Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer has been involved in the criminal justice system for more than 20 years. During that time, he has seen how mental illness and substance use disorders impact society as a whole and the devastation they can have on families. In this episode, he shares some of his insights - both personal and professional - as well as what is happening in Orange County's mental health arena.
Kate Gosney:
Hello, and welcome to the Hope Happens Here Podcast. I'm Kate Gosney Hoffman. Today, we sat down with the district attorney, Todd Spitzer. He is the district attorney of Orange County. Todd has been in the criminal justice system for so long, has had many different chapters in it and has dedicated his life to keeping families safe. We had a great conversation about what he is doing in the world of mental health in the criminal justice system. He made time for us today and it was so awesome to talk to him. Well, Hey, welcome.
Todd Spitzer:
Well thank you very much. I'm happy to be here.
Kate Gosney:
We are sitting here with district attorney, Todd Spitzer at the Hope Happens Here Podcast, and we are so grateful to have you here.
Todd Spitzer:
Thanks for having me.
Kate Gosney:
I know you are a busy, busy man so,
Todd Spitzer:
Not that busy, I just don't like traffic.
Kate Gosney:
Yeah, me either. That's kind of the one good thing of this past year. It's lightened a little bit with everybody's staying home, but thank you. And so, as we were talking about before, this is casual and what I'm most interested in is your personal experience and your perspective on things you're on the front lines of so much. And there's only so much we can talk about in 30 minute. We like to keep the show to about 30 minutes or so. And, but mental health and the criminal justice system is a very big topic. There's a lot under that umbrella. But I guess we could just start with why for you, I want to know for you personally, first of all, how did you get into this work, the work that you're doing now? How long have you been doing this? How did you get here? Let's start there. How did you get here?
Todd Spitzer:
Actually, I'd like to start with, I'm going to take over this interview. I want to start with so, before I got into being a prosecutor and I went to law school, I lived with my uncle, Rick and my uncle Rick, I was going to Hastings Law School and getting my master's at Berkeley. So I lived with my uncle, Rick in the city of Berkeley, and his two daughters are twins and they were paranoid schizophrenics. So my cousin Patsy, Patsy and Jane, Jane worked for the postal service and Patsy was diagnosed in absolutely paranoid schizophrenic. She didn't live with my uncle, Rick and I lived with my uncle, Rick. She lived on her own, she could be pretty much self-sufficient, but she refused to take meds. And she was in and out of problems with the law, little petty stuff, like she thinks somebody was trying to hurt her and she'd throw hot coffee on people and she'd get arrested every once in a while for assault and things like that.
Todd Spitzer:
So I watched firsthand just how devastating it was that we had mental illness in the family and my uncle, Rick, older guy, I was living with him and when I was in law school, he was already in his eighties. And it was just such a struggle. I think he was embarrassed by it. I don't think he understood how to handle it. He wasn't, or didn't really know how to be supportive. And, I think he was kind of shamed about it. So, now with the work I do and the overwhelming impact that I see that mental illness has on both crime and public safety and families. My mom was a marriage and family therapist when they called it MFTs in those days. And I've always come from a kind of a touchy, feely family. And I've just tried to be very introspective and thank God, myself, my wife, my kids, our kids are healthy and mentally stable. And I just feel like we're so blessed.
Todd Spitzer:
And I want to do something significant to try to help people who find themselves dealing with these kinds of really dire situations because it's not just about the offender. I remember when my aunt, Billy and my uncle, Jerry, that's my dad's brother and his wife, their son, Michael, they literally had to kick out of the house. He was drug addict, stealing all the time and they literally lost track of him. They don't even know today if he's even alive because he had such a serious addiction. I don't think people understand. It's not just about the person who has a mental illness or an addiction. The devastation it does to families is so significant that there's a huge societal cost. So I'm really excited about all the things we're doing in Orange County. But I think we have so many opportunities, but we have a long way to go.
Kate Gosney:
Yes, absolutely. And that's one of the main things I wanted to talk with you about here, because I know you're doing a lot of work and then it touches a personal chord with you. So thank you for sharing that. That's awesome. And you have a heart for it and that is so needed. So, what are you working on? What's going on?
Todd Spitzer:
Well, I want to talk about Be Well, obviously we're talking about Be Well. And so let me tell you about Be Well and why I was at one of the key driving forces behind it, at least when I was a county supervisor. So, we didn't have a mental health crisis center, anything like that in Orange County. When I was a prosecutor in the early days, and I'm talking about over 30 years ago now, I was a police officer, I was a volunteer police officer for the city of Los Angeles. And I would take people into custody for being under the influence of drugs or overdosing on heroin, and we had a lot of heroin. I worked in east Los Angeles and we could take people to a place called the Weingart Center, which is still there in Los Angeles. And instead of having to take people to jail for being under the influence of drugs or alcohol, we could take them to this place, drop them off and they could get these kinds of services.
