Brian Shrader
speaker
63 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Brian Shrader’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Even then, sometimes it's difficult because we don't have a path. Our mental health diversion program in Hillsborough County, Florida has a six-month wait list. And the answer to the question for people who've committed crimes and then sometimes when they're having a true mental health break, there'll be crime after crime. They may get arrested for something, manage to get out.
They're going to pick up something else right away. Now their bond gets revoked. And the answer is they just sit in jail for six months waiting to see if they get into the diversion program. And the jail gives no treatment. Am I coming close?
And that's the key. You've got to play on the idea. And I don't want to be too cynical and I don't want to get in trouble with any of my judge friends. They want to do the least amount of work necessary to get through their dockets. And so do the prosecutors. They're not paid by the case. They're not paid by the hour.
And so if you can convince them that this is a way to get the files off their desk for good. That's going to be one of the first thing that's going to trigger. And it's a very cynical view. I think a lot of the people that I work across from or up on the bench are good hearted people who, if they got a chance to really help, someone would want to do it because they're good people.
But from a more cynical standpoint, if we can just show
the system in general that this is a way to get people out of it to stop being a burden i use the air quotes on that because it's it's not how i feel about it but that's how a lot of people would see it if we can get them to see that then maybe it's worth investing in and we've seen it in the drug treatment we've seen some progress it is not where it needs to be
We still over-incarcerate for drug abuse issues. We still just approach the whole system wrong. But if someone gets arrested on multiple drug charges, I can get them into a rehabilitation facility quick. I can facilitate that and the courts are ready for it. There are forms with everything almost filled out for you to get a lot of that done.
Comes to mental health, we're starting from scratch in every single case.
You're going to have to start with the Florida Bar. The Florida Supreme Court started mandating mental health training for prosecutors. When I was a prosecutor, we took all the really cool classes that we thought were exciting about murders and gang prosecution and blood and gut stuff. We weren't interested in the mental health stuff.
Like I said, I spent a short time in the mental health diversion program because it was just part of the promotion chain. You had to serve your time in there before you could go to the next step. It wasn't a destination. It wasn't anything anyone was deciding to focus on.
But it extends not just between kind of the people who we see maybe at the top of the pyramid, the judges, the prosecutors, law enforcement, but even the people who work under them. For example, a mental health client goes to the jail. They put them on opioid withdrawal therapy.
The guy had never done a single opioid, but he was presenting with a lot of the same symptoms as someone who was on fentanyl or some strong opioid. And they're telling him he's going to take all this medication and go through opioid withdrawal. It was a bipolar situation. Aren't there nurses and doctors there doing these evaluations? And shouldn't they be trained to recognize this right away?
And when they see it, shouldn't they have an obligation to say, hey, look, red flag. This is a situation that needs to be treated differently. and especially shouldn't be treated, again, in ways that escalate, locking them in some small cell alone, tripping them down naked into a paper jumpsuit.
All of these hands-on with people can be very overstimulating, very scary, and it can really trigger things to get much worse. We've got to train everybody on that, and there has to be accountability. And unfortunately, accountability in the criminal justice system for law enforcement tends to only come after someone dies.
That's the answer, is we've got to show them The system will be saved because clearly saving an individual is not enough to motivate anybody. Otherwise, this would have been done by now. But we still have first responders who are not properly trained, and we don't have people to accompany them to situations who are, if that was a possibility.
We don't have prosecutors who are trained to recognize it. I need to take a step back there. We don't have prosecutors with the resources to even try and evaluate it if they wanted to. I think at one point I had a thousand files when I was a prosecutor assigned to me and we were turning these things like every 90 days. I wasn't reading the police reports.
I wasn't digging into each file in any detail.
i was looking at the general allegations looking at their criminal history making a plea offer and trusting that the defense attorneys were going to do it but a lot of these individuals are going to end up with public defenders who also are taxed to the maximum who have very little resources and have too many files assigned to them and a lot of public defenders are tremendous attorneys and tremendous people who really are trying to do the best they can but
They're given an impossible task. And so absent someone at the public defender's office being willing to allocate resources that they may not even have, it's not going to get flagged there. We have to have a system, number one, to identify the issues.
because right now i think there's a lot of under reporting or under consideration of how significant the problem is uh because we don't know we don't know what's out there especially in some of the homeless population people who aren't getting medical treatment regularly they're not being diagnosed by anyone ever in a lifetime and so that's not getting reported you know we talk about one percent or these low percentages i think much higher percent in reality
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