Mr. Kellen Russoniello:

Ideally, we would have all of the partners at the table coming together to form this policy. Especially if a decriminalisation scheme was to move forward in the way that measure 110 was written, we would want to have police at the table because they are such an integral part of the implementation of measure 110. As I mentioned, I think there might be alternate ways to think about what the role of police is. From what I have heard from many police departments, they do not want to be the ones who are responding in many of these situations - they would rather leave it to health professionals. However, I am not sure that measure 110 was drafted in the best way possible to achieve that outcome because it relied so heavily, at least initially, on police being the ones who interact with people and the citation system, which became a focal point of whether measure 110 was living up to its expectations. More generally, to answer the Deputy’s question, yes, I think it is important to have all the stakeholders at the table and to ensure their needs are being met.