OPINION | The crisis response program is designed to meet people with compassion in their greatest times of need
The Portland Street Response pilot is slated to transform into a city-wide program — still with a limited scope — this spring. It’s really happening.
The non-police response program for street crises, housed under Portland Fire & Rescue, has widespread community support — an encouraging pilot evaluation and a committed staff.
I was jarred by a new tactic taken by the People for Portland campaign. In their most recent poll this past December, the “unarmed Street Response Teams” were described as “trained health and medical professionals to help move people experiencing homelessness off the streets and into safe and sanitary shelters.” While this doesn’t sound immediately alarming, it’s important to note this is not the mission of Portland Street Response, which meets people where they are to address street crises. That might mean helping people get into a shelter, but it isn’t the primary task.
Why does this matter?
Well, this poll goes on to ask, “Knowing this, which comes closer to your opinion?” and gives people two choices:
1. "This is a humane approach and makes me more supportive of requiring people living on the streets to move into available shelters."
OR
2. "This is a step in the right direction, but I still believe it’s inhumane and cruel to require people to move from the streets into shelters."
See what happened there? This shifted from misrepresenting the role of Portland Street Response to then suggesting Portland Street Response could be used in “requiring people living on the streets to move into available shelters.”
This comes dangerously close to suggesting Portland Street Response would play an enforcement role. Hard no.
“When people are protesting in the street about feeling unsafe in their communities and they see us go by, and they are excited to see us, that tells me that we are succeeding,” Eugene-based CAHOOTS program coordinator Ebony Morgan told me last spring. “That tells me that we have the trust of the community.”
Trust of those in need is hard-earned and precious.
"Trust of those in need is
hard-earned and precious."
“When they are in a hard situation, they are going to be willing to call for help, which is exactly what we want all of our community members to do,” Morgan said of people who might need the services of CAHOOTS, which serves as inspiration for Portland Street Response.
Should Portland Street Response serve an enforcement role, it will lose the trust of those who need it, something underscored in “Believe our Stories and Listen,” our 2019 survey with Portland State’s Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative and other organizations.
The context for advocating to increase shelters and then require people to go to shelters involves an effort to work around the 2018 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals Martin v. Boise decision. The court determined “prosecuting people criminally for sleeping outside on public property when those people have no home or other shelter to go to” violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
So for those who seek to outlaw sleeping and camping in public, the race is on to build enough shelters as a work-around to that court decision. As long as the city lacks enough shelter space, it’s less likely the city can arrest people for sleeping outside under Martin v. Boise.
While increasing shelters certainly isn’t problematic on its own —shelters help a great deal of people — insistence on shelters as a tool to criminalize street homelessnesss undermines investments in housing and other services. The imperative can be about putting people into spaces that aren’t actually good for their dignified lives, rather than a more robust and well-rounded approach (such as the five-point plan the HereTogether Coalition recently issued).
What’s strange, but repetitive, is this assumption that people will have to be “required” to go to these spaces rather than go of their own free will. It’s something to listen for.
I’ve long written Portland Street Response needs to be expansive enough to be encompassing and nimble enough to be effective, while completely separate from the police. My goodness, I didn’t expect to need a fourth tenet: it must not be turned into de facto police.
"I’ve long written Portland Street Response needs to be
expansive enough to be encompassing and
nimble enough to be effective, while completely separate from the police."
In her Reveal podcast, “Handcuffed and Unhoused,” Melissa Lewis tracked Commissioner Dan Ryan hinting at this approach during a Lents Neighborhood Livability Association meeting.
“Commissioner Ryan tries to bring the crowd back to his plan for transitional villages. He says that 9th Circuit Court decision, Martin v. Boise, means if people refuse to stay at a Safe Rest Village, then police can finally act,” Melissa Lewis describes, turning to audio from Commissioner Ryan speaking to the association:
“Because once we build these villages, then we’ll have places to take people and then if they don’t want to go there, then law enforcement and others have an opportunity to actually do something to move them, so …”
When she followed up with Commissioner Ryan, he did not commit to that position.
Once you start listening for this position — build shelters or villages and then force people into them — you’ll hear a pattern. It’s enough to concern me when I hear proposals for shelters and villages, which ideally should be about meeting people’s needs.
But People for Portland suggesting Portland Street Response act as enforcement is particularly audacious. I’m glad, though, to learn more of that campaign’s agenda, “a bleak vision,” as Angela Uherbelau, Sharon Joy Gary-Smith and state Rep. Andrea Valderrama (D-East Portland) described it in an Oregonian op-ed last December.
This campaign for Portland Street Response is a long road. We’re one year into the pilot, three years since Street Roots proposed the plan, and more time than that since Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty proposed the idea during her 2018 campaign. That same year, The Oregonian published its report that more than half the arrests targeted unhoused people in 2017 (and in subsequent years too). We should not let up on seeing it through.
Portland Street Response is designed to meet people with compassion in their greatest times of need. Our challenge is to heed our better angels.
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