 Briefing Room |
 Homeless Gateway |
 Community Support Division |
Reprinted from Law Enforcement News, May 2000
John Jay College of Criminal Justice,
555 W. 57th St., New York, NY 10019.
Web: www.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/lenPolice brass in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., seeking to avoid problems that befell neighboring Miami some years back, believe they have created a plan that not only deals sensibly with the city's homeless population, but has prompted a change in the attitude of police officers toward those residents.
Under a policy established last July, which specifically states that homelessness is not a crime, officers are encouraged to refer the homeless to social service agencies in lieu of making an arrest. In addition, the department is in the process of having its entire staff undergo a two-hour training session known as "Homelessness 101," which explores the causes of homelessness and strategic responses to the problem, said Assistant Chief Robert Pusins, who oversees the initiative.
"We have a policy, we have a special report for homeless contacts, we have the training, and we encourage our officers, particularly in the downtown and along the River Walk, to make proactive contact with the homeless to assure ourselves that they're aware of the available social services, including the [Broward County Central] Homeless Assistance Center," he told Law Enforcement News. "We're going up to the homeless in a non-enforcement type approach and saying, 'Listen, you seem down on your luck. Are you aware of the social services? If you want, we'll refer you."
The initiative was prompted in large part by a $1.5-million settlement entered into by Miami officials in 1998 to resolve Pottinger v. City of Miami, a lawsuit brought 12 years ago by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of 5,000 vagrants.
At the time, the practice of the Miami Police Department was to conduct homeless sweeps whenever a national event was poised to focus attention on the city, said Pusins. "While they were doing that," he told LEN, "they also were taking the homeless' property, including identification, eyeglasses, medicines, and destroying it. At one point, they even put all the property in one location and set it on fire."
In 1992, Senior U.S. District Court Judge C. Clyde Atkins issued a landmark ruling in which he found that the city had violated the constitutional rights of the homeless. Authorities were told they should halt minor arrests and create "safe zones" for street people where they could conduct what Atkins called "life-sustaining" activities, said Pusins, such as bathing, relieving themselves, sleeping, and trying to keep warm. Miami created two of these zones, he said.
In the meantime, officials from Fort Lauderdale, just 30 miles to the north, were following the Pottinger decision and concluded that their city would be smart to create its own safe zones before something similar happened there.
"We were conducting what we called 'bum sweeps,'" said Pusins. "We would bring police in on overtime at 4 in the morning to hit our beaches, parks, the Riverwalk, the downtown area, and try to find the homeless and arrest them for trespassing. We saw the Miami case, and the ruling on the safe zones, and while it didn't apply to us" the writing was on the wall.
But the tent city that Fort Lauderdale created as a safe zone soon became something that Pusins likened to a refugee camp. The four tents put up in a downtown parking lot attracted the homeless from all over Broward County, he said, and began costing the city some $25,000 a month for trash collection, bathrooms, cleaning, security and showers.
However, the "nightmare" of the safe zone, as Pusins called it, eventually led to the construction of the 200-bed Homeless Assistance Center, which was built with city and county funds. Opened in 1999, the facility offers the homeless a maximum stay of 45 days and an immediate medical assessment, along with other services. "So now the tent city is gone, and everybody's happy because all the homeless are going to the Homeless Assistance Center," he said.
In November 1998, Judge Federico Moreno, who had taken over the Pottinger case, approved the settlement in which the city of Miami would pay $600,000 in $1,500 vouchers to those who could submit police records to prove they were homeless and wrongfully arrested between 1984 and 1997, as well as $900,000 in fees for the 10 attorneys who worked on the case.
There were a number of other concessions, as well. The Miami Police Department had to create a policy for dealing with the city's homeless population and implement ongoing training for its officers, among other measures, said Pusins. "We looked at that, and said, 'Let's learn a lesson again from Miami."
Last year, the Fort Lauderdale department was able to obtain a $55,000 Local Law Enforcement Block Grant, which was used to form the Fort Lauderdale Homeless Outreach Program with the Broward Coalition for the Homeless and the Homeless Assistance Center.
All but $5,000 of the grant funds was earmarked for overtime for the outreach program, in which a uniformed officer is teamed up with a volunteer from the coalition who was formerly homeless. Together, they seek out what Pusins called the "hardcore homeless," or those who have consistently refused services. In the past five months, he said, the department has documented over 500 contacts and referred some 275 of those into treatment programs. "These are 275 folks who would have been arrested by us in past years, and now they're hopefully started toward recovery," he said.
Pusins believes that educating officers about the causes of homelessness has affected a cultural change in the department. Like many there, he said, he used to view the homeless as "bums, people who did not want to work, were lazy and causing problems for everyone else." But as a commander in the agency's Northwest District, which included the city's downtown area, Pusins adopted Fort Lauderdale's homeless problem. "I learned myself about the issue of homelessness and learned how enforcement alone is not effective if you're going to have long-term change with homeless people."
Pusins began working with the coalition, became a board member and presented a seminar in Washington last year about turning adversarial relationships between the police and the homeless into partnerships. He and the coalition have also approached the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) about making the "Homelessness 101" training a part of the academy curriculum.
"We're really turning our police culture around within this agency to look at homelessness a little bit differently then people who are out there causing problems for us and the community," he said.