Report: Police response to homelessness is inherently punitive

Clearing encampments and arresting those living on the streets might temporarily remove homelessness from the public eye, but it doesn’t help unhoused residents retain housing or recover their longterm stability. Even so, a new policy brief from the researchers behind Boston University’s annual Menino Survey of Mayors finds the majority of American cities still rely on police departments to address homelessness. 

“Any time police get involved, research shows there’s a risk for things to get punitive,” said Charley Ellen Willison, Ph. D, assistant professor at Cornell University’s department of public and ecosystem health. Willison co-authored the brief, “Policing and the Punitive Politics of Local Homelessness Policy,” which was published recently by Boston University’s Initiative on Cities in collaboration with Cornell University and the advocacy organization Community Solutions. In local government’s response to homelessness, “What we find is really heavy police involvement, both structurally and functionally.”

Seventy-eight percent of mayors surveyed for the latest mayoral report said police have more influence over homelessness policies than housing authorities and those actually experiencing homelessness. Twenty two percent of mayors house their homelessness staff in police departments—the second most popular option after social services (38%)—and 76% of homeless outreach teams in the nation’s 100 largest cities formally involve the police.

The reasons for such heavy law enforcement involvement in the response to homelessness is complicated. For one, addressing homelessness hasn’t always been prioritized as a local government issue—and it still isn’t in many areas.

“The majority of cities today, over 70%, are not involved in the traditional response to end homelessness,” Willison said, noting “the structures we have in place to address homelessness actually circumvent city government.”

Ever since the Clinton administration enshrined the care of homeless people to nongovernmental agencies in the 1990s, nonprofits have played an oversized role in helping homeless people off the streets, according to Willison. But while their participation is a vital part of the solution, NGOs are restricted in their ability to act because they can’t create policies, and they must self-advocate for funding and public support. Local governments, meanwhile, “might not be aware of what nonprofits are doing on a daily basis” when considering policies, Willison said. This lack of continuety fosters a fractured response. 

Meanwhile, rather than relying on research and proven best practices like creating more affordable housing, citizen complaints often drive local government’s response to homelessness. And because police departments primarily handle these complaints, they interface with homeless communities more than any other public department. They typically do so the way they’re trained to—by clearing out encampments, confiscating property that could include important paperwork like birth certificates, leveling fines and fees, forcibly removing people from areas where they could find work, and incarcerating people. These punitive practices perpetuate the cycle of homelessness. 

“This heavy policy involvement means that even those policies whose aims are supportive of unhoused people may in practice be highly punitive,” reads the brief. “Given the broad influence of police in homelessness policy making and policy implementation, we first recommend that cities fund and use alternative outreach teams that do not involve the police. This may include social workers, clinicians, and mental health providers, who have professional practice goals centered on the upstream causes of homelessness.”

Fundamentally, cities must shift from a reactionary mindset—responding to the symptoms of homelessness—to one focused on solving the root causes of it. Many large cities are taking this first step by giving nonprofit organizations and other stakeholders a voice at a central table, and by creating funding opportunities, Willison said. Beyond that, some communities are disassociating resources for the homeless from law enforcement. In Washington, D.C., for example, homeless response teams can’t be associated with police. And “just on May 30, San Francisco announced they are piloting a homeless outreach team that does not involve police, a new street crisis team,” Willison said, noting the initiative will shift the role from a police response to a medical one by exclusively involving social services and EMS. 

At both the federal and local levels, affordable housing solutions should be prioritized. A brief published in January titled “Cities, Zoning, and the Fragmented Response to Homelessness,” co-written by Willison, notes that “only 54% of the nation’s 100 largest cities have homelessness plans.” And of those, only a small share “mention housing policies. Only 30% mention land use and zoning—the most powerful policy tools that local governments wield in reducing the local cost of housing. … Mayors similarly do not perceive land use and zoning to be an important component of homelessness policy. Only 32% believe that land use and zoning are significant barriers to addressing homelessness, desspite the centrality of these policies to reducing housing costs.”

Finally, along with policies that promote affordable housing, administrators should reconsider the functionality of citizen complaint portals, the brief says.

“While city officials understandably want to respond to resident concerns, such portals center the preferences of housed residents over the needs of unhoused residents. This introduces bias where housed residents’ needs and preferences are prioritized over or at the expense of unhoused residents,” the brief on homelessness and policing says. “Complaint portals could be replaced with ‘help’ mechanisms—where housed or unhoused citizens can call for help on behalf of themselves or others.”

Willison also co-authored Boston University Initiative on Cities’ 2021 report “Mayors and America’s Homelessnesss Crisis,” and wrote the book “Ungoverned and Out of Sight: Public Health and the Political Crisis of Homelessness in the United States.”