The Policing Alternatives and Diversion Initiative, or PAD, said this will be the first time there’s a sobering center in Atlanta since before the 1996 Olympics.

The organization launched its own pre-arrest diversion mobile response in 2017. The following year, the Fulton County Justice and Mental Health Taskforce recommended a physical location

Moki Macias, the executive director of Policing Alternatives and Diversion Initiative (PAD), discusses the findings of the Justice Policy Board’s analysis of Fulton County’s jail population that calls for more diversion work to reduce overcrowding.

“We exist because community members have been asking for years that the city change course from a culture of punishment and an assumption that jail is a place where people should be disappeared to if they are poor, or they are suffering in public. When it comes to the decisions that our city and our county make about how to address the fact that so many people who fit that bill are languishing in our jails — we are squarely in the middle of the conversation, whether we like it or not,” Macias said. “We are making changes [to] how our city responds to these really difficult challenges, and we are just begging those partners that we have been working with for years at the city and the county to stay the course.”

“Our current system, which we have had in place for decades, is that the police are available to respond to basically any concern,” Macias said. “And the expectation is that they will make that person disappear.”

But she says if that person is arrested for a minor offense, they’re generally released with all the same problems they had to begin with, now with the added trauma of their time in jail. Macias says that’s why a big part of PAD’s work is community education.

“Our work exposes on some level… where there’s more work to do to make sure we that we are building the kind of systems that really serve people,” explained Macias [the Executive Director of PAD]. Macias along with Chyna Quarker, the referral coordinator for PAD, were guests on Thursday’s edition of ‘Closer Look.’ They told show host Rose Scott about expanding the program citywide and how the expansion will continue efforts of reimagining public safety and rethinking how poverty is seen and defined.

Residents of Atlanta can now call a non-emergency number to ask for help with concerns related to mental health, substance use or extreme poverty rather than calling 911, city officials said.