Every year, Stairways Programming gives an award to someone who has impacted the community in a big way.
Stairways Executive Director Michael Madieros had a few ideas for who should get it, but he put the issue to a vote among the people currently living at Stairways. In the conversation that followed, an overwhelming majority said "oh, it’s got to be Sarge."
They meant Sgt. Scott Zuschin of Chico Police. He’s tattooed, he rides a Harley and you’d never know he’s a cop, Madieros said.
“We just had 65 homeless, formerly homeless, that voted for a police officer as the person in the community that has had the biggest impact in their life,” Madieros said. “And that floored me.”
Zuschin was recognized in early April, and the award marks progress in the relationship between law enforcement and the homeless.
It’s part of a new approach. Since last September, the Chico Police Department’s Target Team has been working with Stairways to help the homeless. When officers in the Target Team enter a homeless encampment, they don’t start by writing citations or arresting people. They have conversations. They build relationships.
This partnership came into sharper focus following the adoption of the Offenses Against Public Property ordinance by the Chico City Council last September. The council has since voted to expand it citywide.
This ordinance followed the Sitting and Lying Ordinance of 2013, which gave Chico police power to warn and cite people who were sitting and lying on sidewalks and commercial areas.
The City Council has often cited such ordinances as temporary solutions for the effects of homelessness on the community. The Offenses Against Public Property Ordinance builds on this precedent.
“The ordinance allows P.D. to interact with the transients immediately, and it’s not the ‘oh, here I’m going to give you a citation’ because that doesn’t mean anything to the transient anyway,” said Vice Mayor Sean Morgan. “They’re not going to pay for it, they’re not going to go to court, they’re not going to do anything. But (the ordinance) allows P.D.—specifically the Target Team which is trained to do this—to interact with the person and help them find services.”
The ordinance prohibits public urination, defecation, camping, depositing foreign matter in waterways, destroying plants and storing personal belongings on public property.
Violations are penalized as misdemeanors.
City Councilwoman Tami Ritter and other community members have opposed the ordinance from its inception, arguing it criminalizes behaviors necessary to life.
“We can say that we are not criminalizing a specific population, but the reality is that whether these ordinances focus specifically on people or specifically on behaviors, they absolutely criminalize a specific faction of our community,” Ritter said. “If we say we’re now going from a citation to a misdemeanor if you are, you know, caught publicly urinating with this new ordinance and we do not provide anywhere for people to go to the bathroom, then we are absolutely targeting a segment or our community.”
Anti-camping ordinances have been approved in Sacramento, Santa Cruz and El Cajon as well.
The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty released a report three years ago that showed criminalizing homelessness is more expensive than other solutions and does not address the underlying issues.
The report cited findings by the Utah Housing and Community Development Division “that the annual cost of emergency room visits and jail stays for an average homeless person was $16,670, while providing an apartment and a social worker cost only $11,000.”
The report concludes: “Criminalization is the most expensive and least effective way of addressing homelessness.”
A more effective means of addressing homelessness, according to the report, is taking a housing-first approach.
"Criminalization is the most expensive and least effective way of addressing homelessness."
-The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty
Stairways Programming in Chico is doing just that, along with working with Chico Police to do risk assessments in the field and help people get off the streets and into homes.
Madieros sees homelessness as a cycle that has to be broken.
“Homelessness most often is cycles, and what you do with something that is a cycle is you have to break the cycle,” he said. “Every single year, 20,000 foster youth age out of foster care and 65 percent of those go directly to the streets. It’s a cycle.”
Madieros says the ordinance and the partnership with police are tools to address this cycle.
“(The ordinance) gave officers a tool to engage people, and so they use it to engage in conversation,” he said.
“It was the most amazing thing to watch happen on the streets,” Madieros explained. “To watch law enforcement one day walk someplace and everyone scatters, to watch it slowly change to now when law enforcement walks up to people and you see these conversations that are happening, and they’re treatable conversations, and in that, there’s offers made.”
And when the homeless are presented with the opportunity to be housed, Stairways has been successful transitioning people into better living habits.
In a six-month study of the collaboration between Stairways and Target Team, 20 people were placed in apartments and seven people gained employment or enrolled in school.
Of those admitted to the program, 90 percent reported having a substance abuse problem.
In the six months prior to the study, Stairways participants had 213 contacts with police and 64 arrests. “This represents 554 C.P.D man-hours. At a rate of $25 per hour per officer, a savings of $13,850 in just C.P.D Officer pay,” the study states.
Since the change in approach, police have issued two citations in 300 encounters, according to Sgt. Zuschin of Target Team.
“It’s showing we’re not one-sided, we’re not just writing tickets,” Sgt. Zuschin said. “We’re looking for solutions. Each and every person is somebody’s son or daughter. It’s important not to forget that.”
And while the results from Stairways and Target Team are positive, the growth of the homeless community creates a demand for growth in programs.
“Ever since we started this Target Team program, we’ve had like literally hundreds of calls on the daily saying ‘hey, do you have any space?’ and unfortunately we have to say that we don’t. We really don’t,” said Eric Jimenez, Stairways housing coordinator and a junior social work major at Chico State.. “We don’t have the necessary resources, the financial support. It sucks. It’s definitely unfortunate to turn people away due to the fact that we don’t have enough resources.”
Thirty-eight people are currently living in Stairways housing. More than 50 are on the waiting list, Jimenez said.
“We have to change as a community and become more solutions-oriented,” Madieros said. We have to accept that we’re changing the narrative. Law enforcement is not the enemy. They’re not out there to beat down and hurt the homeless, or hold them down. They want to help them, and when you see the relationship and the work that Target Team has done, it doesn’t make sense to worry about this ordinance.”
