Coupeville, Freeland, Langley and Camano Island. They serve and promote the business interests of Whidbey Island. The Coupeville Chamber states that it: “…provides assistance to visitors, businesses, and locals alike.”

My objective is to get information from reliable sources for residents of Island County. I often hear Whidbey Islanders complain about the homeless. The issues surrounding the homeless are often front and center in Seattle and Tacoma media coverage. What about our area? Is anybody doing anything about it? What are they doing, and how are they doing it?

My first choice for an interview was easy: newly re-elected Island County Sheriff Rick Felici and his Chief Criminal Deputy, Evan Tingstad. Here is Part One of my interview with them, conducted on December 13^th, 2022 at the Island County Sheriff’s department. (M. = Mike Diamanti, R. = Sheriff Rick Felici, E. = Chief Criminal Deputy Evan Tingstad.)

Initial Call

M. “A call comes in about a disturbed individual – then what?”

R. “A deputy will most likely make a contact with that person and make an assessment of the situation and find out which tool is the best option. Whether there’s an immediate need for some sort of intervention, whether it’s an ITA (Involuntary Treatment Act) situation and takes them into custody because they’re a danger to themselves or others. Whether it’s a situation where we can have a conversation and we can put a band-aid on this particular moment, and get you a referral for a mental health follow-up or a social services follow-up. Whatever the deputy deems as the appropriate thing.”

R. “Sometimes – if it happens to be at a time when we have a mental health worker within reach, they will co-respond and show up with them, then we can do a ‘warm hand-off’. A ‘warm hand-off’ is a way better way for a deputy to get them introduced to some kind of service, rather than a follow-up the day after tomorrow.”

M. “You want to have the immediacy?”

R. “Yeah. In the mental health field as well as the medical field, they use the term ‘warm hand-off’ a lot because it makes sense. One thing about people who are in crisis, whether it be a chemical crisis or a mental health crisis, or both, which I would bet 75% or 80% of the time it’s both, it’s more effective to have a ‘warm hand-off.’ Hey, the deputy came, and he’s not necessarily the right tool for the job. But, there’s the follow-up that we’ve got people who might be able to provide you with a service, provide you with a direction.

The two embedded mental health workers that we have, the grant funding that pays for that, the Oak Harbor police department got one and the Island County Sheriff’s department got one. And they work together, but separately.”

R. “Where we fall short in this region especially, but also in the state and the nation, is the availability of what’s the next step. Let’s just take a typical mental health behavior example. Deputy gets a call, goes out there and makes an assessment, they usually consult with a mental health person either by phone or in person, and the deputy determines that this person’s behavior is imminently dangerous to themselves or to others, and they make a decision to take them into custody for involuntary treatment.”

R. “The law says you take them to the nearest mental health treatment facility, and if there isn’t one, you take them to the local emergency room. In our county we don’t have an emergency mental health treatment facility so we take them to the local emergency room. The local emergency room is completely overwhelmed and ill-equipped to deal with mental health situations. And it gets more complicated than that because the doctors are contractors and the chain of command at the hospital doesn’t necessarily have control over what the doctors’ decisions are. The doctors aren’t bound by the same laws as the mental health situation. So an MD can overrule, for example, a Designated Crisis Responder (DCR), who has made a mental health decision that this person needs to be on ITA status. The physician, by educational seniority or by law or whatever, can say; ‘I disagree.’ So it gets a little crunchy when it comes to the actual resources, when it comes to treatment. Even when people are voluntary, finding bed space for them downstream is a crap shoot at best.”

M. “You start the steps, but there are often hurdles that slow things down.”

R. “Yeah, I think we’re doing a better job and the problems are getting more attention within the system. They are getting more attention than they have historically. And the legislature is throwing a whole bunch of money at the problem and it takes a long time for it to trickle out of King County.”

M. “So it’s up to the deputy, using their assessment skills, to decide where to go next.”

R. “From the deputy’s perspective, they aren’t trying to figure out a treatment path, they’re trying to figure out what the next step is to deal with this particular situation in this moment.”

Mental Health Related Behaviors

M. “What is the biggest number of calls that you get?”

R. “Honestly, dealing with mental health related behaviors has taken the forefront. It’s interesting that, in the time that I’ve been in this profession, I would say that once they get into the criminal justice system, on any given day, I would be willing to say that 75% of the people that are in our jails have either mental health or chemical issues, or both disorders occurring. Mental health and the related drug use clearly are the front part of this problem. And I would include in that, the issue with people living in RVs and the homeless issue. These are all part and parcel. It’s the same group of our population that are involved, more often than not, in all of those things.”

M. “It seems that dealing with mental and behavioral health issues is usually due to a lack of resources, or a coordination of resources. However, so many Island County departments have a common goal of getting someone the help they need.”