Todd Spitzer:
I always wondered, 30 years later, why in the world does a place like Orange County not have a public institution like that, where we could handle our own. So, for example, we shouldn't have our police officers, first of all, being dealing with the mentally ill. And I hope we can talk about that because I'm a very supportive of a dual 911 system, and I'd like to share those thoughts if I could later on.
Kate Gosney:
Absolutely, yeah.
Todd Spitzer:
But we needed a place where the police can drop people off who need help and then get back and really deal with really serious crimes. And let those individuals get turned over to professionals who can help them with their particular situation. So we didn't have that.
Todd Spitzer:
So, there's five county supervisors in Orange County. And before I became DA, I was a county supervisor twice. The second time we decided as a county, we would try to site and build one of these facilities. And no county supervisor wanted it in their district. The communities in general are always, like homeless shelters, they don't want them, they obviously have a not-in-my-backyard mentality. They think it's going to bring in the worst elements. It's going to be dirty. It's going to be bring down their property values. So I raised my hand. I said the hell with it, probably because of my experience with my cousin and because I just, my mom and I was like, okay, if we can find a location in the third supervisoral district, I'll do it in my district.
Todd Spitzer:
I'll take the heat, I'll go out and hold the town halls and talk to the various communities. And so we cited Be Well where Be Well is on Anita Street, and there was a different building there and it had to be torn down. And I was the one that led the different public hearings and we had town halls and the faith-based community, especially the Catholic Church. The diocese was hugely helpful with pulling this whole thing off and dealing with public outcry against it. And we held various town halls and I told the community, "Look, you may not vote for me ever again in the future, you may think I'm here to destroy your communities, none of that is true, but we've got to do something in Orange County because we're a big county. We're the third largest county in California and my office, for example, the DA's office now, it's the sixth largest prosecutor's office in the country. And I have 300 lawyers, 150 investigators, 900 employees, we have $150 million budget. It's a real deal. And so we all have a responsibility to deal with these issues.
Todd Spitzer:
So we did, and we had a problem with the homeless and the Riverbed near Angel Stadium. We cleared that out of my district and we needed a place to put people. So we built a homeless shelter, and now we have a crisis intervention center and I'm just tickled about it. I couldn't be more excited about it. And I actually am working on a program now in the DA's office, I've grabbed a program manager from the healthcare agency, I've grabbed a program manager from social services and they are helping me and my lawyers develop a program to deal with the mentally ill and those who are addicted to drugs prior to us filing criminal charges, to see if we can start treating people as opposed to prosecuting people.
Kate Gosney:
Yeah, so having an earlier intervention to prevent.
Todd Spitzer:
I want the earliest intervention as possible, and I'm sick and tired of the cycle of people just churning through the system because the system continues to fail them. And they don't have the kinds of opportunities because they just can't beat their demons.
Kate Gosney:
Right. And I just want to say too, going back to what you were saying about Be Well, I am very aware of what a large undertaking this has been and the role that you've played in it, and what you just described, how much has gone into rallying, all these troops from all these different camps in a way to kind of get on the same page. It has been a lot. So I just kind of want to acknowledge that and what a big accomplishment this is.
Todd Spitzer:
There's so many people that have been obviously involved in this and it is exciting. That's one thing I think that stands out about Orange County in particular, we're amazing collaborators, people work together, whether it's in the criminal justice system, the department heads, various county agencies, we really work together because, why? Because we really have a vision of what we want Orange County to look like and how we want to protect it. And we can see what's happening in places like Los Angeles that cannot get control of their social issues. And I do not want to emulate in most ways, things that are happening in Los Angeles. Los Angeles is a clear example of failure to me. And I do not want that to happen, the kinds of things that are happening in LA to happen in Orange County.
Kate Gosney:
And you want to set the standard, right? The gold standard of how to be different and do it well.
Todd Spitzer:
Look, San Antonio is kind of the model that started for purposes of crisis intervention centers. I went to San Antonio. I wanted to see how it worked. That was pretty much the impetus for how Be Well, right? So, you bring people in, they're under the influence of alcohol, they're under the influence of drugs and they can go into a sobering station and just get off of whatever's inside of them and with the support and medical staff and everything like that. Then, they make a decision. They're presented at least with a question: Are you interested in changing this cycle of getting high every day, getting drunk every day and basically spiraling downward? Do you want some hope? Do you want some opportunity?
