Wheeler ordered police to cite homeless Portlanders with a criminal violation if they don’t immediately accept a shelter offer from police.
He doubled down on this wrong-headed approach — which was supported by the entire Portland City Council — despite Multnomah County Sheriff Nicole Morrisey O’Donnell’s refusal to book people merely because they are homeless.
Not only is Wheeler setting into motion further trauma and barriers, but he’s committing extensive public dollars and gumming up an already overburdened legal system.
Creating severe consequences for a future when he’s not the mayor is dismal policy-making.
If you support Wheeler and the City Council’s ordinance with the hope it’s moving toward a solution, I urge you to take a second look at what a costly and messy procedure this is.
I talked to two people who lead key portions of the legal system — Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt and Grant Hartley, Multnomah County Metropolitan Public Defender office director — to learn what happens after a police officer cites a person experiencing homelessness for not accepting whatever shelter option police offered.
First, that person has to show up for court.
Because people are managing so much just to survive, navigating scheduling and the court system is a high hurdle.
“If you just gave me a piece of paper and said show up to the dentist in 30 days, and I didn’t have a house, I’m probably going to miss that dentist appointment,” Schmidt said.
If they don’t show up, they face a warrant for their arrest.
If they do show up, the court is responsible for appointing a lawyer to defend them. Once again, if they don’t show up for the next hearing, they face a warrant for their arrest.
If they do? Chances are, they won’t get an attorney.
“There is just a huge overburdening of our criminal legal system to start with,” Hartley told me, and that includes a scarcity of public defenders.
The court prioritizes appointing attorneys, and Hartley said he’d expect it to prioritize misdemeanors such as domestic violence and driving-under-the-influence cases where there’s a public safety threat.
If, at this point — many public dollars and anxious hours later — the court didn’t find them an attorney, a judge would then throw the case out of court.
But if they do, Schmidt points out that an attorney would likely negotiate a pre-trial offer. The likely outcome of this would be the person would need a letter from a social service that they engaged.
They could also take it to a jury, which would be convened to decide whether to convict someone of being homeless.
The police, judge and attorney hours would rack up to hundreds, if not thousands, of public dollars for each case.
Meanwhile, the person would have a criminal record — a barrier to housing and employment. So this process would simply push them deeper into homelessness.
Schmidt pointed out that again and again, people almost access housing services, only to be denied because of warrants and criminal records.
“I spend a lot of time trying to ameliorate those issues and reduce those barriers so that individuals can actually successfully be placed into housing and off the streets,” Schmidt said.
To overcome the additional barriers wrought by this wrong-headed policy, courts and attorneys need to work many more public hours, which is less likely in this political moment when many politicians are grandstanding about law and order.
This new era of draconian policy means investing in police time, court time, public defender time and district attorney time — thousands of dollars and a clogged legal system.
The result? People who are already homeless are burdened with more trauma and criminal records that block them from the very housing they need.
The future be damned, it seems, for the current City Council.
Street Roots is an award-winning weekly investigative publication covering economic, environmental and social inequity. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots. Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today.
