- Adam Wickham
The police and city leaders don't want to see them. Neighbors don't want to see them. Their stoutest advocates don't want to see them. And the vast, vast majority of the homeless themselves—56 of who died on the streets last year, for a variety of reasons—would prefer not being homeless.
No one thinks the increasing presence of homeless people in the North Park Blocks, for instance, is a good thing. Or that it's awesome that people are living in tents on state and city property up on North Greeley Avenue.
It is homelessness. It is a problem by definition. We all agree!
The big question facing Portland, then, is what we do about this problem. And if you're a faithful reader of the Portland Tribune, you've just been treated to the gob-smacking conclusion that a big part of the solution is police being given more leeway to cite and arrest homeless people.
In its latest issue, the paper spends 1,800-words offering a sympathetic ear to police union officials upset they don't have "clear direction and support in dealing with the growing number of homeless people who violate city ordinances." Ordinances like Portland's camping ban. The Trib finds that officers are taking less initiative when rousting homeless people, and bemoans the fact that police are now hesitant to force people to get up from the sidewalk. From the story:
Now, Turner says, a police encounter with a homeless squatter who may be illegally camping or blocking a sidewalk can too easily become a major incident. Take a situation where a police officer asks a squatter to move from his or her sidewalk position, Turner says. Most squatters will comply. But when one doesn’t, an officer might reach down and pull them up.
Until two years ago, that sort of encounter rarely posed a problem for police, according to Turner. Now, he says, it usually requires the officer to write up a “use of force” report, which will lead to a conversation with a superior in which the officer must justify his or her actions.
The piece reaches a hysterical crescendo when it suggests Portland's homeless might clean up their act and find decent places to stay if police only reliably wrote them tickets or arrested them (yep, police arrest people for camping).
The unpredictable policing of the homeless flies in the face of current criminal justice thinking, which is known as the Swift, Certain and Fair approach. Research has shown that quality-of-life offenders especially are less likely to re-offend if they receive consequences that are swift and certain.
This is a flat out bizarre thing to say—particularly because the paper explicitly lumps in camping and erecting structures offenses with what might be more pressing "quality of life" offenses. ("Yet throughout this year, tent campers on the North Park Blocks and in areas like the Springwater Corridor for the most part were allowed to remain," the article says. "And they can still be found throughout the city.") You can't arrest or ticket someone out of homelessness, because homelessness isn't a choice. That's especially true in Portland, where officials readily acknowledge that we don't have anywhere near the shelter space or affordable housing options to get people off of the streets.
Even the US Department of Justice says it's unconstitutional to enforce camping laws in situations like Portland's facing. In an August filing in Boise, DOJ attorneys wrote:
When adequate shelter space does not exist, there is no meaningful distinction between the status of being homeless and the conduct of sleeping in public. Sleeping is a life-sustaining activity — i.e., it must occur at some time in some place. If a person literally has nowhere else to go, then enforcement of the anti-camping ordinance against that person criminalizes her for being homeless.
That same case has been made in Multnomah County again and again. It's even found favor in the past, though the ruling didn't stick.
There's a strong argument that by citing people for sleeping outside, you're just digging the majority of them deeper into a hole, potentially making it harder to find housing or escape legal debts down the road. (On the other hand, officials sometimes see an expediency to tickets. Portland Police have suggested in the past that if mounting tickets and the threat of arrest send homeless people packing for another town, then maybe that's not the worst thing.)
I'll repeat my earlier sentiment: Homelessness is bad. It can involve ugly and sometimes serious public safety problems that should be dealt with "swiftly and certainly." More often, homelessness is unsightly. Just the other day I took this bad picture of a full-sized bed, complete with boxspring, underneath the Burnside Bridge.
No one's arguing it's unreasonable to expect your city to clean up its messes.
But camping and homelessness can't be solved with police, as the police will readily tell you; it can only be pushed around. As we reported this week, the large encampment that took root on Greeley in the last few months was the direct result of sweeps in the Central Eastside. There's also speculation that Portland's homelessness is more visible than its ever been, in part, because of development that's nudged people out of parts of town people formerly paid little mind to.
The Trib's article makes it seem like nothing's being done about homeless campers. That's wrong.
The Oregon Department of Transportation sweeps people from its many Portland properties literally all the time (it's planning to sweep the Greeley camp any day). So do city entities like the Bureau of Environmental Services, Portland Bureau of Transportation, and Water Bureau. The Portland Police Bureau spent weeks doing intensive clean ups just a few months ago. We even have a special agreement for cleaning up the property people leave behind in these sweeps.
So the things Portland Police Association President Daryl Turner is pressing for in the Tribune story are occurring. More importantly, though, there's some hope in the fact that institutional barriers to easing homelessness are getting fresh attention.
Portland Mayor Charlie Hales—at the outset of what promises to be a tough re-election fight—just shepherded forward an emergency declaration he says will allow Portland to dodge zoning codes and more easily create homeless shelters. There's more momentum than we've seen in years toward creating affordable and transitional housing, and the city and county have pledged $30 million to a group dedicated to sketching a plan that will end homelessness (most of that money won't be available until next July).
Is it enough? No. Is it even a viable strategy? The people who think hardest about the problem of homelessness in this community think so.
At any rate, it's better than trying to ticket people into homes.
