![]() ![]() A police response would have most likely resulted in a drunk and disorderly citation and a night in jail. 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. The team would aim to resolve the problem not just for the person calling it in, but for the unhoused individuals involved as well. “The goal, of course, is to address the root causes,” said Jennifer Friedenbach, the executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness. Last year, the city’s police commission urged local stakeholders to come up with an alternative way to respond to homelessness.Ĭommunity 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. In 2019, the San Francisco police department responded to more than 65,000 calls about homelessness. ![]() You’re trying to mitigate the presence of homelessness.” You’re not trying to mitigate homelessness. “Cops across the country have homeless units,” said Paul Boden, the executive director of the not-for-profit Western Regional Advocacy Project. San Francisco sheriff’s deputies outside City Hall as protesters rally against the death in Minneapolis police custody of George Floyd. 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. ![]() These laws have done nothing to solve homelessness, just criminalize it, advocates said.Ī 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. But will cities follow through?Ī nti-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. In Oregon, activists have introduced legislation that would prohibit law enforcement from enforcing a bevy of anti-homeless laws. 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. 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.Īnd some are proposing solutions. 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. It’s hard to forget an encounter like that. ![]()
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