Briefing Room

Homeless Gateway

Community Support Division

The white Fort Lauderdale Police van climbs over the sidewalk and pulls up near a small group of homeless people sitting in the park outside the Broward County main library. “Watch out how afraid the homeless people are,” says a civilian outreach worker, Richard Courtney, as he and his partner, a heavyset uniformed police officer named Scott Russell, get out of the car.

Officer Scott Russell

Courtney, a grizzled, 63-year-old former homeless person, is just being ironic: Nobody scatters, there’s no menace in the air and Russell and Courtney are greeted calmly as they try once again to cajole these chronic veterans of the streets to enter a shelter or treatment facility. “You got a safe place to stay tonight?” Russell gently asks one tipsy black man in his 40s sitting on a cement bench. The only shelter with beds available by this late on their rounds Tuesday evening is Sean Cononie’s Homeless Voice Helping People in America shelter in Hollywood, but the man doesn’t want to go: “I’d rather sleep under a bridge.”

“It’s not a crime to be homeless; it’s better to assist them and give them an opportunity to change their lives.” — Assistant Police Chief Robert

Russell and Courtney are unfazed by such resistance, and are confident that with enough encouragement, he’ll eventually agree to enter a shelter program. In fact, in the course of today’s rounds from noon to 9 p.m., Russell and Courtney will bring 16 people into local shelters, most of whom are desperate for a place to stay, if not an opportunity to reclaim their lives. “I’m trying to convince them that life’s worth living,” Russell says, “to give life a second chance.” As a result of such efforts, more than 2,000 homeless people have entered shelters since the police-led program was launched in November 1999, earning it praise from local and national homeless organizations as a model program.

Even so, a few homeless people and advocates have told City Link that other Fort Lauderdale policemen are too often flouting their department’s official compassionate approach — and its pioneering “Homelessness 101” police training — by still using intimidation with the homeless. Take Lionel, a black laborer in his 30s with a Hispanic wife, who complains that after they couldn’t afford to stay at a Days Inn anymore, they encountered repeated harassment since becoming homeless two weeks ago. While walking with his wife on Northwest Second Avenue near Sunrise Boulevard, he says, they were stopped as suspected drug dealers and were told after their IDs were checked, “Find a hole to crawl in, and if we see you again, we’ll take you to jail.” Another homeless man, who uses the pseudonym Daryl Jackson (the names of all homeless people in this story, except for Lionel’s, have been changed to protect their privacy), praises Courtney and Russell, but says, “The other cops treat you like an eyesore. They want us to keep moving. They tell you, ‘Either go to the shelter or go to jail.’ ” He was evicted from his apartment a few weeks ago, and is currently hoping to get into one of the city’s overcrowded shelters. In the meantime, he’s also turning to the Cooperative Feeding Program for meals.

Despite a major overhaul in the Police Department’s homelessness policy in the past few years, clearly some sniping at the department remains. As Marti Forman, the executive director of the Cooperative Feeding Program, contends, “The basic mentality of the police is to clean up the place for tourism. The homeless are told to move along or be arrested.” She says such encounters regularly occur outside her own soup kitchen across the street from the Police Department’s Broward Boulevard headquarters when the homeless line up early for the meals that are served at her facility at 5 p.m.

Such criticism, though, sets Forman apart from most homeless advocates, who generally give the Fort Lauderdale Police — partnering with the Broward Coalition for the Homeless — strikingly high marks. “The Police Department is doing a stellar job,” says Michael Stoops, director of community organizing for the Washington-based National Coalition for the Homeless. In fact, it’s the only police outreach effort anywhere in the country he commends. “What’s unique about Fort Lauderdale is that they’ve taken the nontraditional approach of having a police officer and formerly homeless man patrolling the streets. It’s a model program that other communities should emulate.” Last year, the Florida Coalition for the Homeless awarded one of its three statewide awards to Officer Russell for his work with the homeless.

The new policing style also has improved relations with skeptical homeless people and social services providers. Laura Carey, the executive director of the Broward Coalition for the Homeless and the developer of the Police Department’s homelessness training program, says, “There’s greater trust in the police. By working together, we’re helping homeless people access those resources that can help them.”

Unfortunately, she points out, “We may be doing a better job of getting people off the street, but the system is doing a better job of making people homeless,” citing such factors as low wages, shortages of affordable housing and welfare cutbacks.

