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About Eugene weekly. (Eugene, Oregon) 1993-current | View Entire Issue (June 1, 2017)
GETTING THE NUMBERS out the Community Outreach Resource Team (CORT) program. Muni Court, social services, judges and Eugene Economics and a failure of state and local safety nets police and others also are engaged with helping this popu- have increased the number of unhoused people on Eugene lation through Community Court.” streets and potential conflicts with police. The records Eugene police established the CORT program to iden- don’t indicate where the violations took place, but Eugene tify the people who most frequently end up with citations police’s data suggest a lot of the citations and arrests occur or arrests and connect them with services that address their in downtown. needs. Community Court allows an alternative to the typi- It’s here that Eugene police say they have increased cal justice system for dealing with low-level crimes by pro- their efforts to work with people in need rather than turn to viding offenders access to social services and sentencing their ticket books or handcuffs. community service instead of jail time. Officer Bo Rankin is assigned to the downtown team, City Hall continues to make decisions — or delay deci- where he patrols an area that includes the Eugene Library, sions — about how to deal with the homeless in Eugene the Eugene Station LTD bus stop and Kesey Square. In without any concrete numbers about how often police 2016, municipal court records show, Rankin had cited bring charges against people who lack a place to live. homeless people for violations and misdemeanors in at For example, the Eugene City Council in March upped least 50 percent of his cases. police enforcement downtown by banning dogs — a new Rankin says that police officers stationed downtown get ordinance that directly affects the homeless or other people to know and care about the people who reside there, but who frequent areas around the library, Eugene Station, Ke- they also have a duty to respond to complaints about tres- sey Square and other downtown passing or threats. He says of- gathering places. The city has ten the only option police have more recently proposed ban- is to issue citations or make ar- ning alcohol in all city parks. rests. “The goal is not to impose “Stacking 20 citations on penalties on people but to have a person may not correct their a two-way conversation about behavior,” Rankin says. “But what people need,” Vinis says. on the other hand, the 100th “[The police] know the folks time you contact that person, that are really living in our they may decide to change their ( 4 7 1 O U T O F 1 , 834) downtown and have that con- life.” “It’s not necessarily that the versation about can they can OF ALL PEOPLE EPD TICKETED FOR help. The city is really working police are bad guys, it’s that the MINOR NON-DRIVING CRIMES IN 2016 to help people instead of penal- laws are bad,” says Ken Neu- WERE HOMELESS OR LACKED beck, chair of Eugene’s Hu- ize people.” A PERMANENT ADDRESS. man Rights Commission, who The city’s refusal to provide has been a frequent critic of the data or offer any kind of public city’s failure to do more to ad- analysis of enforcement against dress homelessness in Eugene. people without permanent ad- “If you’re going to penalize dresses, however, has generat- somebody with a citation or ar- ed criticism in the community. rest for sleeping outside or in a Walker believes police do track doorway, but you’re not going the data, and says they don’t ( 1 , 1 0 3 O U T O F 3 , 110) to provide them with an alter- divulge it because it is “damn- native place to go, this is called ing.” OF ALL EPD’S MINOR criminalization of homeless- “There’s no accountability NON-DRIVING CASES IN 2016 ness.” whatsoever in EPD,” Walker I N V O LV E D P E O P L E W H O W E R E Others have seen police ac- says, “They don’t get down H O M E L E S S AT S O M E P O I N T tions that they find worrisome. there and understand it; they “Without a house, basically just want to judge it from afar.” I N T H E PA S T T H R E E Y E A R S . everything you do is illegal, Walker says the City Council is like sleeping,” said Sue Sierra- perpetuating the problem. lupe of Occupy Medical, a free Sielicki called for Eugene health care clinic frequented by police to “provide real analy- homeless. “Jail is not the hous- sis” on what it’s costing citizens ing we are looking for [to help] of Eugene to prioritize policing the unhoused. It’s fiscally irre- of the homeless population. sponsible, inhumane and immoral.” “If you’re spending that much of your police force on Sierralupe says her staff has seen police write tickets to how it is, and it’s continuing not to work, you should weigh people sleeping on the sidewalk. When Occupy Medical what it costs to provide actual services instead of just con- was stationed in the Park Blocks, she says, it was a com- tinued enforcement.” mon practice for police to sweep the area to write tickets Councilor Semple was not surprised that people with- to homeless people. out housing are more likely to be issued tickets, and said Sierralupe says continually citing homeless people just the city should prioritize giving people housing choices forces them to move elsewhere and doesn’t actually help before pushing enforcement. fix the problem. She says it causes unhoused people not to Neubeck says it’s “unfortunate” that neither the mayor, report