LYNNWOOD — The people Ashley Dawson is trying to help have a lot in common with the people who come knocking at Silver Creek Family Church, asking for $20.
Sometimes, they’re the same weathered faces.
Dawson, a social worker embedded in the Lynnwood Police Department for about a year, keeps a board with magnets in different categories — the names of over 100 men and women in all stages of homelessness and addiction. One man slept off the side of Highway 99. Last winter after months of check-ins and conversations, he told Dawson he was ready to kick his habit.
“When a person is finally ready to jump on board with treatment, we have to capitalize on that momentum in the moment, and we want to do that step-by-step, second-by-second,” Dawson said.
Yet Dawson had an ever-growing list.
“We can’t be the only ones to do this,” she thought.
She called Silver Creek. She’d met the pastors through quarterly talks between police and faith leaders at a group called Cops & Clergy. The night the man came off the street, the church got him into a hotel.
“His hands were swollen and cracked,” said Elizabeth Volz, a co-pastor. “He was in bad shape.”
Church leaders brought him clothes, a new blanket and other necessities. Members who had lived with addiction wrote him letters of encouragement. Since then he has been recovering east of the Cascades.
Lynnwood police hope this is a new example of how local police, social workers and churches can combat addiction together. Pastors, rabbis and imams can reach people in ways that the cops, and even social workers, cannot.
“We want to love people wherever they are in life,” Volz said. “ … We’re the hospital for people who are broken, spiritually.”
Homelessness and addiction are complicated, intertwined problems that can’t be rooted out by police alone. Overdoses from opioids — only opioids, no other drugs — killed more people than car crashes in the United States in 2017, according to the latest data.
“We truly are standing at the bottom of a really big mountain, and it’s time to start climbing it,” Dawson said.
This month officers asked churches to volunteer for training, to do work like Silver Creek’s example. Dawson made the pitch at a meeting of Cops & Clergy, a group that was inspired by Bothell police, by way of another police department in California.
Sgt. Cole Langdon and the city police chaplain, Dale Schlack, knocked on doors and sent emails almost two years ago, inviting religious leaders to get to know the police. The meetings offer a rare chance for leaders from different faiths to get to know one another, too.
“We may not have the exact same beliefs, but we all desire for the same community,” said Brent Hudson, the other co-pastor at Silver Creek.
For a long time, the police department was faceless to Hudson. Now when he thinks of police, he thinks of Langdon and Dawson.
Officers have offered lessons about mass shootings and how places of worship can be resources during natural disasters. The police see faith leaders as a link to their congregations. Some citizens might never interact with officers otherwise.
At the most recent meeting in early December, about 30 members of ministries and churches attended: Baptist, Lutheran, Nazarene, Presbyterian, Scientologist, Sikh. Basically, the idea is to break down misunderstandings.
Chief Tom Davis shared a letter from a former homeless drug addict, to a Lynnwood patrol officer who’d arrested him once.
“I want to first apologize for my poor behavior I exhibited toward you, in the course of doing your job,” the letter read. “ … I want to thank you for always being respectful to me, when we did encounter each other, even if I wasn’t respectful to you.”
Langdon, who described himself as a lapsed Catholic, has offered personal stories from work, life and the intersection of the two.
He spoke about recent police training in how to defuse tense standoffs. He recalled a real-life example from late October.
In this case, officers were called to a man outside a hotel with a gun to his chest. He’d been hearing voices in his head. He held up two magazines and told officers he had plenty of ammo. So how were police supposed to interpret that?
“One of the emotions I’ll have, and I’ll be a little vulnerable here for a minute, is how lonely it felt out there,” Langdon said. “We’re dealing with a no-win situation.”
The standoff wore on. Police kept their distance while the man exhausted himself.
Once he showed enough of his body for a clean shot, officers fired less-lethal rounds. The impact, like being hit by a softball, caused him to drop the gun and surrender.
“It’s important to understand that this isn’t Hollywood. These are real people out here,” Langdon said. “The officers, afterward, were very raw, because this is somebody they cared about, somebody they’d built a rapport with in previous contacts. This is not some predator out there. This is somebody who really needed help.”
For the rest of the hour, Dawson briefed pastors on what she’d learned from a year on the front lines of the opioid crisis. She started another list, passing around a sheet for churches to sign up to help.
She left the Lynnwood Convention Center with 19 new names.
Caleb Hutton: 425-339-3454; chutton@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @snocaleb.
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