Two months after announcing a controversial proposal to arrest homeless residents who refuse available shelter, San Jose officials unveiled plans Thursday for enforcing the potential new rules, including creating a new police unit that will intervene if outreach efforts are rejected.
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While the shelter refusal policy and funding for the new unit still require City Council approval, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan outlined a multi-pronged strategy as he reinforced the need for unhoused residents to come indoors, especially when the city has invested heavily in reducing unsheltered homelessness.
“The goal has always been to get people the help they need,” Mahan said. “What is not okay and what we are not going to continue to accept as a city is the idea that you can say, ‘No thanks,’ forever more, and indefinitely choose that you’re going to encamp in a spot in our city when our community is making a historic effort and offering you the shelter, the services and help that you need.”
In March, Mahan proposed a policy that called for the city to amend its municipal code to allow the city to charge homeless residents with trespassing if they refuse shelter three times over 18 months.
Mahan has argued that if the city and its taxpayers are to continue to invest heavily in homelessness solutions — noting that this year its shelter system will add more than 1,400 placements through tiny homes, safe sleeping and parking sites, and motel and hotel conversions — people had an obligation to use them.
Although he acknowledged that the vast majority of homeless residents would accept shelter if offered, Mahan said his broader intent was to petition behavioral health courts to act when the decision to not seek shelter was impacted by mental health or addiction issues.
Mahan said to implement the new law, the city needed to take at least four steps to ensure that it achieved the impact he was seeking.
The first is to amend the city’s code of conduct for encampments, which currently regulates allowed sizes and prohibited behavior, to include the expectation that if shelter is offered, unhoused residents must accept it. The city also is planning to amend its code to account for damages caused to city property, and to better define trespassing and pollution that is often a byproduct of encampments.
Another change the city will undertake is not to contract out outreach providers, but instead bring the service in-house as it invests in training, quality control and data management to give the city a better understanding of what is being offered and how unhoused residents are responding.
Housing Director Erik Solivan said the city had three phases of outreach, including getting individuals in shelter, identifying encampments that have persisted and need more services, and addressing sites where individuals who have been released from another site like the hospital or jail need more immediate interventions.
Solivan said outreach would also help identify unhoused residents who pose a threat to the encampment or the surrounding neighborhood, and that information could be handed off to the new Neighborhood Quality of Life Unit the city plans to create.
The unit — staffed with one sergeant and six police officers — will enforce municipal code violations, including the cases where unhoused residents do not accept shelter. Mahan said it will prioritize enforcement of the no-encampment zones the city has created, including along the riparian corridors where San Jose needs to protect its waterways to comply with the Clean Water Act and its stormwater permits.
The upcoming budget includes a line item for the unit, anticipating a cost of $2.1 million.
Mahan, the city attorney’s office and police staff contacted the city of Fresno about a similar unit it deploys where its outreach and police staff work together. Mahan said San Jose has decided not to send such teams together in order not to hinder outreach efforts to build trust and learn more about the predicaments of the unhoused residents they contact.
“It’s all about relationship building and not having law enforcement there and doing everything we can to try to help folks,” Mahan said. “This is particularly relevant at a time when we’re making this massive expansion in shelter and housing and we are expanding no encampment zones. We’re going to work really hard to get people the help they need and help them come indoors.”
But homeless advocates, who already were alarmed by the initial proposal, raised concerns about deploying police by themselves, noting the disproportionate level of violence in cases where someone is afflicted with a mental health issue.
Homeless advocate Gail Osmer referenced a recent incident in which a San Jose police officer was seen striking an unhoused man with mental health issues who was accused of resisting arrest after authorities responded to a call of indecent exposure.
“Having the police without anyone else there is going to be a disaster,” homeless advocate Gail Osmer said. “When police go into encampments, people leave. There’s no accountability for what these police will do, and I’ve seen too many times where they do what they want.”
Although nonviolent misdemeanor arrests by themselves will not typically result in jailing, Mahan said the city is engaging with Santa Clara County about potentially directing unhoused residents to facilities focused on rehabilitation as an alternative.
Mahan specifically noted the Mission Street Recovery Station — which he said has an agreement with the city to accept first-time DUI offenders — as one viable option.
But while the city focuses on making strides in getting service-resistant residents into treatment, Mahan reiterated that every person had an obligation to come indoors and that the city and its residents could only tolerate so much.
“If people truly say, ‘I want to choose to camp,’ at some point, they’re going to have to find a different city that’s okay with camping by choice,” Mahan said. “It’s not feasible for us at scale.”