ODs a wakeup call to city

Crisis highlights need for more police, social services

NEW HAVEN — James Thomas knows the exact locations where drug dealers have set up shop on the Green.

A staff member of Trinity Episcopal Church on the Green and leader of a weekly spiritual fellowship group, Thomas has built familiar relationships with many of those who spend their days in the center of the city, including many who are homeless and many who are addicted to drugs.

“Anywhere on the upper Green, it’s all K2,” Thomas said. The upper Green is where many people dropped to the ground last week as more than 100 K2 overdoses involving nearly 50 drug users jolted the city.

Pointing to the bus stop on Temple Street, close to Trinity’s

front doors, Thomas said, “You got your weed down here, the cigarettes.”

Turning to the bus stop on Chapel Street, between Church and Temple streets, Thomas said, “All the lower part down here is heroin and pills.”

If Thomas, who spent a number of homeless years himself, knows where the dealing is going on, then certainly the police know too, he said, but the difficulty in stopping the dealing is “hard to really explain because it’s not visible.”

“They see the police before the police see them, and they got a lookout for the police, believe it or not. I say it before and I’ll say it again. They need more presence. Instead of walking them through, they need to post them up. I don’t see why they can’t put seven cops right here on the Green.

“Walking through is just no good,” Thomas said. “It’s like the neighborhood. They’re doing the best they can do, but the problem is they need to be posted and (the dealers) wouldn’t go there if they were posted there. It’s not really a hard thing to get under control.”

Thomas said his big concern is the schoolchildren who are bused to the downtown stops, where they have to transfer to get home. “All the kids that are going to the ’hood, they’ve got to catch the bus here or on Chapel Street. The kids shouldn’t see this.” He is not alone in that idea.

“We want to move the (bus) transfer station from the Green,” Mayor Toni Harp said. “We’ve been working on that since I’ve been mayor.” A study of where to move the bus stops has been going on for three years, she said.

Police Chief Anthony Campbell said normally six to eight officers are patrolling downtown, with two or three on the Green, but after the overdoses began mounting on Wednesday, a unit of 15 to 20 officers was deployed to the central square.

“The difficulty is this: We’re down 111 officers. The Police Department does not have a contract, has not had a contract for two years. It is very hard for us to retain police officers,” he said. “We can’t pull officers away from other areas.”

Both Campbell and Harp said the need is not just for police but for social workers, crisis-intervention and other counselors.

Harp said a class of recruits will start training on Sept. 17, and others may begin in November and in the spring.

“We do the best training” but New Haven doesn’t pay as well as other towns, she said. “Police forces pick up our folks and they can leave and make $20,000 more.

“We have increased patrols but frankly not enough,” Harp said. “A lot of the people move from the Green to the library. We’ve trained our librarians in mental health and first aid. New Haven is really in many respects a victim of our success in having … programs that service our community.”

She said about a year ago the state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services provided social workers who were stationed by Trinity Church. “The contract went through Columbus House and for whatever reason Columbus House pulled them and brought them over to the Boulevard,” Harp said. “They are technically still around but they are not working on the Green anymore.”

But Alison Cunningham, executive director of Columbus House, which runs a homeless shelter and offers housing services, said a person on the agency’s outreach staff “is responsible for outreach on the Green and the downtown area.” She said outreach case managers have “always been downtown and they were there this week and they’ll be there this weekend.”

Cunningham said her staff members who were downtown on Wednesday “were all saying it was a really scary day for them. Our staff was pretty traumatized, moved … because they were seeing the same thing the police were seeing. … It was important for us to be there to help with that group of folks.”

However, she said, she couldn’t say how many of the victims were homeless.

“I think it’s a myth that everybody on the Green is homeless and that’s simply not true,” Cunningham said.

She said the atmosphere at the shelter Wednesday “was pretty quiet. I think people were talking quietly among themselves.”

The overdose crisis that began Tuesday night and continued through Thursday, involving 47 people — some overdosing multiple times — put a spotlight on issues of addiction, drug dealing and policing, especially on the Green, the magnet for business people eating lunch, families enjoying the flagpole fountain and homeless people whiling away their time before the Columbus House shelter opens at 4 p.m.

It’s also a draw for those addicted to drugs and those who prey on them. Campbell said last week that 85 percent of those who hang out on the Green regularly are not homeless.