Todd Spitzer:
Let me just tell you how crazy this is. It takes on average about 35 visits to the sobering station before most addicts, most drunks have an epiphany that indicates: You know what, I'm going to go at Be Well to be upstairs, second floor, and San Antonio is across the hall, and go into detox. Because, for anybody who's addicted to anything, I know when I try to wean myself off coffee, because I'm a terrible coffee addict, I get horrible headaches. When you put things in your system that are not there naturally trying to get them out of your system can have horrible effects, and we've seen pictures at least. I've seen drug addicts withdrawing, it's not a pleasant experience. They don't want to go through it. So, they'd rather get it fixed, and then they go on their merry way until they need their next fix, which is not a way to lead a life.
Todd Spitzer:
So, I'm trying to build a criminal justice system in Orange County where if you agree, person who's under the influence, which is a crime, if you agree to go into treatment, I will agree not to file those criminal charges against you. I'm literally trying to create incentives for people to get help because of the leverage I have to charge them with a crime. The sad part is that in California, after proposition 47, it used to be a felony to possess drugs, now it's a misdemeanor. And unfortunately, it used to be, if you got caught with drugs, if you did a treatment program, you could get a dismissal. Now that's gone because it's a misdemeanor. And a lot of, unfortunately, people who are in that lifestyle, they have such a criminal history already. Another misdemeanor is not that big deal to them. So, we've got to figure this all out but I as a DA, I'm trying to build leverage to help people so that they don't get into more trouble, get clean in their lives.
Kate Gosney:
And I can imagine that's a hard balance for you too, right? Well, I guess more of a question of how do you balance the role that you play because you have to, you're a prosecutor, right? Not this role,
Todd Spitzer:
But we're compassionate.
Kate Gosney:
Well, that's what I was going to say is how do you... You have to have both compassion and a heart for this and you have to have that hard line in the sand, right? So, how do you do that?
Todd Spitzer:
Well, I think it goes back to you who you are, how you were brought up, who your influences are. Look, when I started in the DA's office in 1990, it was an old school mentality. Over 30 years ago, I became a prosecutor and we were told, "Prosecute this person, get the most jail time, get the most convictions you can get. Forget about it, move on to your next case." That's so unenlightened and it's...
Kate Gosney:
Not helpful.
Todd Spitzer:
It doesn't do anything for society. That's what's resulted in mass incarceration, that's what's resulted in high recidivism rates, just churning people through a system and not trying to give them any other opportunities is, quite frank, it's quite sickening to me. So, it used to be, we got our raises and our promotions in the DA's office based upon the number of trials and convictions. We were measured by how hard charging we were. Wow. And I've changed that model evaluation to the whole prosecutor. What are you doing to change people's lives? What are you doing to be good colleagues and what are you doing to influence and help society. And we're rewarding a lot of other contributions that your typical prosecutor has never even been rewarded for.
Kate Gosney:
That's great. So you're looking more at the big picture and long lasting change is what you're driving towards instead of just kind of let's get in, let's get out, let's just do this quickly.
Todd Spitzer:
We don't have a choice anymore. We don't have a choice. We are spending so many resources on keeping people in prisons and jails and we've got to figure out and we have to commit to a different way during business.
Kate Gosney:
Something has to shift. Something absolutely has to shift. You mentioned a little while ago about the dual 911 system. I want to hear about that. What is that for you?
Todd Spitzer:
So today, when I was a cop, any cop, if somebody is having a mental health crisis and the police are called, and what happens is the uniform show up in a patrol car, they're armed with weapons and tasers and pepper spray. And the person is just out of control and let's say they're breaking walls and windows and just dangerous, right? Which is why their family calls. Well, unfortunately what happens in so many of those cases is those people want to die. They want the cops to kill them, it's suicide by cop. The uniform somehow exacerbates the situation, escalates police officers are as much as they are dedicated to protecting the community, everything else they have not historically been trained and have the skills to deescalate situations. I know in certain communities, the families are afraid to ever call the police because in a situation like that, it's resulted in shootings and deaths of the one that they called the police just to get help.
Todd Spitzer:
And so we're going through a real crisis in a national conversation today about whether you should even call the police, if somebody in your family, or you observe somebody having a mental health crisis, because they'll end up dead. The police are doing a lot more training, but to me that's not good enough. What has to happen and it's happening successfully in other states and other major cities across the country is where either you have mental health dispatch. So if 911 operators are trained to dispatch a mental health team for a kind of call, that seems like a low grade crisis intervention. Some cases, if they're more elevated, both a mental health team is in a ride along or separate vehicle, but they are dispatched simultaneously. And the police get there at the same time. And they're the mental health professionals are the first ones to have the interaction. Whereas the uniform presence stays back or kind of hides out.
