Police crack down on homeless activity, advocates question motives

from the Nashville City Paper

By Amanda N. Maynord, amaynord@nashvillecitypaper.com

Metro police say 454 people have been charged with “quality of life” violations downtown since the department began an initiative focused on cleaning up the area in late July.

Although police officials refrain from labeling individuals as homeless, the persons charged have been homeless or chronically homeless.

“There’s been a consorted effort by the police department since the summer to strongly address quality of life issues downtown,” said Don Aaron, Metro Police spokesperson.

Quality of life violations include public drunkenness, indecent exposure and trespassing.

Police officials said despite criticism from homeless advocates that police are “picking” on the homeless population, they are attempting to help many of them and prosecuting any persons who break the law.

“We don’t categorize people, we don’t go out looking for a category of people,” said Cmdr. Andy Garrett of the Central precinct. “We go out looking for violators.”

Garrett said his officers are arresting or giving citations to chronic offenders, usually for public drunkenness, indecent exposure or trespassing.

Homeless advocates say the increased prosecution is only compounding the issue of homelessness, not helping it.

“We’re committed to a positive relationship with the police department — at the same time, their current policies… are resulting in an exacerbation of poverty through a waste of tax dollars by giving people citations and jail time for trying to survive,” said Matt Leber, organizer of the Nashville Homeless Power Project.

He claims that pressure on the police department from the Nashville Downtown Partnership, a nonprofit management organization aimed at improving downtown, and businesses has led to the “quality of life” initiative.

Garrett said he had received complaints from tourists, residential citizens and businesses.

Cindy Demuth said she has been homeless since April and was arrested a month ago for trespassing while sleeping in a parking garage downtown.

“I was just trying to stay dry and warm,” Demuth said.

She said because she didn’t have identification, she ended up spending the night in jail and now, because police are spending more time downtown, it’s become increasingly hard to find a place to sleep.

“You can’t sleep anywhere anymore,” she said. “I actually have a pretty OK spot where I am now, but the hard part is if it rains.”

Garrett said he wants to help those chronic offenders — people who have been homeless for several years — “break the cycle” by providing them information on social services in town and transportation to shelters.

“We’ve got to help these people to break this cycle,” Garrett said. “If we don’t, they’ll die on the streets and I don’t want to find another body on the street.”

Since August, police officers have offered to assist 668 individuals out of the downtown area by referring them to a Metro social service agency or transporting them to shelters like the Nashville Rescue Mission or Room at the Inn.

Out of those, 558 declined the assistance.

“People don’t realize when they give food and clothing and money to somebody that’s living on the street they’re enabling them to die on the street,” Garrett said. “I don’t want to find the next body frozen under a wool blanket somebody gave them — it breaks my heart.”

Leber said he agreed that police are simply doing their job, but he wishes someone would publicly recognize that the initiative “is wasting tax dollars when we could use half that money to house double the amount of people.”

Police officials said they’re watching closely a bill proposed by Metro Councilman Walter Hunt that would ban “aggressive” panhandling — defined as the personal solicitation of money that “would cause a reasonable person to believe that the person is being threatened with imminent bodily injury.”

The Homeless Power Project accused the Council of carrying an anti-homeless and anti-poor agenda when the bill came before the Council for the first time this year at its last meeting.

The bill is up for a second reading at next week’s Metro Council meeting.