Police strive to focus on referrals, not arrests
What we reported: Every morning, San Francisco police officers spread across city streets to help clear tent camps and address complaints about minor crimes by homeless people, including public drinking and drug use. And every evening, the problems return.
Police and other city officials agree they can’t arrest their way out of homelessness. Locking people up doesn’t get at the poverty, addiction and mental illness driving many to the curb. But law enforcement can play a vital role by steering those who need help to services like drug rehabilitation, counseling and housing assistance.
The quandary in San Francisco is that these services remain in short supply, while police lose leverage over homeless people because the courts rarely enforce citations for nuisance crimes.
Out of tens of thousands of tickets issued annually for quality-of-life offenses like camping and urinating in public, as many as 90 percent go unpaid. Two years ago, San Francisco Superior Court leaders stopped issuing arrest warrants for those who failed to pay or show up in court, saying that tracking delinquents was too onerous and costly and inconsistent with how the city treats comparable violations.
With complaints about homeless issues soaring to new heights — some 50,000 or more calls to authorities a year — police are left with few tools. They have a limited number of places to refer people and a pad of tickets that offenders are largely free to ignore.
“We’re working to be more responsive than we have been to people who call in these complaints and concerns about homelessness,” said Cmdr. David Lazar, who heads the Police Department’s homeless unit. “But in dealing with homelessness, we are not the primary agency. We’re really in a supportive role.”
What has happened: The police force has increased the number of officers hitting the streets daily to address homeless issues, from 26 to 30 or so.
The city is also offering more services for homeless people, such as opening Navigation Centers, the one-stop shelters that link people to services such as addiction treatment, mental health care and housing assistance. That, in turn, is allowing police on the streets to make more referrals. But the options are still too limited for the department to make a significant impact on homelessness and nuisance crime.
What may prove effective in the long term is a strategy at the heart of a diversion program set to begin in August around the BART stations at Civic Center and at 16th and Mission streets. Instead of going through the largely unproductive process of citing someone for a petty street crime, city and BART officers will be able to offer a person who is using drugs or being a nuisance the option of being diverted directly into treatment.
A two-year, $5.9 million state grant is expected to help provide services for as many as 100 people at a time. The program, modeled after a successful effort in Seattle, could expand in the future.
What’s missing: A recent Chamber of Commerce poll found that nearly two-thirds of San Francisco voters cite homelessness, bad street behavior and tent camps as the city’s top issue.
Fears of confronting the encampments, however, are still fresh from last year’s sweep of a sprawling tent city on Division Street. The push to clear the area of 350 campers mostly shifted the low-level crime to other places, even as officials tried to direct the tent dwellers to help.
The struggles point to the need to provide desirable places for homeless people to go, including shelters. Shelters prove most successful when, like the new Navigation Centers, they provide not only a menu of services for homeless people but leniency for those who haven’t been able to get a roof over their heads because of rules against pets or limits on stays.
Increasing the number of social workers and psychiatric counselors working alongside police officers could also help get more homeless people into housing and treatment. The city’s Homeless Outreach Team, run by the new Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, numbers about 70 people, the same as a year ago.
Crucially, the city hasn’t come up with a way to enforce nuisance-behavior citations. With offenders facing little consequence for ignoring tickets for such crimes as camping or blocking the sidewalk, police have one less lever for nudging homeless people toward help.