Todd Spitzer:
So, the situation doesn't get worse. So the city of Anaheim is the first and only city in Orange County right now. There's other entities that have crisis intervention teams and things like that. But Anaheim is doing a [pilot 00:00:18:20] where actually non-uniform only crisis intervention is dispatched for say certain types of crisis calls, but not at the highest level. And we're going to see how that works. And what I'm hoping is that for Orange County, we can implement a dual system where sometimes it's just mental health, depending on the call. Sometimes there'll be mental health with police in case things are bad. I'll give you an example. This is another thing I do that not a lot of people know. I'm the only person in Orange County, I'm legally and responsible for deciding whether a police officer is going to be charged with a homicide where they shoot a person.
Todd Spitzer:
Anytime, whether there's a death in the jail or death out in the field, I review all those cases for whether we're going to charge police officers.
Kate Gosney:
So, back stop with you?
Todd Spitzer:
Yeah, it's like one of my biggest responsibilities is to evaluate that. I get recommendations and input from my attorneys, but I make that ultimate decision. And I review so many cases where the police and I see the videos because we have body-worn cameras. Now in a lot of situations where I have one visualized for you where two Buena Park police officers walk up, man's in the middle of street, his family called because he's having a huge, huge crisis situation. And the police are telling him to stop. He won't stop. He won't stop. He won't stop. He keeps coming and then he pulls out two big knives from underneath his shirt and he continues to walk towards the officers and they kill him.
Todd Spitzer:
And that's the situation on a dual dispatch where let's say the police weren't there in a crisis intervention, unarmed, psych team is there and they walk up and a guy's got a non-tucked in shirt, and then suddenly he pulls out two knives. That's where things can go bad for civilians very, very quickly. So, we can't allow situations like that to escalate where the police aren't present. And that's why training of dispatch is so critical. But the point I want to make is that we really, really, need to invest in how we deal with these calls. And today the police are being asked to do all of that, and it's not working. Well, if your argument is: Oh yeah, they keep the peace and they down the situation, okay, fine. Call it a day, I guess, if that's the end of our analysis.
Todd Spitzer:
But if you really care about the fact that, what is that person going through, that's armed with two knives underneath his shirt, and he will not stop when the police tell him to stop and get down on his knees or do whatever so they can control the situation? That guy wants to die. In my opinion, I watch videos all the time where people are shot and killed and they literally do want to die. That means that person is in the ultimate crisis situation, right?
Kate Gosney:
Absolutely.
Todd Spitzer:
And that's not the part of the society that I'm proud of. It's not a part of society I want to be part of. I want to change that.
Kate Gosney:
Yeah, you want it to not get to that point.
Todd Spitzer:
Well, people are going to have crises. And during the pandemic, we're seeing horrible, horrible, horrible mental breakdowns, family structure breakdowns, things like that. But I can't control how, that's way outside my lane, about what's going on in society, and if I can control it, but I want to put steps and intervene in places where it's possible. So we can subdue that and not have people hurt. And then how do we get those people help ultimately?
Kate Gosney:
Well, it takes a village, doesn't it?
Todd Spitzer:
You don't, now we're going to go political. You're going to go Hillary Clinton on me.
Kate Gosney:
Does it not take a village to help somebody in crisis?
Todd Spitzer:
Well, it takes a community. I don't know about the village analogy. I live in a city, so... But, no, I'm just teasing you, but I do agree. I do agree that everybody,
Kate Gosney:
Everybody has their role to play. So you're talking about the police officer has a role to play, the dispatcher has the role to play. The mental health professional has a role to play. And that really, we talk about in mental health, we talk about wraparound services, continuum of care, and all those things, that lingo, that is the village, right? That is the community of helping the person, the families are impacted like you said, so much. And they play such an important role. And oftentimes the support for them is really hard to find or non-existent. And what does that look like? So what I'm hearing from you is you're trying to implement something that addresses that and creates different interventions than the way that it's always gone, slowing down the process a little bit. And there's steps in between, right?
Todd Spitzer:
Well, as a society, years and years ago, under the Lanterman-Petris Act, we got rid of all of our mental institutions so our jails and our prisons have become the place where we warehouse our mentally ill, if they get in trouble. And generally-
Kate Gosney:
That's wrong with that picture, right?
Todd Spitzer:
Yeah, well, of course. So, and we don't force meds in California. We don't. So, if you want to commit somebody under 11550, you want to deprive them of their freedom. You've got to find, or a court has to find, or that at least has to be a declaration. They're a danger to themselves or to others, right. To temporarily take away their freedom. Well, okay. If they're going to harm themselves or others, I get it. But that's a band-aid, because they've gotten to a point where I can actually grab them and isolate them.
