West Warwick realizes that criminalizing homelessness is not simply immoral - it's impractical

"The solution is housing. That's what is lacking. And that's why, year after year after year after year, we keep coming to this place."

The West Warwick Town Council on Wednesday night had a three hour conversation on a subject troubling many municipalities in Rhode Island: The increasing number of people forced to live in homeless encampments and the health and human safety implications of this growing population.

What the Town Council learned is that there is no real way for a municipality like West Warwick to police itself out of this situation and that cities and towns are experiencing the effects of a state government that has failed to take meaningful action on this issue for decades.

It’s important to understand that not only have cities and towns across the state been having this discussion, but some have been having this same conversation, on repeat, for years. Palpable frustration was expressed by all members of the West Warwick Town Council who found, throughout their conversation, few answers and many roadblocks to meaningful action - whether that be a compassionate response to the suffering caused by homelessness or a more authoritarian police response.

The West Warwick Town Council ended their discussion on unhoused encampments by unanimously passing two motions.

• The first motion directs the Town Manager and Town Solicitor to come back to the council at the next meeting with an ordinance and/or resolution to address the eradication of homeless encampments in the Town of West Warwick - incorporating the discussion that was had at tonight's meeting.

• The second motion instructs the town manager to work with the Police Chief and whoever else is necessary to get additional police beats out to the encampments starting on Wednesday.

You can watch the Town Council meeting here. The following highlights from the meeting have been edited for clarity:

Council Member Mark Dennison: Everybody here has a home, and I like to think of our Town as our collective home. When there's an issue at home, you must address it. If you don't address it, the problem will never go away and it will just increase over time. As I mentioned in the last meeting, I think our town has a big issue that's eating away at the fabric of the town, and that's the homeless encampments.

I want to make it clear that I am a person with compassion. What we've witnessed over the last weeks, months, and even years is a group of people who are very disrespectful to Town property. They create a large safety concern, not only for residents but for our police and fire personnel and even themselves. Last time I read off a list of incidents that our police and fire had to respond to since the beginning of June, and it was quite extensive. [First responders] are being put in danger every time they go to one of the encampments… Within the encampments, we have people who are addicted to drugs and have sexual offenses on their record. The concerning part about this to me is that most of these encampments tend to be popping up around playgrounds, schools, and parks and those are the places where our children and families are spending a lot of their time - or would like to spend a lot of their time.

The way I look at this is that we have taxpayers who we ask every year - hopefully, it's not a large increase - but we tend to increase taxes on people year after year - we ask them to pay that, and in return, we give them services such as police, fire, education for the youth of the town, and all those sorts of things. Hopefully, we can give them a town they can take pride in. I think we're at a place now where that's in question, and a lot of it has to do with the encampments.

I get calls and emails almost daily about another situation involving the homeless encampments and none of it is good. I'm sure police and fire would have many more stories to tell. We had a situation off New London Avenue last year into this year at Flat Top Park. The town put a lot of money into Flat Top Park. I raised concerns earlier this year and we were looking to have the homeless encampment removed. Luckily, some of the advocates went down there and spoke to the people that called that home and they decided it was in their best interest - and they saw where we were coming from - [to leave the] encampment.

Friday I found myself in that part of town. So I stopped by and the homeless encampment is back in business. I saw it with my own eyes. I took a walk down the path and sure enough, there it was. The thing that upset me was on the way back to my car, in the parking lot, I found evidence of drug use. I have a picture of it on my phone. Keep in mind this is a park where children are spending a good amount of time. Last meeting, we discussed an issue at Horgan Elementary School. I could go on and on about these individual encampments and what happens, but the fact of the matter is that the folks who are living in these encampments are not good neighbors.

I can say that with confidence because if you look at these encampments you find drug paraphernalia, trash, and human feces. They're using these encampments and town property as dumpsters, and that is not what our taxpayers are paying for.

What we are allowing right now is for the few - anywhere between 40 to 60 to maybe 100 - to tear away at the fabric of this town of more than 28,000. We are catering to the few. These folks have been given opportunities for help, which they have rejected, for whatever reason. That's their decision. The state and the town have offered services. Other organizations in town have offered services. They choose not to use them.

So tonight I am looking to take action on this issue... Public comment is welcome, but the fact of the matter is this problem has been going on for a long time and we have never taken action on it and we expect it to go away. It's not going to go away. It's only going to get worse.

Town Manager Mark Knott: I hear the frustrations about the issues that have come up. The Town has been a partner in working towards solutions to the homelessness issue with a variety of state agencies and community partners. Honestly, it's [been] frustratingly slow and even [stalled] efforts and that's frustrating. The side effect of that is some of the encampments ... are adversely affecting other populations and the homeless population itself.