R. “I think that the results that we have and the programs that we have speak for themselves. We have done so many things to try to help people get where they need to go, mental health-wise or addiction-wise. So, here’s the thing: what if you don’t want help? What if you are happy living the way you live or you don’t have the ability to make the decision to improve? That’s where we run into some real problems. You have to be voluntary in order to be treated. The rare cases where people are involuntarily treated is often a band-aid, a temporary fix. Sometimes it works. They go back to their life and they don’t pop up on the 911 screen anymore. What we deal with most often are people who have co-occurring disorders or they self-medicate because of their mental health issues – they’re not comfortable, they’re not happy, they’re not functional, so they take amphetamine, heroin, fentanyl now. There’s no path to success once that decision has been made.”     

M. “People will say they are out there because they want to be out there, and they’re behaving that way, because they want to behave that way.”

R. “Some of them do! For a fair portion of them, I believe that’s true. And no amount of intervention is going to change their behavior.”

M. “A lot of people don’t know what to do and need help.”

R. “The very nature of mental health and addiction is counter to accepting treatment or having the ability to make the decision to change. You’re so far gone that this is your normal. The system fails in that when you have people who are forced into the system or go in voluntarily, there is a significant lack of resources for long term care.”

M. “Then they raise the flag that says I have the right to do what I want.”

R. “And they do. But the public has rights as well. The other thing that really  grates at me, is I have yet to hear any conversation whatsoever  about are we dedicating any resources to discovering and determining the cause of this epidemic of mental health that we have. Do we have more mentally ill people than we’ve ever had? Or do we just have a higher population so the numbers have become more visible?

From my perspective, having started in 1994 as an Island County deputy, at that time we dealt with one or two mentally ill people that we were aware of and they were regulars. We all knew them by first name, we all knew their behaviors. Today, you can’t drive down the street without seeing somebody behave in a bizarre fashion somewhere in the visibility of the main traffic routes. And it’s not an Oak Harbor problem, it’s not an Island County problem, it’s a cultural problem and it’s nationwide.

So, is there a huge influx of people that are mentally ill or dealing with chemical issues or both, and if that’s true, why did it start, why did it grow so rapidly? Ten years ago we weren’t talking about this to the extent we are today. The population hasn’t increased that much in ten years. It has obviously increased.”

R. “It seems more visible now maybe because we’re finally paying attention to it and maybe it’s because we’re more aware of it, the laws have changed. It used to be that if somebody behaved a certain way there were treatment facilities. The numbers weren’t so high and the beds weren’t so full. We used to take people to North Sound at Sedro-Woolly on a fairly regular basis. They would go there and take treatment and we wouldn’t see them again.

And there’s a stigma attached to mental health treatment. I call it the ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ stigma, where people have this vision of mental health treatment being a warehouse of mentally ill people that are abused and neglected. We certainly don’t want that  as a solution.”

Public Perceptions

M. “Public perceptions can be easy and quick and people use them as an arguing point.”

E. “I think one of the problems with perception is that they only see the people who don’t succeed from the programs. They don’t see the success stories because the success stories are relatively quiet. They happen slowly and it may or may not be because of a police interaction, or a series of calls to the police. Sometimes it is. A lot of times, these individual programs that are in place, the programs attract the people who want the services. In drug court, even if you are a little bit cynical it’s still a success. If you measure it by objective measures, it’s still a success.”

R. “I know people in this community who are successful graduates of drug court who are now working and are functional people in our society. I also know people who have failed drug court, or graduated and relapsed. That’s the horrible nature of addiction. Treatment can certainly be successful, but it’s directly related to the commitment of the person who needs to be treated.

I hate the fact that one of the best interventions tools we have is incarceration, because it’s less than ideal, for sure. But there’s an opportunity created there. So, somebody spends three months in the Island County jail. They sober up and they clean up, they’re getting regular food, so there’s an opportunity, which is why we heavily invest in that treatment and all the other things we’ve got going on in jail. Here’s a break in the action and it gets people focused. But it’s not the best solution in the world. It’s just an option we have in the tool box.

Mentally ill people don’t necessarily belong in jail, although sometimes mentally ill people commit crimes that they need to be held accountable for just like anybody else. Addiction, on the other hand, if your issue is just drug addiction, there’s an opportunity there for intervention. There’s also an opportunity for mental health intervention, we do that too. But it doesn’t seem like enough; we don’t want people to have to get arrested just to get treatment.”

M. “Who wants treatment? People can be lying to you, they can honestly be asking for help….”

R. “In a perfect world, if we treated all the people who were willing to get help, and they were all successful, we’re still going to have a significant population of people that aren’t. What do you do with that? At the same time, the community still has that issue in their backyard. I don’t know the answer.

Now, there are people out there whose mindset is: ‘I don’t care – I just want it gone.’ And no amount of rational is going to change some of those personalities.”