“Many of these people are associated with the APT Foundation,” which treats people addicted to opioids with methadone, Campbell said. “More than 50 percent are not city residents. More than 60 percent who come to the APT Foundation are not residents of the city.”

Lynn Madden, president of the APT Foundation, disputed Campbell’s assertion, saying 60 percent of patients come from Greater New Haven. She said she was given a list of 35 people who overdosed last week and only six were APT Foundation patients, one of whom receives psychiatric services and is not being treated for substance abuse.

The APT Foundation has clinics at 1 Long Wharf and 495 Congress Ave. in New Haven, 352 State St. in North Haven, 184 Front Ave. in West Haven and 425 Grant St. in Bridgeport.

“The reason why we opened programs in West Haven and North Haven … is so that people would not have to come into the city,” Madden said. “One of the challenges we have is that the bus routes are not very useful,” forcing many to go downtown to catch buses home.

“We’ve been in conversations with the city and others to see if we can have some impact on those bus routes,” she said. “I don’t think scapegoating treatment providers is a very helpful response.”

Harp said the APT Foundation differs from some other treatment centers in that patients can receive methadone “if your urine is dirty” — if the client has drugs in his or her system. “They are bullish on their model. They think it’s a very successful model,” Harp said.

But Madden said that drug addiction, like other chronic illnesses requires “five to seven treatment episodes,” each of which may be interrupted by a relapse.

“Sometimes they stay in treatment as they relapse,” she said. “All addictive disorders are difficult to treat. … This one happens to involve behavior that is considered illegal,” putting the patient at risk of going into the criminal justice system, making it more difficult to get a job and to recover from addiction.

‘In the front line’

Located near the Temple Street bus stop and the busy Chapel Street corner, Trinity Church is “in the front line of this … and therefore we try to empower people as best as possible with spiritual resources and this is a fine line,” said the Rev. Luk De Volder, Trinity’s rector.

He and his maintenance staff said it is common to find drug powder, feces and blood along the church wall that faces the Green. “The police do not have enough resources to cope with the magnitude of what’s going on,” De Volder said. Police “are doing all that they can … but as a structural thing it is bigger than they can address. … We get the backlash.”

This weekend, De Volder called together a task force of church members “who are specialized in public health, drug addiction, and pastoral care,” according to an email sent to church members. The parish vestry also will discuss the issue this week, according to De Volder.

He said church staff regularly deal with “mentally unstable” people “trying to selfmedicate in order to allieve pain and have some mental stability. Their presence is volatile, they’re accosting us constantly, and we’re used to it.”

Phil Costello, clinical director of homeless care for the Cornell Scott Hill Health Center, was manning a temporary setup on the upper Green on Thursday, where people who had overdosed could come for treatment and avoid a trip to the hospital. The effects of K2 are short-lived and so a trip to the hospital isn’t always necessary, although an ambulance was standing by.

“Long-term, we’re very interested in setting up a walk-in center where the homeless can walk in and be safe,” Costello said. The agency is looking at sites “someplace close to the Green so we can take care of them and they have easy access to medical services, to take a shower, be watched.” He said the project could be a collaborative project with other agencies such as Columbus House, Liberty Community Services or Community Action Agency.

“We have to be close to where they are,” Costello said. “We don’t have to be on the Green, but a stone’s throw from it.” However, he said, “fundingwise for this we’re going to need some help.”

One woman on the Green on Thursday said the sudden attention to the problem of overdoses is overdue. “Every day the ambulance is here picking up people,” she said, refusing to give her name.

Mike, who was homeless until March, said the police attention is misplaced. “They try to catch anybody for drinking a beer,” handing out a $99 ticket.

“Meanwhile, this is happening,” he said. “I think they should focus on the important stuff instead of drinking beer.” He said police ignore Yale students drinking beer on the Green but ticket black men like himself. “They target people but they’re not trying to save people.

“As they see in movies, catch the big fish. … They got cameras all around here. Why don’t they catch him?”

Cynthia Boll, of New Haven, who was waiting for a bus, said “a lot of it has to do with a lot of pain” when it comes to the vulnerable downtown population.

“We’re trying, but nothing is being successful in their lives. They have nowhere to go. They have rehab but they need a long rehab. They need more down-deep help. They’re fragile. They don’t know what to do.”