Todd Spitzer:
How are we going to deal with people? That's why Be Well, and that's why the crisis stabilization center is so important because it caters not only to the people I've earlier described, people who are mentally ill, homeless, mentally ill, drug users, drunk in public, low-level criminal stuff. And then but it's also there for families and others when there's a crisis. We just built through funding with the board of supervisors, what's been about a year now through children's hospital, a crisis intervention for youth, for 10 beds. We never had that. We never had those kinds of crisis beds for kids. We have adolescent beds. So, it's baffling to me that Orange County can be this amazing place. We have really disparate communities. We have Anaheim Garden Grove, Santa Ana, we have [dents 00:25:03] .
Todd Spitzer:
Socioeconomic, generally, lower income levels in those areas. We have the Newport beaches, going to look good in the gals, the code of the causes, we have so many opportunities and we have so much wealth and so much influence in this county. And yet we have been so slow to grow up and add amenities in our county that are long overdue.
Kate Gosney:
What do you think that is?
Todd Spitzer:
I think there's been this attitude that Orange County doesn't have problems. I think that we've been really slow to acknowledge and accept our maturity and the fact that we are an urban core. We have demographically diverse people. We have social economic diversity. We were a huge melting pot and we have problems. We don't look like a big, because we don't look like a Chicago or New York, we don't look like a downtown Los Angeles. So, we don't look like a city, but Santa Ana is more dense per with the number of people living in Santa Ana, than most major cities.
Kate Gosney:
Definitely.
Todd Spitzer:
So I just think we've been slow to acknowledge and quite frankly, I think we've not wanted to acknowledge that we're a grown up municipality, urban core with urban problems.
Kate Gosney:
That doesn't exist here. That attitude of, that doesn't exist here. It's almost kind of like a collective shame. We'll just, that doesn't happen here. When in reality, we used to call Orange County rehab raw in a lot of ways. I worked in rehab for a very long time for drug and alcohol abuse. And the opportunities are endless for tons of treatment centers.
Todd Spitzer:
And just think about what you said that rehab row are the highest end rehab facilities milking insurance companies because I prosecute a lot of rehab centers for milking insurance companies unlawfully and engaging in unlawful procedures. But again, the point is, don't you need these kinds of facilities and these kinds of amenities in order to actually, it's just the opposite, you need them not to blind yourself in the reality check of what you actually have and you need to deal with it. They are necessary in order to preserve the quality of life that you do want to have.
Kate Gosney:
100% absolutely. So, it's a necessary thing to look at, not turn a blind eye on. In the world of therapy, we have a phrase called parallel process and parallel processes. When I'm working with a client, I need to be really aware, self-aware of my own process that's happening because a lot of the time what I'm going through personally, or in reaction to them is very similar to what my client might be going through as well. And this might sound a little out there, but when we're looking at what you... It made me think of that when you were talking about Orange County is sort of this syndrome of kind of denial, a little bit of, we're talking about the families who have mental illness in their or drug addiction in the families. There can be this sort of blind eye, because of shame, it's a reflection of me, I don't want to acknowledge it for whatever reason. There's a plethora of reason people ignore it in their families. But a lot of it kind of just boils down to shame.
Kate Gosney:
And then kind of as a community, we could also say the same thing, parallel that we don't really want to look at that because that makes us look bad. We're not one of these denser cities. We don't have those same kind of problems, look at us. And I appreciate that you're saying that because putting a spotlight on that, kind of calling it out, just saying, "Hey, no, it does exist. Let's do something about it because our quality of life, our quality of community depends on it." And it's really vital. So let's look it in the face. Let's de-stigmatize it, make it real because when we make things real, when we call it out, they're less frightening, right? So let's just look it in the face, look the dragon in the eye, do something about it.
Todd Spitzer:
Well, we are doing a lot about it now. I'm very proud of the things we're doing. We do have a long way to go. We need to collaborate a lot more. Some of us are still really in our silos and I'm just very excited about what the future holds. And I think that Be Well location, the institution, the potential of building another one further south in Orange County is incredibly hopeful for all of us. And I think at the end of the day, if we can help other families get through their situations, I think that makes us all better as citizens. And I'm just really proud to be a part of it.
Kate Gosney:
Wow. I'm so happy that you're doing what you're doing and who you are and that it's coming from a personal place too. I think that makes a really big difference. So I honor that and I appreciate it. And thank you so much.
Todd Spitzer:
Thank you.