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must be forced by our criminal legal system to get help. As the Mayor argued during the July 18th city council meeting, "Most of them say, `No thank you. We don't want a program. We'd rather be on the streets.' Whether they are high, whether they are drunk ... police need to stop and make contact with them ... but I can tell you right now, sometimes jail saves people ... it saves them from themselves." The real problem is that Santa Ana is experiencing a dire shortage of voluntary behavioral and mental health care and affordable housing. Waits for mental health and substance use treatment are long at best, and are rarely available on demand. Evidence shows that jails are likely to traumatize people, are not conducive to care and recovery, and conflict with the Office of the Surgeon General findings that never recommend jail as a means for care and recovery. Even the City Manager'siff ort on the proposal notes that "...jails are primarily designed to detain individuals who have been arrested and are awaiting trial or sentencing... the facilities and staff at the Santa Ana jail may not have the expertise or resources to provide the level of care needed." Santa Ana's waiting list for housing choice vouchers is closed, as are the lists for all other housing authorities in Orange County. These lists remain closed for many years, then open for narrow windows of time, after which applicants wait years longer to receive subsidized affordable housing. Meanwhile, market rate rent continues to spiral out -of -control. Who will be impacted? While the Intoxication Detention and Service Offering Policy does not overtly single out unhoused community members, comments by the mayor and council members during the July 18th city council meeting make clear that the underlying goal of this policy is to use law enforcement to forcibly clear public places of visibly unhoused and unsheltered neighbors. In fact, in an attempt to justify the policy, the Mayor engaged in unacceptable speech during discussion of agenda item #39 that otherized and denigrated unhoused residents and perpetuated several unsubstantiated, inflammatory, false, and broad brush stereotypes targeting them. This policy will be harmful. While some on the council argued that this policy will be helpful, it will only target and hurt people. Community members will be needlessly traumatized, exposed to unlawful searches during the detention and processing, separated from their belongings and companions, displaced, and exposed to criminalization and a high likelihood of other charges —all so they can receive a flier that could have been handed out or left available in a public area. Criminalization harms our entire community. The proposal would put more untrained discretionary power in the hands of the police department, which already monopolizes over a third of the city's budget. The police department already spends a large share of its resources criminalizing unhoused community members, who are routinely harassed, displaced, cited, and jailed for being unhoused—but are rarely offered a safe, permanent, affordable home. Criminalizing substance use —the "war on drugs" is a failed and retro rade oolicy that is both immoral and ineffective. It has only served to expand our bloated carceral system, wage war on poor people and communities of color, and stigmatize substance use as a personal failure rather