SF homeless response program stalled for lack of funds

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Supporters of a stalled program that would divert non-violent emergency calls regarding homelessness away from the police have renewed their calls for city funding, asking for some $6.8 million to be diverted from the police department towards the program.

Backers of the Compassionate Alternative Response Team (CART), which would handle some non-violent 911 and 311 calls, asked the Police Commission on Wednesday night for their backing to create a program that would send trained staffers to certain homelessness-related calls instead of the cops. 

Despite the pressure from advocates and interest from commissioners and the Board of Supervisors, the program’s future is unclear: The mayor has not chosen to fund the program, and in the past refused to spend some $3 million allocated by the Board.”

Sending police to answer the tens of thousands of homeless-related calls each year is expensive for San Francisco and harmful to the targeted unhoused people, said Chris Herring, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, in a presentation at last night’s meeting.

What’s more, he said, police officers don’t want to be involved in encampment sweeps and move-along orders, either.

“Police officers and [Department of Public Works] workers were in wide consensus that the approach was not effective, and many found the work demeaning and demoralizing,” Herring said. Herring has spent time with street cleanup crews and on ride-alongs with police. 

CART teams would be staffed with workers trained in de-escalation and conflict resolution, and could handle calls such as sit-lie ordinance violations, aggressive panhandling, and trespassing. All of these are currently handled by police officers. Calls to address tent encampments, currently routed to 311, could be handled by the team as well. 

“Another basically 9,000 calls a month, which [Street Crisis Response Team] and [Street Wellness Response Team] are not touching at all, is what CART would be covering and responding to,” Herring said. Unlike the issues that would result in a call to CART, those other teams focus primarily on medical and mental health calls. 

The CART program, which a coalition of community organizations has been advocating for since 2019, is asking for $6.8 million yearly diverted from the police budget to start taking all “Priority C,” or low priority, calls from the police department. 

“There’s been a lot of talk about the police department’s workload, and it’s a great way to lighten the workload, right?” said Coalition on Homelessness director Jennifer Friedenbach, who was called up from the audience to answer a commissioner’s question. “I think there needs to be more political will.” 

In 2019, a Police Commission resolution called for alternative responses to calls regarding homelessness, and CART was developed with input from unhoused people. Though funds have been earmarked by the Board of Supervisors twice, the program has never been funded or implemented. 

Earlier this year, Urban Alchemy was tapped by the city to run a pilot of a different police alternative program using those funds — instead of CART. But that organization has been accused of acting just like the police, shuffling homeless people along with nowhere for them to go.

“This type of policing keeps people homeless longer,” said Herring. 

He pointed to studies showing that actions like encampment sweeps and move-along orders resulted in loss of expensive medications, important documents and supplies for survival, and that such actions put unhoused people at greater risk by forcing them to unfamiliar areas. 

Having spent 56 nights sleeping outside in San Francisco encampments himself while working as an ethnographer, Herring said he witnessed many of these issues first-hand. 

“San Francisco has been great at reducing incarceration,” Herring said, “But these move-along orders, property destruction, citations — all of these things create barriers from moving on from homelessness.” 

Instead, trained workers from CART would provide street counseling, health assistance or refer people to services, reducing the need for frequent and expensive police responses to calls. The program is modeled after similar programs which have seen success elsewhere, such as CAHOOTS in Eugene, Ore., and Denver’s STAR program. 

More than 100,000 calls were made to San Francisco police in 2019 for mental health crises, noise complaints and homeless-related issues, according to a Budget and Legislative Analyst report from last month. 

The low-priority homelessness calls include issues like complaints about encampments, sit-lie laws and trespassing, Herring said, and for years, those calls only appeared to be coming more frequently: Complaints rose 76 percent between 2011 and 2018, although homelessness did not rise significantly.

Some police commissioners, most of whom were not yet appointed when the resolution in support of an alternative response team was approved in 2019, spoke in support of the program.

“It was a surprise to me that the city awarded a completely different program that does not require the training that this CART program has as part of its model,” Commissioner Jesús Gabriel Yáñez said, apparently referring to Urban Alchemy’s contract reported earlier this year. He called CART’s proposal for training “robust” and “impressive.”

Commissioner Debra Walker commented that when she worked on the Building Inspection Commission, outreach programs attempted to resolve tenant issues prior to issuing violations or citations, much as CART aims to do by avoiding police responses. 

The measures that police are equipped to take, Herring said, are ineffective: Studies found that 91 percent of people asked to move along remained in public space, especially since San Francisco does not have voluntary shelter available for the large majority of people living on the streets.

Asked what homeless people do after police ask them to move along, Herring said they simply shuffle away out of sight.

“The most dominant response was simply moving around the block or around the corner.”