Based upon recent discussions and things that have been highlighted at the Council over the past few meetings, I started to shift and prepare for a [possible] legislative directive to go the next step. I've been open, at least with the Council and in internal meetings, on where I think our role is and the hiccups that we are currently exposed to that would be obstacles to doing that.

In preparation to try to resolve those and have a solid plan should a directive come regarding encampments, I want to make sure that our staff and our community put their best foot forward. That [effort] needs to continue with our social service efforts... that should be nonstop. But I think there's a flaw or flaws in our ordinances that would empower us to constitutionally move people and potentially enforce -whether it's a municipal ordinance or a state law and everything that comes with that. … We met internally last Monday, brainstormed some ideas, and started collecting those concerns, protocols, procedures, and what side effects any of those actions may have. That's a work in progress.

I sent out a draft today on where it stands, but it's more the generalities. ... It lays out our current conditions and situations. Chief Jeffrey Varone did some overhead mapping, laying out where the different encampments are, and has a spreadsheet with the approximate numbers. The chief's been a real leader on behalf of the town to try to facilitate some answers. I mentioned what our active measures and responses have been to date, started listing the variance ordinances and state laws, and listed examples from other communities that may need to be considered, or in my opinion, amended, if we want to do anything on a more affirmative level. Then there's a listing of the various departments that would have some part of this program. I think it would take some type of task force or response team of town people and some social agencies.

Once that gets triggered it would involve the police department with its navigator, our EMS and community Paramedicine folks, our EMA people, the Department of Public Works, and Park Center Recreation. Thrive Behavioral Health has been a key partner. There are probably multiple agencies or groups that can help with that. Then [the task] is building supplemental information and resources, which will be the largest portion of this eventually - different things that have come out from federal, state, and local agencies, and some social service agencies to help give us a positive direction to act.

Mark Dennison: One thing I failed to mention, and I'm glad you brought this up - I wasn't calling for the town to dissolve the services that are provided to anybody. That's not what I'm saying here. My speech, if you will, was more about the encampments themselves. We still need to offer the services, and you did a good job in your email outlining all of the organizations and the services that are offered. Maybe it's wishful thinking, but in the end, maybe somebody will take advantage of those services who currently are not. If we engage and take some action on the encampments, that's my hope.

I don't want anybody to live in the woods even if they want to. I don't want people living in the woods. I want people with housing and roofs over their heads. But if they're not going to, and again, it's more likely than not that there are people who are for lack of a better word, down on their luck and suffering right now. I'm not going to pretend to know all about that world. But for those that are out there that do not want the help and services to go on treating our town property like it's their dumpster, is unacceptable. That's where I'm going when I talk about taking action on the encampments.

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Town Manager Mark Knott: The enforcement path for municipal ordinances is you give somebody a summons to appear in municipal court. If you're getting one for a motor vehicle violation and you get fined or you don't appear, you can get your license suspended. If you're there on a housing issue, didn't clean up your yard, didn't cut your grass, whatever, you're called before the municipal court. If you don't comply or you don't show up, a lien can be put against your house. There are remedies there for enforcement purposes. [For people experiencing homelessness], you can give somebody a summons [to] appear, [but I] suspect a vast majority would not.

What enforcement do you have? You could issue a fine that's never going to be paid. The municipal court enforcement mechanism is broken at best. It is not adequate for what we're looking to do.

One path? How can you [force] the rules that we want to enforce into District Court? What misdemeanors and initial arraignments for felonies ... have some teeth that potentially have fines - again that probably wouldn't get paid - but have the threat of jail? That's not the answer anyone's looking for in these scenarios - the threat of locking people up for whatever their circumstances are. Coming from a career in law, career in law enforcement, [I know that] when people earn it, they earn it. In these circumstances, we need to be cautious about involving the district court when appropriate.

[This path] has a slew of side effects that eventually I want to include in this to help make an educated decision or directive that you need to be prepared for - all the things that come with [this path, such as] the increased burden on the court system [and] sheriff's office. If ... we're going to go with the trespass law, and we give [someone] a warning, they don't leave, and we arrest them for trespassing, we give them a summons, or we bring them to the District Court where they're arraigned - they're given a court date for a couple of weeks [in the future] and come back [to the encampment] the next day - they're putting their head down somewhere where they're not supposed to. We arrest them again. Now they're a bail violator. They're going to go to the ACI for two weeks.

So now the ACI population is ballooning. The person earned [their detention], they know it, they did it. That's our system. But when we do that - and I don't want to make this sound like an excuse for not doing something - I just want to make sure we are prepared to handle what we're directed to do. Since we took somebody into custody, we are now responsible for safeguarding their personal property, essentially just like seizing evidence. It needs to be tagged, identified, logged, and properly secured somewhere until we can properly return it. We can't just bulldoze it, bag it up, and throw it away. We're responsible for that because [when we're] taking somebody's liberties away, we're responsible for taking care of their property. [These costs] will balloon and cause adverse effects on our personnel and our budgets. That's something that needs to be considered in this planning process. There are reactions to our actions...

