Unsheltered Homelessness...Unsheltered Homelessness - Metro Transit Police Homeless Action Team Sgt. Brooke Blakey. I’m going to discuss the connection between the police and homelessness,
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Unsheltered Homelessness - Metro Transit Police Homeless Action Team Sgt. Brooke Blakey
Metro Transit Police Homeless Action Team Sgt. Brooke Blakey
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Presentation Notes
I’m going to discuss the connection between the police and homelessness, and the challenges that law enforcement and Metro Transit are facing today. I’ll be taking more of a street level view through the lenses of my two different careers one as a nurse and a paramedic and the other as a police officer. I’m going to discuss the decisions that police officers make that result in the homeless being sent to the jail. I will also going to talk about some solutions that we are working on to reduce this enormous problem.
Connection between Chronic Health Conditions and Homelessness
Source: Wilder Research: Homelessness in Minnesota; Findings from the 2015 Statewide Study. November 2016.
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This slide demonstrates the deep connection between mental illness, substance abuse and chronic health problems that can lead to homelessness and contact with the police. In the criminal justice system we need to prove intent and sometimes that needs to be juxtaposed with their diagnoses. Since not all cops have a psychological/medical or social service background it can be a real challenge for the police to sort this out on the streets. 60-70% of homeless people suffer from some form of mental illness.
“Bermuda Triangle” Twin Cities’ Largest Homeless Camp
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Affectionately known as the Bermuda Triangle, the Light Rail Trains between Union Depot in St. Paul, Target Field to MOA are now considered the biggest homeless camp in the Twin Cities. Depending on the weather conditions at least 180-275 people per night use the transit system as their shelter. This makes our transit system the 2nd biggest homeless shelter in Hennepin County, second only to the Salvation Army. Last February we had this little event called the Super Bowl which created a big push for the Mall of America and the St. Paul Skyways to fix their homeless problem so they did fix their problem by closing and forcing them onto the transit system. This year as we incorporated an overnight maintenance shutdown occurring on our Green line (8/13/19) from 0200-0400 hasn’t seen a increase in numbers of unsheltered individuals throughout the system. fact a stakeholders state that they routinely give bus tokens to people who have no where to go , so they have a warm place to go. So even the shelters use transit as their solution. We saw our PIT counts go up by almost 170 people this year I get it….I have sat with the homeless on the train and asked them why they choose the LRT instead of the shelters, and they say it’s clean and they feel safe on the LRT in part because of the police, and the shelters are overcrowded.
Light Rail Trains after Midnight
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Talk about recent survey after midnight riders. Shutdown needed
Working Toward Solutions
Metro Transit Police DepartmentHomeless Action Team (HAT)
Ultimately, transit agencies should not be a refuge for the homeless, rather a provider of means for them to connect to available resources. “Destination Travelers”
Data suggests that an average of five months of intense contact is what is needed to move someone into transitional housing and then into permanent housing. This needs to be a community effort.
HAT contacts—5291 unduplicated individuals since the teams inception Sept 2018. Offering access to shelter referrals, medical care, mental health treatment, crisis intervention, survival gear, food and benefits.
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Here is my HAT team…Over the past year working this project alone I’ve gathered best practices from around the Nation to help address the growing customer complaints. I understand the transit community’s concerns about safety but as the police we also need to look after the vulnerable who are homeless who ride the transit system too. Many people write complaints saying the police are not doing their job and the homeless should be thrown off the trains. To that I say, “We are not throwing people out into the freezing weather unless there is somewhere safe to drop them off.” The HAT Team focuses on the overnight hours from 10-0800 Sunday night through Thursday morning rush hours. Outreach workers in the Twin Cities don’t work overnights so this allows us to get the real homeless numbers and hand off people to social services during the day. We also help the homeless establish how many nights they are unsheltered to help them when they are applying for housing. Unrealistic expectations of the police. Hygiene—fluids and smell Hepatitis concerns
HAT Training Topics Crisis Intervention and De-escalation Outreach Worker Certification HMIS Assessor Training Trauma-Informed Interviewing Understanding Addiction Narcan Training
Building Community Trust
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Homeless Management Information System is a class of database applications used to confidentially aggregate data on homeless populations served in the United States. Training was meant to understand how the system works not to become assessors. Now more than ever it’s important for the police to build trust. It’s frustrating as police officers because Trust in every police officer can quickly be destroyed by the actions of police officers miles away that we don’t even know. So we give officers additional training on how to respond to people in crisis, and increase our own accountability.
