San Diego police expanded a team for serious addiction cases. Success is never guaranteed.

On Tuesday morning, five San Diego police officers went looking for one man.

There was no guarantee they’d find him. Even if they did, it wasn’t a given that he’d talk. And even if he talked, who knew if the guy would agree to sign up for a detox program.

For the past year, a new group at the San Diego Police Department has devoted its days to residents struggling with drug and alcohol addiction. The Intervention Services Team exists somewhere between social workers and beat cops: The officers can make arrests, but their marching orders are mainly to get people into treatment.

“This was a change for me,” said Carlos Navarro, a member of the team who’s been a police officer for more than 25 years. Previously, he felt like the correct response to most drug-related incidents was, “Everyone gets handcuffs!”

Beyond the moral case for the team’s approach, there’s an economic argument.

Some individuals the officers work with may have more than 100 arrests on their record. Others might be demanding ambulances three times a day. A police sergeant estimated that one person recently cost the city $250,000 in man hours alone from officers, firefighters and paramedics.

Studies out of Point Loma Nazarene University and the Economic Roundtable, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit, have similarly found that a few people can cost taxpayers millions upon millions of dollars.

Nor are jails a budget panacea: The Sheriff’s Office recently said the tens of millions it’s spending to lock up residents under California’s new, stricter drug laws are causing the department to divert money away from infrastructure projects.

But there’s no simple way to convince somebody to radically alter their life. There’s just the slow, often convoluted work of building relationships.

The team first drove to Chicano Park in Barrio Logan. The officers knew from previous interactions that the man they were looking for sometimes hung out in the area. If nothing else, finding him might help maintain rapport.

Officers parked on the street and stepped outside. Their vehicles were unmarked and much of the group wore collared shirts and slacks. They could’ve been mistaken for lawyers if it weren’t for the badges and guns.

The guy in question wasn’t visible, but other people walked up, some of whom seemed to recognize the officers. One person in a gray T-shirt needed a ride to a community resource fair. Another said he had just drank a fair amount of vodka and wanted help sobering up. A third started hitting on the sergeant in charge and asked for her phone number. (She politely declined his advances.)

They also received a tip: Someone said the man was in a local hospital. If they hurried, the team might be able to catch him before he discharged.

The group split up. One pair of officers drove the man in the T-shirt to the fair. Others took the vodka drinker to the McAlister Institute’s Recovery and Bridge Center, a small, unassuming building in San Diego’s Grant Hill neighborhood that offers short-term detox beds. Once that drop-off was done, they could head toward the hospital.

For years, this type of work in the police department was largely done by one officer: David McGowan.

McGowan functioned as a one-man intervention services unit, often fielding middle-of-the-night phone messages and ferrying people to and from rehab. He discussed getting a partner with department leadership, but the pandemic delayed that effort until September 2024, when officials ended up creating a full five-person team.

“It was a huge relief for me,” McGowan said in an interview earlier this year.

The five officers meet some of the people they work with on the street. Others are referred to them through colleagues or outside agencies, and the group has so far gotten at least 115 individuals into detox and treatment programs, according to a city spokesperson.

“It’s not traditional police work,” McGowan said. “But it’s very effective.”

McGowan is now an acting sergeant with the department’s Homeless Outreach Team. His replacement on Intervention Services is Anthony Sanchez, one of the cops who pulled up Tuesday to UC San Diego Health’s Hillcrest Medical Center.

Sanchez and Officer Matt Levasseur approached the emergency room entrance, conferred briefly with a security guard and then vanished through the door.

Their sergeant, Kayla Evans, waited on a nearby sidewalk.

Five minutes passed, then 15. No word from the officers inside. Perhaps the guy had already left. Or maybe he was angry to see cops show up without warning. Or — and this was one of the hardest parts of the officers’ jobs — it was possible the man did want to commit to a long-term sobriety program and there just weren’t any open beds.

As of last year, San Diego County had only 78 longer-term detox beds that accepted ​Medi-Cal, the state health insurance for low-income residents. That scarcity of options could create long waits for those willing to get clean, which in turn increased the chances that they disappear or relapse.

Officials are working to boost capacity, and the total recently ticked up to around 100 beds, with dozens more coming online this month at a renovated Father Joe’s Villages facility downtown.

Yet even as detox numbers improve, the number of outreach workers countywide able to connect people to services is at risk of shrinking. Deficits at the city, county and state levels, as well as federal budget cuts, threaten a range of homelessness aid. One group overseen by the nonprofit People Assisting The Homeless, or PATH, that’s doing similar work to Intervention Services may shut down next year without more funding.

It’s easy to see why this type of job might be cut during times of austerity. You can offer help to somebody for months, perhaps years, without anything to show for it.

After about a half-hour inside the hospital, the two officers walked back into the sunlight.

“Is he with them?” Evans, the sergeant, said to herself. For a moment it looked like the cops were alone. Then a man with a bald patch and graying stubble stepped out too. “Very good,” Evans murmured.

The man was dressed in sweats and carried a clear plastic bag filled with clothes. The three stopped to talk in the shade. After a while, the two other officers who had been at the resource fair drove up and joined the conversation. The man seemed to enjoy their back-and-forth, but he wasn’t moving anywhere fast.

Soon he walked down the sidewalk to greet the sergeant. “These guys are helping me get into a program tomorrow,” the man said, referring to the officers behind him. “I have two dollars burnin’ a hole in my pocket and I’m dying of thirst — I just want one more beer.” He pledged to meet the team at a park the following day.

“You said that last time,” Evans said.

“I’m gonna make it happen!” the man responded.

She pushed back lightly. He promised to stay healthy. The officers who had met him inside finally climbed into their SUV and drove off. “Tomorrow guys!” the man shouted at the departing vehicle.

He continued to talk, about his misdemeanors and felonies and travels across the country. The fireworks over Lake Michigan? Spectacular. Chicago pizza? Too soupy. He rubbed his face.

Eventually he noticed that Navarro, the officer with more than 25 years of experience, and his partner, Mike Wasco, hadn’t left. The man asked the pair for a blanket.

“A blanket?” Wasco said. “I don’t have a blanket on me, but I can go get you a ride somewhere.” He added that the resource fair should have blankets.

The man thought about that. “I usually just catch this bus right here.” He sounded exhausted. The man reached into a jacket pocket to see if he still had his bus pass. Then he mentioned that he thought there was a warrant out for his arrest.

“You have charges pending here,” Wasco said. “But it hasn’t become a warrant yet.” If anything, entering a sobriety program might convince a judge to go easier on him, Wasco noted. “They’re gonna want you to be a benefit to society, right?”

This seemed to trigger something within the man. He launched into a monologue, his voice rising: There were nonprofits he planned to start! He’d create homeless shelters in every state! “Also help foreigners, you know, like, people from the Philippines …”

“One thing at a time,” Wasco interrupted. “Sometimes helping yourself a little bit is the start to being able to help other people.”

The man continued on undeterred. It was almost as if, by listing all his dreams and hopes, he was declaring: I am worth more than nicknames like T-Shirt Guy or Vodka Drinker or Two Dollar Beer Man.

Navarro again brought up the resource fair. The man, his voice a little quieter, pivoted: He’d left a shopping cart filled with belongings in another part of the city and needed to retrieve it immediately. The cops kept pushing the fair.

“We will give you a ride there —”

“We’re not gonna strand you!”

“— and we will come back and pick you up and we will take you to your shopping cart!”

A pause. An exhale. “Alright,” the man said. “I guess I can do that.”

He got into their car. Within an hour-and-a-half, they’d convinced him to go to detox.