With so much praise for the department, why, then, are Forman and some of the homeless she champions so critical of the police? The best explanation could be that while the outreach team is doing an admirable job helping the homeless, some other policemen on the force may be sticking to an old-fashioned hostile approach that used to mark police policy. Between 50 and 70 percent of patrol officers have received the two-hour “Homelessness 101” training, according to the architect of the department’s new policy, Assistant Police Chief Robert Pussins, who says officers generally encourage people to go to shelters without threatening arrest.

He says there’s been a downturn in both public complaints about the homeless and arrests for the minor violations — such as sleeping on the beach or loitering and prowling — that once enabled the police to sweep the homeless off the streets. As for the allegations of homeless people such as Lionel, he says, “It doesn’t sound like we did all that we could [to help them], but it’s difficult to respond to an anecdote when we don’t hear the other side of the story.” Pussins invited Lionel and his wife to lodge a complaint with the department.

At the same time, he contends, the department has been acting appropriately to thwart criminal violations by the homeless outside of Forman’s soup kitchen on Broward Boulevard. “We’ve received complaints from the community and the district commissioner that they’re loitering and trespassing, and drinking alcohol in violations of city ordinances,” Pussins says. “Just because you’re homeless doesn’t mean you get a free Get Out of Jail Pass.” He maintains that the department’s basic policy, which was formally announced two years ago, has a humanitarian message: “It’s not a crime to be homeless; it’s better to assist them and give them an opportunity to change their lives.”

Indeed, there have been a host of reforms emphasizing referral to social services since the Police Department moved in 1998 to end its harsh policies. It once used “bum sweeps” as well as forced the homeless to stay in the notorious Tent City near City Hall; that PR disaster paved the way for the opening of the well-regarded Homeless Assistance Center (HAC) in February, 1999. The evolving policing approach that now teams the Broward Coalition for the Homeless, which pays Courtney, with the Police Department was spurred in large part by a $1.5 million settlement paid in 1998 by the Miami Police Department, resulting from the landmark Pottinger ruling on Miami’s unconstitutional crackdown on the homeless; Fort Lauderdale wanted to avoid similar penalties.

Today, five days a week, Courtney, Russell and a few other officers on the team are doing what they can to help the homeless find shelter and new lives. It’s not easy, given the reluctance of the chronic homeless to face the more structured life of a shelter program — or deal with the overcrowding that plagues shelters in today’s crumbling economy. There are less than 700 general emergency beds in the county, not counting nearly 400 more for specialized populations like teens and families. But with the total homeless population estimated at 5,000, there’s often a waiting list for those who call the shelter referral line at 954/524-BEDS to enter a shelter program, which typically lasts between 30 and 90 days. The city’s police team is allotted about a dozen one-night-only beds in the two main Fort Lauderdale shelters, the Salvation Army (dubbed “The Sally”) and the Homeless Assistance Center, which are offered in addition to those shelters’ own short-term program beds. Police referrals are then given priority in entering the shelter programs. “If you want to get off the street, you might not get the shelter you want, but we’re going to try to find you a place,” Courtney says.

That dedication is on view from the moment they step out of headquarters about 4:30 p.m. to continue their rounds after already placing three people in shelters. An eerily soft-spoken 22-year-old black woman approaches them seeking refuge, accompanied by a relative who says he doesn’t have room for her. In a voice that’s quieter than a whisper, this woman tells Russell that her two children have been taken away because she’s homeless since fleeing a sexual attacker at the place where she was staying. Russell will make sure the shelter gets her help from Legal Aid. “What we do is triage,” Russell says, “to stabilize the situation and get her into a shelter.”

On the way to take her to the HAC, they stop by the Salvation Army shelter where they’ve already reserved five or six slots for the night. There they encounter one of the homeless mentally ill they’ve recently rescued from months of deterioration on the street. Now, after being released from the hospital, she approaches them looking almost normal and tells them, “My doctor says I’m doing OK.” “Keep taking what the doctors told you to take,” says Courtney, who as a former victim of mental illness knows its perils first-hand.

