For Wilshire Baptist Church
The day started with a civic meeting and ended with a civic meeting, and while the groups and agendas were different, they landed on the same topic: homelessness. Yes, it’s the topic that won’t go away.
The morning meeting was for our downtown business association, hosted by a downtown church. LeAnn and I don’t have a downtown business, but we live on the edge of downtown and work from home. We care about what is happening downtown, so we joined the association, pay annual dues, and we attend the meetings. As a result, we not only know what is going on downtown but we know many of the shop and restaurant owners by name. If they don’t know us by name, they at least recognize us when we come in their door or they see us on the street.
An early agenda item – before downtown redevelopment and community events – was a report from the police department. There really isn’t much crime in the downtown district: mostly parking violations and petty stuff and thankfully no violent crime. But then the report moved to the issue of homelessness, and yes, we do have a problem with that downtown. We have people who hang out at various locations in the downtown area, and some walk down our street going from wherever they’ve been to wherever they are going next. We recognize some of them and even know some by name, like Carla, who talks and gestures wildly as she goes. And we’ve seen a new man recently who walks in complex patterns down the middle of the street as if he’s connecting invisible dots. Both may be indicative of the most difficult aspect of homelessness, and that is mental health.
Our community has a homeless task force led by the police department. We’ve watched it develop and evolve over the past decade and it really is trying to handle things in a thoughtful and compassionate way, with the goal of getting as many people as possible connected with services and assistance to help them get off the streets and “return home” as it were. But they also must deal with public safety and health issues, and that involves dealing with the homeless camps that pop up in recurring fashion. Officers and social workers visit a camp and offer help to those who want it, but they also give notice that the camp will not be allowed to remain. A few days later, city crews clean up the camp, hauling away debris that typically can be measured in tons.
We talked about the homeless situation for an hour, and these discussions are never without strong opinions about whether people who are trying to help are actually contributing to the problem. That perspective comes from those who just don’t want to see or encounter homeless people at all. They blame public transit for bringing them to our town, and blame local agencies and independent do-gooders for keeping them coming with handouts and short-term reprieve.
I ended the day at the police station for our periodic Neighborhood Crime Watch coordinator meeting. Sometimes we get crime reports and sometimes it’s show and tell. This time it was the latter with a report and demonstration from the K9 unit. As one of the officers said, police dogs are the only weapons they have that can be called back after they are launched. A gun or a taser can’t be recalled once fired, but a dog can be stopped in mid-charge. Fascinating stuff.
None of that had anything to do with homelessness, but when we got to the “are there any more questions?” part of the meeting, the subject of homelessness came up again. This time the conversation was brief because it had been covered for a full hour at the previous Crime Watch meeting.
I’ve written about this issue in the past — many times in fact — and that’s a disappointing sign that the problem is not going away. We keep talking about it but have yet to find a solution, because while some people do want to get back into the flow of a normal, stable life, there are many who don’t. Part of that is stubborn independence, and some is poor mental health. Local law enforcement can’t do much about it because it is not a crime to not have a home. Meanwhile, the rest of us can’t pray the problem away, and we can’t just move it to another location where it is out of sight and out of mind.
Like with us and the downtown business association, the homeless task force and the police know many of these people by name; they know some of their stories. Some of their stories aren’t very different from our own stories. I’m thinking the key may be to intersect with their stories earlier in their lives – when education, health care, employment, faith communities and social services can have a positive impact. That may be Civics 101.