Outreach Certification
Street Outreach Worker Certification
HAT Next Steps Hired housing navigators
teamed with HAT officers and current street outreach workers
Utilized College interns to conduct data
Creating education plans for employees and riders
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Navigation component--Hiring people that can do assessments since we have already trained our officers as outreach workers. One idea is to start partnering with a local college to help graduate students in social work with their required internships. Examine our all day pass that contributes to the sheltering problems. Strengthen our Code of Conduct policies and educating the riders about our challenges with the homeless population. I personally email people with complaints back to explain our challenges. The public education component is very important.
Connections Provides federal rent assistance to homeless transit riders with
disabilities to date houses 42 families(over 123 people) Families housed still housed 6 months later
Winter “Safe Space” shelter placed of 4912 unduplicated individuals into “low barrier shelter”
Coordinated efforts and update service partners regularly in collaboration with MN State Office of Homelessness
Developed a registry of homeless using transit as a shelter to target services
Eliminate duplication of efforts
HRA outreach team does Pre & Post-move housing stability counseling
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This year after publicly highlighting of our homeless problem we were awarded 89 HUD housing vouchers. We appointed one person to coordinate the efforts. We are having regular meetings where we get all our service partners in the same room and hammer out solutions. By getting all the players in one room we often see one homeless person might be in multiple processes so we streamline services by eliminating the duplication of our efforts. We also ensure that after people are housed we have an ongoing connection to make sure they stay housed.
Housing Challenges Homeless transit riders come with high
barriers Criminal backgrounds, mental health issues,
poor housing history Not all riders are housing ready for
independent living with a voucher Integration funds needed for success 10 Families housed 36 additional referrals in process
Most of the shelters in Minnesota don’t accept people after 7 at night in part because they are full, so last year we created the Winter Safe Space. The Winter Safe Space is a shelter — designated for St. Paul and Metro Transit Police and homeless outreach staff to refer homeless individuals. It opens at 10 pm till 9 am. The operating costs for the space are about $400,000, which are split between Ramsey County, the city of St. Paul and philanthropic partners. It gives the police 62 shelter beds and an option other than the ER, detox or jail when the shelters are closed. So our next challenge will be--How do we simultaneously focus on engaging and housing this group while not creating incentives for new people to join this group in the hopes that doing so provides a faster path to housing? Last year when we started Safe Space we used business cards as referrals and the homeless starting Calling 911 from our LRT platforms for an officer’s business card as a referral to the drop-in shelter. Yea, I didn’t see that one coming….We are fixing that issue for this year’s Safe Space shelter.
Frequent Faces Pilot Program Partners Guild Outside-In Consultants Catholic Charities East Metro Crisis Alliance Dept Human Services SPPD & SPFD
Vision Identify Top 30 Resource Users Many use Metro Transit Focus social, legal and medical
services. Close endless cycle. Create Permanent Solutions
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The Metro Transit Police Department is developing an innovative pilot project in Ramsey County which, together with our strategic partners from the emergency room, detox, SPPD, SPFD, and the court system, identifies the top 30 frequent users of our system resources, who commonly use the Metro Transit Green Line trains as shelter. The new project will focus intensive social, legal and medical services toward creating permanent housing solutions for those struggling on our streets.
Transit Homeless Action Team Healthcare for Homeless
IBIS ID System (modeled after Houston)
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--We Have repurposing a Metro Mobility short bus for our team and have already got an IBIS fingerprint identification system to use because: One of the biggest problems for the homeless is lost or stolen ID cards. They had no way to access necessary documents like birth certificates to replace them. If you can’t show who you are you can’t access services. Houston’s outreach vehicle is setup with computers, incorporating fingerprint technology with a mobile printer to help print replacement IDs. IBIS Information-Based Identification System (IBIS) [also known as Integrated Biometric Identification System]
Ongoing Challenge
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This is truly going to be a long battle to create meaningful solutions for the homeless using the transit systems for shelter. Because in the end without creating adequate sheltering options the transit system will always be the easy alternative. As a police officer the one thing I do know for sure is that solving this problem lies in connecting these people with services and not citations.