Then, they bring the young mother over to the HAC, where she’s greeted with a brief but friendly orientation talk about the shelter. In a few minutes, they’ve helped a homeless person to have another chance in life, and now Russell returns to the van, exulting in a booming voice, “We’re out here to save lives! We’re doing God’s work!” He means that literally. Now a devout Baptist, he had a religious rebirth about the time he began dealing with the homeless on Fort Lauderdale beaches in 1996, bringing a more supportive approach to policing. “I got results treating people with a lot more compassion,” he says. He carries with him in his patrol car a well-thumbed Bible, with Jesus’ injunction to feed and house the poor highlighted: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.”

The poor will always be with us, and a dozen of them are waiting for Russell and Courtney when they drive to a pick-up location, Seventh Avenue Recovery, a drug counseling facility. They’re a motley group: black, white, Hispanic, some are young adults, there’s an ex-con or two as well as a few middle-aged alcoholics and drug addicts. Courtney and Russell start chatting with them next to the van, taking down their ID information while figuring out their situation and where to place them.

“Would you like to get into a program like the HAC?” Courtney asks one healthy-looking young man in a Marlins cap. “I’d love that,” he says, although he concedes he was kicked out of the Broward Outreach Center in Hollywood for testing positive for drugs. But he’s given another chance and is picked to go to the HAC, the most sought after shelter slot. If they haven’t tried a shelter before, the homeless are usually given an opportunity to go there, but if they’ve dropped out, they often can’t be readmitted unless they’re approved on a case-by-case basis — and are seen as having a chance to succeed. Courtney says to one young black man, an apparent crack user who dropped out of the HAC, “Next time, don’t screw up.”

In about a half hour, they’ve sorted through everyone, each with a history that’s brought them to this outreach team as their last resort. One ponytailed, 48-year-old construction worker named Paul says, “I’m dying out there, man. I just need 30 days to get back on my feet.” But because he quit the HAC program last year while using cocaine (he’s says he’s clean now), he can’t be admitted there now and agrees to go to the Salvation Army. “We see a lot of shelter shoppers,” Courtney says.

For the team’s first trip — to the Salvation Army — five people cram into the van. Among them are Paul; an aging alcoholic and HAC drop- out whose hard-drinking girlfriend has a broken arm and will be taken to the HAC; and an ex-convict just released from jail in Miami-Dade.

After dropping them off at the Salvation Army, they return to ferry a handful of the most injured and vulnerable of the homeless to the HAC. These include a middle-aged Hispanic recovering from a heart attack and an aging, bearded man who uses a walker. They’ll all sleep on mattresses in the lobby tonight before being fully evaluated tomorrow. During this visit to the HAC, Russell encounters a living example of the difference his work makes. A recovering addict who was on the streets a few weeks earlier is serving dinner in the cafeteria, and he smiles when he spots Russell. The tall black man says, “He helped motivate me. He gave me a pep talk: He made me see that with my college degree, I could be doing much more with my life, that I needed to change.”

Russell says, while driving to scout his next homeless hangout, “I throw something at them that they can grab hold of for a little ray of hope.”

Near the end of their rounds, he returns once more to Seventh Street Recovery to speak to a young crack-using couple who left the HAC program and now want a lift to the depot to go to Cononie’s shelter in Hollywood. Before taking them to the bus, with a dollar in fare for each, Russell spends much time appealing to his pride to return to work and to stop sponging off her $500 disability check. “A man needs to get on the J.O.B. program,” Russell tells him.

It’s often a slow process to win the trust of the homeless, and to Russell, “It’s like a hostage negotiation, except that they’re holding themselves hostage.”

Finally, they visit the Broward library grounds, where he spends a long time explaining to the middle-aged, tipsy black man how he can get free clothes and other amenities to clean himself up for job interviews. “When you’re sober, we’ll take you up to the Sally or the HAC,” Russell tells him. “But you’ve got to be ready for it.” The man nods in agreement: “I’ll be ready in a few days.”

The long day seems to be over when they return to police headquarters — until they’re approached in the parking lot by an exhausted man recently let out of a Lake Worth jail for vagrancy. Russell starts to give him money for bus fare to Hollywood, then thinks better of it and calls over to the Salvation Army right across the street. “They’re full,” he says, “but I’ll try.” He drives over while speaking on the phone, “Can you squeeze one more in?” Once there, he lays on all his charm to the staffer in charge. “I need one more, do the right thing,” he says, slapping him on the back. It works, and another homeless person has found a place to stay the night.

For the Fort Lauderdale Police Department’s outreach team, there’s always some more room at the inn.

Contact Art Levine at alevine@tribune.com.

Briefing Room