Should police address homelessness? One city is betting on a new model
It’s been some time now since Shanna Couper Orona has slept on the sidewalk, but she can’t forget the first time a police officer kicked the side of her tent in an encampment sweep in San Francisco.
The disorienting confusion of getting jarred awake at 3 in the chilly morning. The rush of fear that comes for any woman who hears unknown male voices at night. The ache in her back. “I poked my head out, and they said, ‘You have to get the fuck out’,” Orona said. “I said back to them, ‘I have to get the fuck out?’ And they said, ‘Oh, you got a smart mouth’?”
It’s hard to forget an encounter like that. It became even harder to forget when it happened time and time again to Orona in her four years on the streets – as well as to countless other homeless individuals, in San Francisco and beyond.
Now, with a renewed push to question the role of law enforcement in public safety after last summer’s protests, housing advocates and unhoused individuals in the US are asking why, far too often, armed police officers are still the first response to the complex crisis of homelessness – a response that often ends in violence and death.
And some are proposing solutions. In San Francisco, this questioning of the status quo has given rise to a new initiative to take police out of the homelessness response altogether. In Oregon, activists have introduced legislation that would prohibit law enforcement from enforcing a bevy of antihomeless laws. But will cities follow through?
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Anti-homeless laws exist in some form or another in jurisdictions all over the US, everything from trespassing and loitering, to the more severe ordinances of bans on tents, camping or sitting and lying down in public spaces. These laws have done nothing to solve homelessness, just criminalize it, advocates said.
A Guardian analysis in 2015 found that homeless people were 6.5 times more likely to be killed by police than the rest of the population. And police largely don’t have an answer when encampment residents ask them where they should go, as most local jurisdictions lack the supportive and affordable housing necessary to house the more than 567,000 living unsheltered in the US.
“Cops across the country have homeless units,” said Paul Boden, the executive director of the not-for-profit Western Regional Advocacy Project. “Why? Not to protect homeless people. You’re not trying to mitigate homelessness. You’re trying to mitigate the presence of homelessness.”
In 2019, the San Francisco police department responded to more than 65,000 calls about homelessness. Last year, the city’s police commission urged local stakeholders to come up with an alternative way to respond to homelessness.
Community leaders developed a proposal that would reroute all calls regarding homeless issues to the Compassionate Alternate Response Team (Cart), highly trained civilians tasked with de-escalation and conflict resolution through each situation.
“The goal, of course, is to address the root causes,” said Jennifer Friedenbach, the executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness.
The team would aim to resolve the problem not just for the person calling it in, but for the unhoused individuals involved as well. If a woman calls about a drunk man leaning against her door, the team would speak to the man about going into a detox center, Friedenbach said. A police response would have most likely resulted in a drunk and disorderly citation and a night in jail. If neighbors were complaining about garbage from an encampment, the team could work with the city and encampment residents to schedule a cleanup while ensuring the encampment residents don’t lose their belongings, which happens often.
“This team is not going to solve the homeless crisis, but it is going to stop us from wasting money on the police response while also solve the calls coming in to 911,” Friedenbach said. “In terms of the deaths from police use-of-force and the trauma, we’ll be able to stop that with this team.”
Proponents of Cart estimate that the team would cost San Francisco $6.8m a year. The Board of Supervisors has already approved $2m. The other $4.8m would come from the police department’s budget.
The proposal came after London Breed, San Francisco’s mayor, redirected $120m from the budgets of the police and sheriff departments to the city’s underserved Black communities. In June, following nationwide demonstrations over the killing of George Floyd, Breed directed the police department to stop responding to non-criminal activities like homeless calls and said the city would develop a crisis-response program over the next year similar to one deployed in Eugene, Oregon.
But Breed has stopped short of throwing her support behind Cart. In November, she launched the Street Crisis Response Team, which responds to behavioral health calls within three specific neighborhoods.
“The early data has shown us that with over 100 cases that they’ve responded to, they’ve been able to help at least 34 of those individuals transition into something where they could get help,” Breed said in an interview with the Guardian.
Some individuals had to go into psychiatric detentions, Breed said. “But at the end of the day, they’re taking a very targeted approach involving people who know how to work with people who are struggling mentally,” she said. “I’m very proud of that. I think it’s made a noticeable difference to the conditions on our streets.”
Cart proponents say the Street Crisis Response Team doesn’t go far enough – it only covers behavioral health calls, a mere sliver of the calls that affect the total homeless popu
lation. The city also has a homeless outreach team, but this team is not dedicated to resolving issues between housed and unhoused residents.
Breed also maintained that while law enforcement should not be responding to all homeless calls, sometimes they are necessary for the safety of the workers.
“When it comes to someone who’s just homeless and sleeping in a tent somewhere, our goal is not to have the police respond to a situation like that,” she said. “But sometimes things can get a little bit challenging, where someone who is responding who is not a police officer, they may not feel safe. We’ve encountered situations of violence, attacks and other things. For us, I need to protect my workforce as well.”
Friedenbach called that assessment classist. “Housing status has nothing do with proclivity to violence,” she said. She pointed out that the city’s nonpolice Street Crisis Response Team is already responding to any unpredictability that may arise from mental health or drug addiction crises, suggesting that they could be handled without an armed police officer.
And when it comes to danger in the streets, most homeless people will say it comes from the police. Two weeks ago, Brian Martin, 42, woke up at 5 in the morning to a knife cutting through the tarp of his structure in San Francisco. “There was a police officer standing there, and they told me to step away from my door,” he said. “They handcuffed me and told us that we were going to be leaving.”
Under San Francisco’s tent ban, encampment residents must be given 24 hours’ notice before a sweep. Martin said he never received one, and was unprepared when the police arrived. He lost construction gear he used to make money on odd jobs, bicycles that he rebuilt to sell, clothes, electronics he collected off the street for his future home.
Worst of all, however, was the orthopedic brace and cane that Martin needs to walk after enduring six back surgeries. When he told the police he needed his brace, “They told me to shut my mouth,” he said.
“They wouldn’t let me have anything,” he said. “Every time I would ask them, ‘Can I grab that? That’s mine’. They said, ‘What job do you have to be able to afford something like that’?”
No one offered Martin housing after they swept his encampment two weeks ago. But Shanna Couper Orona, now a housing advocate, was able to help get him a temporary shelter bed.
Even though Orona no longer sleeps on the streets – she has an RV that she lives out of with her cat, Maison – she’s still a known entity in the unhoused world of San Francisco. A firefighter before she became homeless, she provides medical care for the unhoused and counsels individuals however she can.
“Most people are fearful of the cops because they have had interactions with the cops before,” she said. “And the way cops are doing things is only harming more people. People are done being bullied and done feeling like they’re nothing.”
This team is not going to solve the homeless crisis, but it is going to stop us from wasting money on the police response
Jennifer Friedenbach