Program launched to help chronic offenders

Jen Lawson

Thursday, March 20, 2003 | 10:56 a.m.

In his 10 years as a downtown Las Vegas cop, Officer David Fricker found himself arresting the same people over and over again for minor crimes -- small-scale drug dealing, public drunkenness, petty theft.

One 45-year-old man has been arrested 1,014 times since 1983. That works out to an arrest every 6 1/2 days for the last 18 1/2 years, mostly for charges of trespassing and being a public nuisance.

"The criminal justice system is like a tornado," Fricker said. "Once you get inside the system, you have a hard time getting out."

Seeing that something needed to be done about chronic misdemeanor offenders, Metro and city officials spent about a year hatching a plan for the Habitual Offender Prevention and Education, or HOPE, program, which was launched Wednesday.

It allows certain offenders to be given a suspended jail sentence if they agree to spend 90 days in the Transitional Living Community or Women in New Recovery, which are halfway houses, where they would try to turn their lives around by receiving counseling, employment assistance and treatment for drug and alcohol abuse.

"We are now going to be dealing with root causes of these problems," Undersheriff Doug Gillespie said. "I know it will be a success and we support it wholeheartedly."

The program works this way: Patrol officers and officials at Fremont Street casinos will give Metro's community-oriented policing office a list of people they consider chronic offenders.

Metro will run criminal background checks on each one and come up with a master list of 25 of Las Vegas' worst chronic offenders who will be eligible for the HOPE program if they get arrested again.

When a person on the list is arrested and pleads guilty, he or she will be offered a chance to be given a suspended jail sentence and spend three months in the Transitional Learning Community or the Women in New Recovery center.

Authorities will keep tabs on the offenders in order to measure the program's success.

The initial program can accommodate only 25 participants, but Fricker said he expects the number to grow after the first year.

"Nobody who is not guilty of a crime will be affected, so we don't have to worry about constitutional violations," Mayor Oscar Goodman said Wednesday at a luncheon at the Fremont marking the program's launch. "We're talking about people who are criminals within the system."

While researching the chronic misdemeanor problem last year, officers and casino officials came up with a list of 25 people believed to be 2002's most infamous chronic misdemeanor offenders.

These offenders have been arrested in Las Vegas a total of 8,114 times, Fricker said.

Officers found four distinct categories of repeat offenders: habitual narcotics offenders, chronic alcoholics, chronic petty thieves and mentally ill offenders.

Fricker gave an example of a chronic petty thief, a 76-year-old man whose arrest record began in 1989. As of last year, he had been arrested 453 times for petty larceny, using fraud to stay in a hotel room and obtaining money under false pretenses. He used seven aliases, seven Social Security numbers and five dates of birth.

Currently, the program isn't set up to accommodate offenders who are mentally ill, but Fricker said he hopes the program will be expanded to include them. Reno has a mental health court, and he said something similar might eventually be brought to Las Vegas.

"The way the system is set up, this wouldn't work for the mentally ill," Fricker said. "It's like taking a kindergartener and sticking them in high school. You know they're going to fail."

Fricker predicted that some chronic offenders might not be interested in enrolling in the program at first because people resist change.

"It's easier to stand on the same street corner and drink all day long," he said. "But if you're faced with the decision of a 180-day jail sentence or going through the HOPE program -- this will be the hammer to get this person back into mainstream society."