Portland knows its response to street homelessness is inadequate, but does it know how to fix it?
Portland knows it has a problem: Every day, costly police resources are dispatched again and again to handle low-priority calls for service involving people experiencing homelessness and behavioral health issues on Portland’s streets. One Neighborhood Response Team officer reported spending 90 percent of a typical day responding to citizen reports of homelessness in a survey of city staff that Portland State University students recently conducted.
These aren’t the calls police officers joined the force to answer, and much of the time, these calls don’t warrant a response involving a badge and a gun.
And it’s not just police. The same survey, and its resulting report, found city employees working for other bureaus, including Portland Parks and Recreation, Bureau of Development Services and Portland Bureau of Transportation, as well as at City Hall, find themselves working on issues around homelessness anywhere from 15 minutes to eight hours per day. Some reported that time is spent working on policy planning and service coordination, but the most common tasks involved rule enforcement.
The report’s authors, then-graduate students at PSU’s School of Social Work, Kathleen Evans, who works for Multnomah County at the Joint Office of Homeless Services, and Katherine Lindsay, call this the “invisible spending” on responses to street homelessness.
The survey sampled only 3 percent of city staff, but even among that small sample, it revealed an estimated $3.6 million spent annually on hours reallocated to street homelessness. That’s in addition to money spent on camp clean-up activities with the city’s One Point of Contact program.
With such a small sample surveyed, Evans and Lindsay conclude “true spending on this issue is much deeper” than what they captured in their analysis, released last spring.
Expensive first-responder resources are the most frequently used. Portland’s Bureau of Emergency Communications, or BOEC, received 24,530 calls in which the caller said they were calling about a situation related to homelessness through 911 and the police non-emergency number in 2018, according to data pulled at Street Roots’ request. More than 80 percent of those calls were categorized as low priority.
When police show up to deal with nuisance and behavioral issues, it can result in an arrest, creating additional barriers to accessing housing and employment for the individual in question.
It can also come at an additional cost to taxpayers if the person is jailed and run through the court system. If the subject is found mentally unfit for prosecution, then a stay in the Oregon State Hospital will ensue as they are stabilized, to the tune of $1,364 a day in 2018. In worst-case scenarios, a person experiencing a mental health crisis or an acute reaction to drugs or alcohol can lose their life as the situation escalates.
Since the beginning of 2017, Portland police have shot at seven people experiencing a mental health crisis and six people under the influence of drugs or alcohol, according to a list maintained by the Mental Health Association of Portland.
Of those, seven died.
Portland’s over-policing and criminalizing of people experiencing homelessness and struggling with mental illness have grabbed recent headlines. In the process, Portlanders learned the scope of the problem is much greater than ever imagined: The Oregonian’s explosive report last year revealed that 52 percent of all arrests in 2017 were of people identified as homeless, and Willamette Week’s recent report on BOEC’s 911 dispatch center showed Portlanders call 911 to complain of an “unwanted person” more than any other reason. In 2018, more than 133,000 “disorder” calls were received, including nearly 29,000 calls about an unwanted person, according to the report.
About 100 miles south, a more compassionate and fiscally responsible model for handling issues that arise on the streets has also been getting attention in recent months. An article in the Wall Street Journal highlighted the program in November, and in January, Mayor Ted Wheeler paid the program a visit.
For 30 years, CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets) has been dispatched through 911 to respond to behavioral issues on the streets of Eugene and Springfield. In 2017, it handled roughly 17 percent of calls requesting police services.
Unlike Portland’s most-utilized mental health crisis response team, Project Respond, CAHOOTS does not typically bring a police escort along with it on calls.
With an annual budget of $1.6 million, and just two vans, CAHOOTS responded to more than 23,000 calls for service in 2018.
Each two-person CAHOOTS team includes a nurse or EMT and a crisis worker with mental health experience who are dispatched through emergency communications systems (911 dispatch) and directly through CAHOOTS’ own crisis line. These teams respond to mental health crises, issues involving homeless persons, intoxicated persons and other situations on the streets.