crimes because they’ve accumulated so many vio- chief of police nor City Council knew the rate at which lations they haven’t paid. She also says it makes it near homeless people were being cited. impossible for homeless people to get jobs or pay rent, “This whole thing comes from the law enforcement ap- because their credit is so terrible. The effect, she says, is proach to homelessness that’s taken by the city of Eugene,” “crippling.” Neubeck said. “You’re constantly faced with people who are doing things out on the streets that are often against the law because they have no other place to do them, and that cycle of adding onto people’s records is just going to con- DECISIONS WITHOUT INFORMATION tinue so long as you don’t take an alternative approach.” “This is no surprise to us or to our downtown team,” Eugene police spokeswoman Melinda McLaughlin wrote Kaylee Tornay, Francisca Benitez, Victoria Ganahl and Thomas Rivers contrib- uted additional reporting. Data for this story were originally obtained with the in an email to EW when apprised of the data. She added help of the investigative reporting program at the University of Oregon School that downtown officers “are actively engaged in carrying CRIMINALIZED SLEEP 25% 35% For our story on arrests and citations of homeless people for minor crimes, we used a database from the Eugene Municipal Court. The Municipal Court handles violations and misdemeanors within the city of Eu- gene. More serious charges are filed in Lane County Circuit Court. The Municipal Court released data under the Oregon public records law. From it, we identified 1,834 individu- als who were charged with committing non-driving vio- lations or misdemeanors by Eugene police in 2016. Court records list a mailing address for each defen- dant — the most current address known to court staff for the defendant. We focused on 2016 cases and the most recent charge against each defendant. EW identified 170 people in the court database as homeless or lacking a permanent address. To reach this number, we counted people in the court database listed as transient; people whose mailing address was a motel or other temporary housing; and those whose mail went to social service agency or homeless shelter. We identified another 346 people for whom the court listed “general delivery” as an address. With general de- livery, any mailings from the courts would go to a post office, where the recipient can claim it. U.S. Postal Ser- vice regulations say general delivery is specifically “for transients and customers not permanently located.” Municipal Court staff objected to our automatically characterizing defendants listed under “general delivery” in the court database as transient or those lacking a per- manent address. The court staff said the “general delivery” designa- tion did not necessarily reflect the information a defen- dant gave to police, and that the designation doesn’t automatically mean the defendant is transient. Yet the court officials could not provide an estimate as to how often they used the “general delivery” designation when they knew the defendant was not a transient. Therefore we were faced with determining how many people in the court database as “general deliv- ery” were homeless or lacked a permanent address. We chose at random 100 defendants who had been charged by the Eugene Police Department in 2016 and who had “general delivery” listed in the court database. We examined the file documents in the most recent case for each defendant. The court charged us $97.94 to let us look at the files. Our sample found that, in 85 percent of the cases, the defendant fit our definition of transient. In these cases, legal documents or the police officer writing the ticket indicated that the defendant was transient, lacked an address, or listed a social service agency or homeless shelter in 2016. In our sample, we didn’t count cases in which the defendants, police or other court records provided no address information. In doing so, we are underestimat- ing the actual rate. Nonetheless, we applied this con- servative rate to calculate the number of defendants with a “general delivery” listing who are transient. By our conservative estimate, at least 471 out of 1,834 people cited or arrested for minor crimes were homeless in 2016 — around 25.3 percent. The actual rate falls between 24.2 and 26.4 percent based on our sampling method and a 95 percent confidence level. We wanted to also use information pulled directly from EPD reports and tickets. And we tried to do so. In April, we filed a request under the Oregon public records law, asking the Eugene police for computer data collected from all tickets issued by their officers from 2014 through 2016. In May, the Eugene police declined to provide the computer data as we had requested. Instead, the po- lice told us we would need to examine the actual paper tickets and case files — more than 37,000 of them. We would be allowed to examine the files if the police pulled each file by hand, one by one, and only if we paid the police department’s costs for providing the documents. The bill for this service? $139,132.50. And that’s after the police gave us the 25 percent discount they routinely offer to all members of the news media. We declined to pay, and we are working to have the Eugene police release data we originally sought in our public records request. — Kenny Jacoby of Journalism and Communication. eugeneweekly.com • June 1, 2017 15
