Study finds shelter didn’t impact crime
CHICO >> Safe Space is known for operating low barrier shelters in different locations each season, but controversy over permanent locations has persisted due to concerns about criminal activity.
Motivated by heated local discussion of the issue, Chico State researchers designed a study of whether two measures of suspicious activity or crime were impacted in areas where the mobile low barrier shelter was operating.
The paper is in part based on a similar analysis from Vancouver, Canada, and is kept narrow by focusing only on locations in Chico where Safe Space shelter locations were operating during three winter seasons.
“Using geo- spatial and statistical methods appropriate to the research question and type of data, our results suggest that Safe Space has no statistically significant effect on arrests or calls for service in 100-500 meter distances from the church hosting Safe Space,” the study concluded.
“The analysis considered the immediate area, 100 to 500 meters, of each of the 15 shelter sites. We consistently find that arrests and calls for service do not significantly increase or decrease around church locations when they hosted community members experiencing homelessness.”
The analysis utilizes arrest records and calls for service data from the Chico Police Department, with records of Safe Space locations between 2015-2019 from the Safe Space operations team. Arrest records were collected from December 2015 to February 2018 and analysis of calls for service records covers December 2017 to February 2019.
“We have worked with this group from Chico State on other projects and I have found them to be objective as to their research and findings,” Chico Police Department Chief Matt Madden said Tuesday.
Using calls for service, or contacts with Chico police dispatchers, helped to “lessen any explicit or implicit biases that may go into the decision of whether or not to arrest any individual while an officer is on a call.” Arrest data doesn’t include incidents where an officer decides not to arrest people.
“On the other hand, if an officer decides to make an arrest that they normally would not because Safe Space is operating, then this would cause us to overestimate any positive relationship between Safe Space operation and crime,” the study noted.
Researchers had to choose calls relevant to the study, as over 300 categories of calls were collected. Over 120,000 calls were analyzed in the study.
The team of researchers are all faculty at Chico State. Economics lecturer Greg Madonia has completed research papers on crime. He pushed to get the incident-based reports to balance out the study and performed empirical level data analysis.
“Obviously homelessness is a concern for the community. And as a economist, I strongly believe it’s always good to know the benefits and costs of various public policies,” he said.
Geography information technology consultant Peter Hansen previously worked on a study of public safety laws’ impacts on unhoused people. Chico State’s International Relations Department associate chair and program coordinator Jennifer Wilking previously worked on a study of homelessness among students as well as the study with Hansen on the effectiveness of city laws which impact people without a home.
Hansen said Friday the Safe Space study seems to “demonstrate that a rotating low barrier shelter is maybe not as impactful to a neighborhood as some narratives might indicate it to be.”
As Safe Space sought a more permanent location, such as on Orange Street, “One of the main areas of pushback was the potential for increasing crime in the neighborhood,” Wilking said Friday.
“The discussion is so fractured and people are so firmly on either side of it there’s no middle ground discussion,” Hansen said.
He said Safe Space’s rules for operation also affected the population who would be using the location if they followed the rules — “This isn’t like a posse of criminals that are going to come sleep in your neighborhood overnight. It’s just people who need a place to sleep.”
Wilking hopes the team’s range of expertise can add to the study’s value, bringing data to discussions often driven by emotion, while “not taking a position necessarily.”
The data does not represent the impact on Safe Space after the Camp Fire, or the impacts of the pandemic.
Another caveat was studying crime reports and calls for service in a radius around a Safe Space location, not necessarily based on how one might travel to and from a location, Hansen said. The data is also affected because some offenders are repeatedly involved in frequent disturbances, and calls for service do not necessarily get tracked by Chico police as related to homelessness.
Wilking added that’s why different ways of testing their model was necessary, to “see if you’re getting consistent results, not dependent on some specification or choice you’ve made in the data.”
The study results focus on the short term effects of a church hosting Safe Space and longer term effects could be estimated through evaluation of a fixed location, low-barrier shelter, should one be created in the community, the report noted.
Local discourse around homelessness impacted the study to some degree and the researchers said they hope having a thorough analysis and hard data will add to the discussion.
“I don’t even know that the discourse is representative of the community at large,” Hansen said. “But it is what’s visible.”
“In some ways my hope is that our involvement may be that we offer a middle ground, but also lower the temperature a little bit,” Wilking added. She is creating a website to try to answer people’s questions about issues using available data.
Safe Space is hosting up to 20 clients during the pandemic, versus 65 in previous years. Shelter operations manager Rick Narad, who also lectures in Chico State’s Public Health and Health Services Administration Department, said he thought the study “confirmed what we felt.”
Accusations that the shelter would increase criminal activity concentration are addressed by the data, as people typically stay in the shelter all night, he said. Safe Space’s rule is that if a person leaves, they cannot return for the night or for the next night.
“This type of data should ease their (residents’) minds, I would hope,” Narad said.
He hopes for a follow up comparing crime reports and calls for services in other neighborhoods, to see if Safe Space may have decreased any reports of issues by giving people a place to sleep for the night. The same people, without a temporary shelter, might otherwise have been sleeping on sidewalks or doorways in neighborhoods, he said.
Safe Space had one more week to use one church’s location Monday and is trying to find another sanctuary to use.
The university study will be submitted to a peer review journal this summer, Wilking said, and the full report or comments about it can be requested of or sent to JWilking@csuchico.edu.