For our fire, police, and rescue - we want to try to provide for the health, safety, and well-being of everybody, including the people who are in the encampments, but especially those who need to respond to them. Another thing that will come out is there is difficulty responding to some of the encampments. They're not clear paths and clear roads. We can't get emergency vehicles in - they generally hike in with their equipment.

Housing Vouchers

Cathy Shultz is the Director of the Governor’s Overdose Taskforce. She was speaking to the Town Council as a West Warwick resident. She initially responded to a comment containing false information about how many people experiencing homelessness have housing vouchers they refuse to redeem.

Cathy Schultz: Vouchers are a process. People have to be put on a waitlist. It doesn't happen in two weeks. It doesn't happen in a year. It could take three years. It depends on what the voucher is.

When we say that people are not accepting services, they most certainly are accepting services, they are getting outreach services. They are most likely connected in some sense to Thrive Behavioral Health, Thundermist, and many other organizations that they are going to regularly.

The solution is housing. That's what is lacking. And that's why, year after year after year after year, we keep coming to this place. We can assume that the people who are out there don't want services and use drugs. They probably are [using drugs]. I probably would be too if I was living in a tent.

There's not enough housing across the state, let alone in West Warwick. That's what the issue is. Even if we focus on the vouchers - [and] people need vouchers - there's still a waitlist. If people out there with vouchers go to the ACI for two weeks - they may lose that voucher. That's a very true story.

One of the reasons you're seeing an increase in the encampments right now is that, and I said this the last time I was here - I said, “Be prepared, a shelter project's closing.” There were people there from West Warwick who are now back out. It was one of the motel projects and we were making great momentum. There have been [replacement] solutions offered that didn't come to fruition. It's unfortunate.

The reality is that there has to be a regional approach to this. Talk to Warwick. Talk to Coventry, because the bike path goes across all the areas. These are people from West Warwick. A lot of times people say, “They're not from around here.” They are.

Council Member: I think some of them are transient. They're from Woonsocket, they're from West Warwick. I mean I think it's...

Kathy Schultz: Nobody from Woonsocket. I highly doubt that. It's the Kent County area. What I've been proposing all along is a conversation across the towns and cities to try to come up with a regional solution. We need property for that solution. And maybe it's not necessarily in West Warwick.

Constituent complaints

The Council discussed phone calls they have received from constituents fearing for their safety as regards unhoused people and encampments.

Council Member Maribeth Williamson: I don't think it's just a West Warwick issue. The state needs to be involved. Think about how small the state of Rhode Island is compared to municipalities. But to criminalize [homelessness]? I'm not sure that's the right answer. There are people and families out there because they're afraid that they're going to be broken up, people who don't want to be in that situation, but they don't see an alternative, especially if they have children. And there are children out there. It's not easy, but if we're going to have an edict or work towards an ordinance, we need to have everything in line. It's not just sending someone in to bulldoze. In my opinion, we need to understand what the implications are.

... We need to include some of our behavioral health [and] community partners at this point as well. We have to have a plan. To just say we're going to throw everybody out on November 1st - we're setting ourselves up for failure and I think we need to know exactly what we need to do and understand what the implications are going to be.

Ideally, I would love to say that we were able to go to someone and say, “We have this place for you where you can get services. Go there, and if you say no, then that's on you and we're going to take care of it. We're going to move you out.” We don't have that place right now. We need to find that place... Ultimately, it's a taxpayer thing [requiring] a lot of it's federal [and] state funding. It would not be West Warwick taxpayer dollars that would be used. We don't want to be in the business of being landlords, I don't think. Those are the conversations we've had over the last, I don't know, is it two years now?

Winter's coming. We have temporary solutions at the Civic Center... We have some affordable housing coming in - at the last meeting, we approved Lipppitt Mill. That's going to be affordable housing [but] that's not until next summer… It's not as simple as bulldozing - that's not something that I would support. These are moms and dads and brothers and sisters.

Council Member Mark Dennison: I feel a need to push back, slightly, on what you said about children and families being out there. That may be the case. But I can tell you one thing: If I was ever in that position and I had children, the last place I'm going to bring my family and children is to an encampment where there's known drug abuse and sex offenders. This is not an indictment of the homeless. I'm talking about the encampments and all the trouble that comes with the encampments. I don't want anybody to think that I'm clueless about that.

Council Member Maribeth Williamson: I didn't insinuate that.

Council Member Mark Dennison: I know you didn't. But the family thing, I do think that...

Council Member Maribeth Williamson: That's real.