M. “You mentioned that mental health issues and behaviors represent the bulk of what you deal with.”

R. “And all the associated stuff that comes with that, whether it be trespassing, or burglary, or shoplifting or whatever. All of that is sort of the mouth of the funnel, if you will, of how they get into the system, right? That’s not to say that we don’t have people out there that are just flat out criminals and will steal your stuff. But one of the things that is an absolute truism, and you will never convince me otherwise, is that drug use absolutely, is the biggest driver in criminal behavior. And we’ve proven it locally when we’ve been able to be proactive in drug enforcement. We see an immediate drop in property crime. Burglaries go down because the people doing burglaries are involved in the drug culture.”     

Opioid Outreach

M. “Approximately when did the Opioid Outreach get started in Island County?”

R. “The conversation started in 2015 and 2016. We actually started hiring people in 2016 and getting boots on the ground in late 2017. We started out with one, then there were two people. The frustration for a lot of citizens that I talk to is: how many people have you cured? Well, there’s a fundamental misunderstanding about addiction out there. And how long it takes to do that.

When I’m talking to a group, and this comes up, I say, raise your hand if you were ever a smoker and you tried to quit smoking and how difficult was that for you? Some say I just quit cold turkey, some people say it took me 10 years to quit smoking. And that’s the nature of addiction. Emotionally, what people see, is a problem that they want to go away. And I don’t think there’s a shortcut on how to get that done. We have to keep trying different things and we have to keep applying different tools until we figure out what combination works.”  

Behavioral Outreach

M. “Can you tell me more about the Behavioral Outreach programs?”

R. “We’ve developed a co-responding program where referrals are made. All of our Opioid Outreach workers have done ride alongs and established relationships with deputies so they can work together better. They do a combination of referrals and ride alongs and they get a lot of referrals from other places as well. Faith based operations, other mental health contacts may occur, other community health contacts may occur, maybe nursing programs or other providers.”

E. “Also, we have a very robust opioid outreach on Camano and one of our deputies is key to that. It’s a core competency and an interest that he has…This deputy embeds with an outreach opioid coordinator who is assigned to Camano.”

Homeless Situation

M. “How do you handle clearing homeless encampments?”

R. “My frustration is, sometimes, the level of bureaucracy that plays a role in these situations. There are a couple of very significant Supreme Court decisions that limit what we can do, and I’ve tried to make the public aware of that. Common sense says, why do we allow that behavior? The public wants the problem to go away and we would like it to go away too. We would like the whole problem of homelessness, and drug addiction and mental illness and all those things, those visible problems that we    deal with, to go away too. But there is no one solution and that’s why we’ve had to be so collaborative in our approaches.”

R. “The only even remotely effective way we’ve been able to deal with that is try to take a multi-faceted approach. We apply mental health professionals to it, we apply what limited housing opportunities are available by folks who have expertise in housing, and we try to coach, counsel and control these people into making some kind of change. Every once in a while it works. But for the most part, they’re like: No, I’m good, I’ll stay right here.

Another involvement to look into is code enforcement, and Mary Engle is the department head and has code enforcement officers. They have a perspective, especially as it pertains to RVs and housing.”

E. “Because some of the time the problem isn’t a group of people in an RV. Sometimes the neighborhood problem is a group of people in a residence, or on a property that they own. They have every legal right to be there, but still, there’s a problem there that needs to be addressed. And we can’t just go and arrest people.”  

Deputy Hiring and Training

M. “I would imagine the training for your deputies is extensive.”

R. “The application process is far more stringent than most job applications. All of our applicants go through a public safety testing process where they take a basic knowledge assessment test. Depending on their score, they get placed on a civil service list, and after that we do a complete background check. We contact previous employers, neighbors, family, do a fingerprint check and get an assessment of their character. In addition to that, they are all required to take a mental health evaluation and a polygraph before they even enter any training. This is before they are offered a job. Then, once they go to their training, it’s a minimum of 12 weeks training with a field training officer, very well laid out, best practice oriented from state guidelines. And then, they are shadowed for awhile, placed on a shift with someone they can bounce things off of for the first year of their appointment.  And they are on probation for a year, from the completion of their academy date, not their hire date. So it’s a pretty extensive application process.”     

“Their training includes dealing with mental health issues and substance abuse disorders and all the legal portions as well as some coaching about how to interact with people who are in some sort of crisis. It’s a foundational training, and then of course, experience builds on that. And there’s ongoing training throughout the year.”

M. “I have not heard anyone question the competency of your deputies.”

R. “We are super fortunate, well, fortunate combined with process. We don’t just hire the next person who comes through the door, we use a pretty good vetting system, and we have a culture that leads to professional interactions. That’s not always the case in some other places in the country. Sometimes things don’t end well. But I think we’ve done everything we can to prepare to prevent that.”

My heartfelt thanks to Island County Sheriff Rick Felici, and his Chief Criminal Deputy, Evan Tingstad, for their time and candor in helping me better understand what happens when an Island County deputy answers a call.  Mike Diamanti