Vancouver Cpl. Drue Russell stood in a seventh floor window at the Hilton Vancouver Washington on Friday, scanning Esther Short Park below for any signs of trouble.
Wearing a black sweatshirt and knit hat, and carrying a backpack containing his citation book, handcuffs and binoculars, Russell was preparing to head into the park to look for park visitors, largely homeless, committing crimes ranging from harassment and assault to drinking and littering.
“We don’t have the crowd today that we normally do,” Russell said. “But that’s a good thing.”
Vancouver police are in the third week of a three-month push to ticket and arrest those breaking the law in Esther Short Park, following complaints about rising fights and incidents between intoxicated homeless people and the public.
The point isn’t to drive the homeless out of the park, but rather to curb illegal actions, Russell said.
“I want people to feel safe, and the businesses around here depend on it,” he said.
Elusive solutions
In the first two weeks, police handed out 23 fines for infractions like littering and drinking in public, wrote nine criminal citations and made one arrest. Those who do not appear for their court dates or pay their fines can be arrested and sent to jail. Judges can also ban offenders for a time from Esther Short Park.
Yet the potential incarceration and ticketing of the homeless isn’t something that politicians, police and social service providers are applauding: It’s just that law enforcement is one of very few tools left to keep order.
“Giving them tickets and adding more barriers to them moving forward isn’t the solution,” said Katherine Garrett, Share House and Share Outreach director, who works with many of the homeless at the park. “Clogging up our homeless court isn’t the solution.”
Garrett said this recent wave of crime is directly tied to the closure of Share House’s daytime shelters in portable buildings at West 13th and Lincoln streets in October. Vancouver, under budget duress, cut $179,000 from its contributions to Share, and a two-year temporary use permit for the portable buildings also expired.
“They have no place else to go,” Garrett said. “I don’t have a day room. They can go to the library for a short period of time or to the Marshall (Community) Center for a short period of time. But there’s just not a place left with something for them to do and a place for them to get out of the elements.”
On Friday, Russell left the top floor of the Hilton just after 11 a.m. and headed into the park on foot. As he rounded a corner near the main stage in the park, a woman exhaled a thick puff of smoke and passed a pipe to a man sitting on the ground.
“She’s smoking marijuana,” Russell said, and approached the pair.
He took a small film canister and a metal pipe from the woman, Denise Verrier, and placed her in handcuffs.
Verrier, 55, sat on her walker as Russell, with Cpl. Duane Boynton as uniformed backup, filled out a citation for misdemeanor marijuana possession. Verrier said she stays at the WHO night shelter and brings extra food down for others in the park during the day. She agreed there were some unsavory transients in Esther Short Park, but said she wasn’t one of them.
“They’ve done nothing but harass the kids that come here,” she said. “The younger ones don’t have any place to go.”
Russell gave Verrier a court date, and told her that since she has helped him identify other troublemakers in the past, he’d note that she’s been cooperative.
“I just shouldn’t have got caught; I knew better than to do that here,” Verrier said.
Leaving the main stage, Russell and Boynton next found a man, Charles Lucky LeClair, 22, sleeping with all his possessions around him on the back porch of the Slocum House. They ticketed him for camping.
Jessica Lightheart, Share’s community relations director, said the nonprofit agency isn’t supportive of the fights and drunken harassment by some of the homeless at the park. But she said the latest crackdown — which includes tickets for littering and other minor infractions — may be a bit extreme.
“It starts to feel trivial; it almost seems more like a punishment at that point,” she said. “Like it’s just to make a point with the homeless.”
Russell said that most times those sleeping on the Slocum House porch would simply be told to move along. But during this effort, set to go on for another two months, the citations allow them to track top offenders and trends.
The names of the top 25 offenders are being passed along to the Council for the Homeless for further outreach help, he said. Also tied in to the VPD patrol plan are Neighbors on Watch volunteers, who have stepped up patrols.
Esther Short Park has long been the scene of tension between the homeless and the surrounding businesses and residents, most aptly illustrated by a run-in between former Mayor Royce Pollard and a transient who hit him with his shopping cart in the mid-1990s.
“People will migrate back to where their comfort zone is,” Garrett said. “And the comfort zone in the past has always been in the downtown core.”
Mayor Tim Leavitt, who lives across the street from Esther Short Park, said he is pleased to see the increased patrol presence. He sent an e-mail last month calling for more patrols after hearing that one transient followed members of a women’s fitness class, threatening to “rape and kill” them.
But he also said it’s time for a larger conversation about what can be done.
“We all are aware that funding for programs to help individuals and families are being cut, and we’re seeing the aftereffects on our streets,” Leavitt said. “It’s a bigger community issue that we’re seeing the symptoms of in our parks.”
Unfortunately, and particularly with the current economic malaise, those on the front lines said they have no idea how to make this better.
Russell said he’s learned a lot about homelessness — who those people are, what their problems are — in his last few years as a neighborhood patrol officer with the West Precinct.
“There are so many issues around it, it’s going to take someone a lot smarter than me to find a solution for it,” he said.
Garrett, with Share, said she felt for the city’s budget woes, and also empathizes with businesses wanting a more welcoming environment. But she also said a fix won’t be simple.
“I wish I had the miracle answer for this,” she said. “But adding more tickets and putting them in jail isn’t going to help the end solution … when you have that much mounting upon you, it becomes hopeless to them. They can’t get an apartment, can’t get a job, can’t get clean. That’s what the portables did: At least we had showers, had a day room and bus tickets. We have none of that any more.”
Andrea Damewood: 360-735-4542 or andrea.damewood@columbian.com.
