Homeless, nobody's choice

By April Silvaggio  

DECEMBER 4, 2009 4:48 p.m. (0)

One is a former university professor with graying temples and a humble smile who says he watched helplessly as his career slipped away when he became depressed and turned to alcohol after an ugly divorce.

Another is a brawny younger man, a construction worker by trade, who says he lost his home after steady work became impossible for him to find when the economy began to sour just over a year ago.

A woman in her 30s with long, dark hair worked in radio in metropolitan areas like Chicago and Philadelphia before a fractured relationship with her boyfriend left her penniless and on the street.

They are faces among Greenville’s homeless population.

And each day, like in many other cities across the U.S., they are among anywhere from 650 to 1,200 homeless locally who struggle to walk a fine line between doing those things essential to sustain life like eating, sleeping and urinating without doing something that by law is considered a criminal act.

Too often, cities are engaging in practices that only exacerbate the problem of homelessness by pursuing criminal charges, said Robert R. Pusins, a retired police major with the Fort Lauderdale Police Department, who from the inception until his retirement in 2004 led the agency’s homeless initiatives that today are touted by the National Coalition for the Homeless in Washington, D.C., as a example for the rest of the country.

That was the case in Fort Lauderdale, too, until the police department there, spurred in large part by a $1.5 million settlement paid by the neighboring Miami Police Department after a landmark ruling on a class action suit brought by homeless people resulted in what today is known nationwide as a “no bed/no arrest” policy, sparked a massive strategy change.

“We went from a ‘bum sweep’ mentality to getting out and interacting with the homeless and developing a relationship with them that involved trust and acceptance,” said Pusins, who now runs a police practices and procedures consulting firm in Pompano Beach, Fla. “It doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a culture change within an agency, and it has to come from the top down.”

Locally, a 10-week-old misconduct investigation now being led by the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division involving allegations that at least four officers while working with the Greenville Police Department abused homeless people is continuing, U.S. Attorney Walt Wilkins said.

Greenville Police Chief Terri Wilfong has said she is convinced the investigation centers on isolated incidents, and that the officers responsible are no longer with her agency. She has said the department will have to work diligently to regain the homeless community’s trust.

Pusins is convinced the approach implemented by Fort Lauderdale in 1998 could go a long way in doing just that.

Most importantly, he said, the entire effort is based around a policy that clearly states being homeless is not a crime.

The idea is to encourage officers to refer the homeless to social service agencies in lieu of making arrests and initiating a “time served cycle” through the system.

The Fort Lauderdale Police Department began by partnering with the Taskforce for Ending Homelessness Inc., a nonprofit agency that provides outreach, education and advocacy services for the homeless population in Broward County to help get them off the street.

Through that partnership, the Homeless Outreach Team was launched, which sends one formerly homeless person and one police officer out to public places each afternoon, where the situations of homeless people are assessed and matched with appropriate services.

That special three-person unit, which officers are assigned to by request, works the homeless beat full-time, focusing efforts on building relationships, earning trust and establishing a mutual respect.

Those officers partner with local shelters to ensure access to beds and services. Those accepting shelter assistance receive priority, entering a program if a bed is open. They are also provided with dinner, breakfast, a hot shower, laundry facilities and a safe night’s sleep.

Repeat visits are often necessary to build rapport, trust and confidence between the workers and the homeless people they meet on the street.

In its first five years of operation, the Homeless Outreach Team had more than 23,000 documented contacts with homeless individuals and placed 11, 384 in shelters, Pusins said.

Estimates are there are at least 2,400 fewer arrests each year as a result of the Homeless Outreach Team’s work, Pusins said.

Ultimately, some homeless people are sent to shelters, some are enrolled in long-term programs and others are given bus tickets to reunite with their families.

It is a strategy that has significantly decreased the criminalization of the homeless, Pusins said.

“Strict enforcement is the only strategy many agencies have for dealing with the homeless,” said Sgt. Frank Sousa, a spokesman for the Fort Lauderdale Police Department. “But it became clear to us that strategy wasn’t effective and did not provide long-term resolutions to problems.”

Not everyone wants help, Sousa said.

Some are grasping at every opportunity to climb back up the ladder of success, while others admit being content, at least for now, to wrap up in a tattered blanket, sip on a bottle of cheap liquor or disappear into a fog created by some illicit drug. Others with mental issues wander aimlessly, sometimes audibly arguing with themselves as they go.

“But what I can tell you is this,” Pusins said. “When you were in the sixth grade and your teacher asked you what you wanted to be, nobody in the class raised their hand and said they wanted to be homeless. A series of events caused them to be where they are. Every single one of them.”

Frequently, whether by choice or circumstance, the worlds of the homeless and the police collide, said Tulin Ozdeger, civil rights director for the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty.

It is what happens next that can define a city.

“There has to be an evenhanded approach that doesn’t discriminate or lead to something worse,” Ozdeger said. “Serious minds must come together.”

In Fort Lauderdale, to help officers better understand the homeless, the department developed a two-hour course entitled “Homelessness 101,” designed to raise officers’ awareness to the reality of homelessness, its causes and the most effective ways to address the growing social problem.

Still, Pusins said, officers were initially skeptical.

“We had to make helping them easier than arresting them,” he said. “It’s easy to kick them out of the way, but tomorrow, you’ll have to kick them out of the way again. And you’ll have to do it again the next day, until the police department and the community decide to come together and help them.”

Over the past decade, other cities have come to Fort Lauderdale to study their example, Pusins said.

A similar program has been implemented by the Pasadena, Calif., Police Department, and in Minneapolis, Minn., recommendations by a task force created by the City Council to review laws, policies and practices that criminalized homelessness resulted in changes to city ordinances, training for police officers to help homeless people find services and a repeal of the local vagrancy law.

Officials with the National Coalition for the Homeless, headquartered in Washington, D.C., point to Fort Lauderdale as a model for other cities to follow.

“The police officers with the task force there have a heart for the homeless and know homeless people don’t need to be arrested to get them off the streets,” said Michael Stoops, director of community organizing for the coalition. “What’s unique about Fort Lauderdale is they’ve taken a nontraditional approach of having a police officer and a formerly homeless man patrolling the streets. It is a model program that other communities should emulate.”

Educating officers about the causes of homelessness caused a cultural change within his agency, Sousa said.

“The interaction has to stay positive to be successful,” Sousa said. “It is all about building relationships, and getting to know these people for who they are, and even who they were before.”