Bay Area S.F. takes a different approach to homeless drug addicts.
Krystal Rojas sat slumped on an alley sidewalk in downtown San Francisco and peered up from under her hoodie. A cop was walking up. The needle she’d just used to shoot dope lay on the cement next to her. She instinctively brushed it under the edge of her ragged suitcase.
“You look like you could use a little help,” Officer Dominique Ellis called out brightly. Rojas mumbled indistinctly and stared at her feet. Ellis squatted down. A conversation grew slowly. In three minutes she had Rojas, 31, nodding yes to the idea of going to a homeless shelter.
“It’s terrible out here,” Rojas said, fidgeting nervously as she waited for a Homeless Outreach Team car to pick her up. “I was clean three years ago. Things got messed up. I just want some stability again.”
That’s precisely the kind of thing Ellis and about two dozen other street specialists from a cluster of city agencies were aiming for this week as they fanned out around the Tenderloin and South of Market neighborhoods. They were on the latest test run of a new program called Healthy Streets Intervention, designed to try to clear public spaces of addicts who openly inject or smoke illegal drugs.
So far they’ve gotten 109 addicts off the streets and into homeless shelters, drug rehabilitation centers, sobering respite beds, hospitals and a range of other places where people ensnared by heroin or other hard drugs can fight for a sec-
ond chance at life. The team is drawn from the city’s police, health, paramedic, homeless counseling, public works and probation departments. The idea is not to arrest people, but to route them toward a service that can offer them more help than a few nights behind bars can.
“Their problems out here didn’t just happen overnight, and they aren’t going to be solved overnight,” said Ellis’ partner, Officer Steven Ogbonna. “Arresting your way out of the problem just doesn’t work; we’ve all learned that. So we do this.”
The intervention technique got its first test run Oct. 17, and 26 people were taken to shelters or other services. The second run came on Oct. 30, and 53 got help. The third run happened Wednesday — it went from morning to night, like the others, and 30 people were connected to services.
“Usually, it’s either public health, or housing counselors, or police or others out here separately approaching homeless people, but this problem of open-air injecting is really a combined issue,” said Randy Quezada, spokesman for the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, which helps administer the new program as part of the city’s multiagency Healthy Streets Operation Center. “So it needs a different kind of attention.
“We’re trying to learn as much as we can each time we go out, so that we can really scale it up if it works,” he said.
With thousands of homeless people addicted to heroin or methamphetamine and openair injection a top complaint for years in San Francisco, there is clearly a mountain of work ahead for the new team. There’s no official count of street addicts, but 41 percent of the 7,499 homeless people counted in the city’s last onenight survey, taken in 2017, admitted to drug or alcohol abuse. Street counselors assume the actual number is higher, especially among longtime hard-core homeless people.
And those estimates don’t include the addicts who have places to live but often shoot up outside. Health officials estimate there are 22,500 injection drug users in the city.
Mayor London Breed, who often tags along with police or counseling teams as they make their rounds, logged a couple of hours with the crews Wednesday and said she has high hopes for the program. She sees it as a welcome extension of the outreach work already being done.
“This is important, because what’s going on here is not something young people (or anyone) should have to see in the streets — urinating, defecating, using drugs in the open,” Breed said, striding up Seventh Street toward Market Street, stopping every block or so to chat up street people as they connected with counselors. “What people have to understand is that it’s not going to be tolerated.
“But I want them also to know that treatment on demand is available,” she said. “Why do you think I want more mental health stabilization beds? More conservatorship? I want this fixed.”
More than half of the people approached by the walking team Wednesday either skittered away before they arrived or refused help. That was OK with the officers and counselors. The marching orders from police Lt. Dean Hall to his team before it set out was “give no promises, no guarantees, no lies, but keep your minds open.”
“Hey, this is a cycle,” said Homeless Outreach Team counselor Elester Hubbard. “Sometimes it takes two or three times in rehab before it works, and sometimes it takes months or years of talking to people before they even take that chance. But when it all works out? That’s what keeps me upbeat.”
Rojas was a prime example. She’d turned down Ellis and Ogbonna several times in recent months when they’d shown up on their own. She wound up Wednesday at the Division Circle Navigation Center, a specialized shelter that tries to fast-track people into housing and rehab.
“Been there, did that on just trying to arrest people and fix the problem with jail,” said Police Chief Bill Scott, who came along to assess Wednesday’s test run. “Jail can be important sometimes, but these are complex issues. And if we want to turn the corner on this problem, we need all these people,” he said as he waved a hand to take in the team.
Scott smiled as he watched Breed stop on Market Street to exhort 52-year-old Ebony Holt to take counselor Hubbard’s offer of a shelter bed. He’d just waved the mayor down as she passed by, and told her he hadn’t been injecting on the street but was apparently freshly clean of drugs and needed to get inside before possibly backsliding.
“I’m off coke now, I just need some help for a new start,” Holt told the mayor. She leaned in close and pointed to Hubbard.
“He’s here to help. You focused now? You ready?” she said. “Yes, I am!” Holt said. They grinned at each other. Hubbard took down Holt’s information. The mayor headed up the block.