Police accompanied CAHOOTS on fewer than 30 percent of those calls, and the majority of the time police were present, program manager Tim Black said, it was because police called CAHOOTS to take over on a call they had initially responded to, and once CAHOOTS arrived, they disengaged.
“We rely on extensive training in scene awareness and compassionate communication and verbal de-escalation to prevent things from becoming physical,” Black said. “This training covers everything from identifying potential environmental hazards to not blocking exits, doorways when in someone’s living space, utilizing postures and dialogue which minimize the perception of threat, and being mindful of the small non-verbal cues that a patient may be escalating.” Teams do not carry defense weapons, such as pepper spray or Tasers.
A Street Roots editorial suggested in December that it’s time for Portland and Multnomah County to prioritize creating a similar first responder program here – one that’s responsive to the needs on our streets and doesn’t involve police.
We realize the impacts of street homelessness are a symptom of much larger issues: skyrocketing housing costs, ongoing opioid and meth epidemics, lack of access to mental health and substance use disorder treatment programs for those who need them most, and a disappearing federal safety net.
However, while long-term efforts to address Oregon’s root causes of homelessness are underway, Portland continues to subject its most vulnerable residents to additional trauma and barriers, and it subjects taxpayers to increased costs when it fails to respond to people struggling with homelessness in an appropriate manner.
This is not about solving homelessness. This is about solving the way the community responds to the symptoms of homelessness.
As the city’s budget cycle commences, Street Roots decided to take a deeper look at ways the region could feasibly, quickly and effectively address the crises on our streets in a compassionate and responsive way.
But first, let’s take a look at steps the city and county are already taking.
Since November, Portland Police Bureau has stationed a rotating sergeant to assist with low-priority calls in the 911 dispatch center.
According to a 26-year veteran dispatcher at BOEC, Sandi Goss, this sergeant often reaches out to callers to explain, for example, that it is not illegal for a person to sit on a sidewalk and that police will not be able to do anything about it. If the caller insists, an officer may still visit the scene, but oftentimes this initial over-the-phone discussion can resolve the request for service.
To date, BOEC estimates this position handles 9 percent of calls for police in some fashion.
But more changes could be coming to the way calls are dispatched through BOEC. Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, who oversees the bureau, is spearheading a three-year pilot project. In part, BOEC is switching to a new software program, ProQA, for screening medical and fire calls. It’s the same software that’s used in Eugene, and eventually it will include police dispatch as well. This will allow dispatchers to more uniformly assess calls, and it can be formatted to include a street response team.
The transition to this software began before Hardesty took the helm, and it will include a nurse triage. Lower-acuity medical calls might be transferred to the nurse, or the nurse might be accessible to the public through a separate phone number – or both. The nurse triage would divert non-emergency calls away from expensive ambulance and emergency room services.
According to Hardesty’s staff, the three-year pilot project could also include a response team that’s similar to Eugene’s CAHOOTS. It could be an expansion of a response service already active in Portland, or it could be an entirely new program. The idea is still in its early stages.
The strategic plan for BOEC that was completed in late February sets a target date of October 2022 for launching a small-scale pilot program, pending the results of framework development and stakeholder engagement. An actual citywide response team would not be implemented for three years and seven months, at minimum – if it were to pan out.
But that timeline applies only if the city budget for next year includes $187,000 in funding that will pay for someone to develop the program – and the City Budget Office has recommended against funding that position.
Until a better street response is implemented – if the trends of the past 30 years continue – additional lives will be lost during police interactions with people experiencing mental health and substance use disorder issues on Portland streets, and thousands of arrests and prosecutions involving low-level livability crimes will be inflicted upon the city’s homeless population.
The city is, however, moving forward with a $1.2 million police bureau pilot program that will send non-sworn police personnel to respond to low-level disorder calls. This program has not yet been implemented.
In this special report, we take a look at non-law enforcement programs already responding to public safety and health issues on Portland’s streets and ask the question: Are any of these programs suitable for an expansion, or does Portland need to create a new response team – one that does not involve the police bureau?
Email Senior Staff Reporter Emily Green at emily@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @greenwrites.
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