- The Schenectady Cares program is a program that started in 2019, and it's based on a kind of a collaboration with not only the Schenectady Police Department, but the Office of Community Services here at Schenectady County, New Choices Recovery Center, and also Catholic Charities.

(intriguing music) We started it based off of a program out of Massachusetts, and basically what was happening out there was a small agency in Gloucester, Mass, opened their doors and said, if you're struggling with substance use disorder, you don't know where to go, you can walk into the police department with complete amnesty and you can get connected to services that work for you there.

So in 2019, we adopted the program here in the city of Schenectady.

And so, now, an individual can walk into the Schenectady Police Department and they can connect to services that are harm reduction based that range from safe syringes, for example, or it could be a long-term rehab center, whatever works for somebody.

So in 2021, we kind of redefined Schenectady Cares again and opened up what would be considered phase two of it.

We learned through partnership with the fire department where non-fatal overdoses occurred in our community, we can get it into an OD mapping system, which actually plots it for us and can really kind of show us where overdoses are occurring.

So that's good for those services that are out there that may wanna target areas of the city that really could use the services.

And so, now what we're doing is when we find a non-fatal overdose in the community, we're able to get that data into the hands of those individuals at New Choices and Catholic Charities, and those are peers and counselors there who then reach out to an individual after a non-fatal overdose and they try to find services that work for them.

I think phase two actually in many ways is even more impactful because this is bringing services to that individual.

Since 2021, about 950 post non-fatal overdose referrals have gone out to Catholic Charities and New Choices.

- An overdose follow up is when we go and knock on the door of an address where an overdose occurred and saying, you know, we understand that you had a 911 here yesterday and there was an overdose, can we help?

Here's information, here's Narcan, would you like to talk to anybody?

That kind of thing.

We offer the full continuum of services, treatment, intervention, medication, counseling, residential programs, as well as support for recovery.

- We wanna see more police agencies out there adopting this kind of methodology towards substance use in their community.

But at the same time, I think we also have to look at collaborations.

It needs to be a well-rounded approach, we can't put it all on public health, we can't put it all on our medics, we can't put it all on law enforcement, but together we could kind of carry this a little bit better.

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