[BoulderCouncilHotline] Ideas for discussion regarding encampments

[Brockett, Aaron]

Dear council members and Hotline followers, I hope you have all had a safe and meaningful Martin Luther King Jr. day today. At our meeting on the 19th we will be discussing issues raised by encampments on public lands in the city of Boulder. City staff has brought forward a number of recommendations on how to deal with these issues. I will wait until our meeting to offer my opinions on those proposals, but I would like the council to consider two additional actions we could take.

The first is the creation of one or more safe camping sites, either by the city or a private service provider. There has been a new, successful model for such sites that has been rolled out in Denver in the last two months that has provided a safe, warm, clean alternative to the unauthorized encampments that have been becoming more and more common in Denver, Boulder, and many other cities across the country. The sites are required to have security, maintenance and measures in place to mitigate impacts to other properties. Safe camping sites in Boulder could reduce the impromptu encampments while giving the people that occupy the new sites a level of stability that would enable them to engage in services, get on their feet, and obtain access to long-term housing.

Information on the Denver safe camping sites and their success can be found in these articles:
https://www.denverpost.com/2020/12/03/denver-homeless-community-church-uptown/
https://www.westword.com/news/denver-safe-camping-sites-have-successful-first-month-11881632

One of the challenges the staff memo lays out is the high impact on police time and resources from responding to calls regarding people experiencing homelessness. My second proposal is to consider adding a non-police based emergency response team for 911 calls staffed by social workers and mental health professionals. This could be modeled off of the successful 31 year old CAHOOTS program in Eugene, Oregon and the recent STAR program implemented in Denver. In the CAHOOTS model, police are always dispatched to calls about crime in progress, violence, or life-threatening emergencies, but if a call for service relates to a mental health or behavioral crisis, the CAHOOTS team can be sent to provide crisis intervention, counseling, mediation, information and referral, transportation to social services, first aid, and basic-level emergency medical care. The model has been shown to improve outcomes to the people served while also saving communities money. This could be a way to dramatically reduce the time and expense that the police department currently spends interacting with people experiencing mental health and behavioral issues but who are not engaging in criminal activity, while also providing another avenue to connect people without housing to services and support.

Information on the CAHOOTS program can be found here:
https://whitebirdclinic.org/cahoots-faq/
https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/articles/2020-07-06/eugene-oregons-30-year-experiment-with-reimagining-public-safety
Denver's STAR program is profiled here:
https://www.denverpost.com/2020/09/06/denver-star-program-mental-health-police/


Best,

Aaron Brockett


 [cid:25c8070f-2d82-472a-b84e-ccef03da23e5]

<http://www.bouldercolorado.gov/>

C: 720-984-1863

brocketta at bouldercolorado.gov

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