Council Member Mark Dennison: That's a talking point that's trying to garner some sort of...

Council Member Maribeth Williamson: No, it's a real situation.

Council Member Mark Dennison: It may be. I'm not going to dispute that [saying] 100% it's not true. But again, if I've got kids and I find myself in that unfortunate position, the last place I'm bringing them is with known drug abusers and sex offenders. And if people are doing that, then that's just flat-out bad parenting...

I think as great as your suggestion of a solution is, I wish there was a place for people to go there and there won't be. Because three years ago we were talking about this as a town - last year, we were talking about this - and we're still talking about this - and not one thing has been done. If we started today, there would not be a place in the town or the region for another year or two or three. I don't see how that's going to come online. In the meantime, this festers...

Council Member Maribeth Williamson: Something needs to be done, but it needs to be done humanely. And not everyone is a drug addict and a sex offender. I just want to make that clear. That's all.

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Vincent Marzullo is a West Warwick resident, an advocate for unhoused people, and a candidate for the State House of Representatives.

Vincent Marzullo: This is a complicated and serious issue for everyone in the State of Rhode Island. And it's happening because the caretakers of our system have neglected their duty for at least ten years, if not more. When our solicitor [Timothy Williamson] was a member of the General Assembly in 2011, legislation was passed to establish an Inter-Agency Council on Homelessness because there was a declaration by the General Assembly that homelessness was not only an issue and unsafe for the well-being of those who were unhoused but also to the detriment of the general public.

The legislation mandated that the state would establish a strategic plan to end homelessness in the State of Rhode Island. That group met for about two or three years and then, for whatever reason, it shut down in 2015. So for ten years, the effort that was legislated to eliminate homelessness and establish the capacity to deal with these issues - and they're complex - has been abandoned.

Tomorrow, many of the people in the unhoused community, particularly in Providence, are having a conversation with Mayor Brett Smiley at Mathewson Street Church to see how the issue can be better handled in a humane, responsible, and civil way.

The cities and towns are overwhelmed. West Warwick alone can't deal with this issue. There's got to be involvement and a strategic effort with the League of Cities and Towns... Each community on its own can't properly address this issue, especially when the state has retreated from its duty to develop the capacity service-wise and housing-wise.

I think what was outlined by the town manager makes a lot of sense, but it also requires a lot more thought and participation. And as much as you might want to or think that we're going to come up with a solution today, as the councilwoman indicated, we can't criminalize our way out of this issue in this or any town.

And it's not that I'm soft on law enforcement. My son's a cop in New York. My father was. My brother-in-law was the president of the union.

For ten weeks I dealt with this issue on Charles Street at the DaVinci Center. I walked in there to try and serve meals and to help people in that community. I was faced with organized crime, drug dealers... They tried to kill people at night in the parking lot and beat up the elderly in Charles Place. The kids were going to the middle school next door and in the middle was a senior center. I think that was one of the first times that there was significant attention to the issue. It wasn't dealt with appropriately.

Gene Valicenti got Peter Alviti to come in and they bulldozed the tent encampment.

I'm at Mathewson Street Church on Friday and Sunday mornings because I want to understand what the street outreach workers are doing, and equally important, the relationships with those who are unhoused. It's been enormously revealing and enormously frustrating and depressing because there's so much more we can do, yet the governor and the political leadership have not brought everybody together to address this from a joint task force standpoint.

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Whatever efforts you or others may come up with in the next few days or weeks is not going to turn this around overnight. It's just not going to happen. There are at least 800 to 1000 people unhoused in communities throughout Rhode Island. On Sunday mornings we serve 300 to 350 people breakfast at Mathewson Street Church and more and more of them are either elderly or veterans.

Whatever you choose to do locally is one thing, but you've got to involve Ernie Almonte and the League of Cities and Towns and get organized. You're all politicians - organize some of the other cities and towns to be of one voice to deal with the Governor and the Attorney General. We sent a communication to the Speaker of the House, he responded that we'll meet after the election.

What about the people who are on the street tonight? What about tonight? The Speaker didn't have a primary, he didn't have a general election. And his response to the unhoused issue is we'll talk about it after the election? We sent a communication to Representative Patricia Serpa, the Chair of the House Oversight Committee. She has yet to respond. At least we got a response from the governor's office from his chief of staff, who set up the meeting with Housing Director Dan Conners, which was a very productive and respectful meeting. I think more good will come out of that.

Why Criminalizing Being Unhoused Doesn’t Work

Attorney Timothy Williamson: [The] Town Council does not have control over the judiciary in District or Superior Court. And your municipal court isn't made to incarcerate people for the acts that they've done under the jurisdiction that they have. So even though at this level you say, “Okay, this is what we're going to do. We're going to arrest them.” Great.

Let's say the task force, or whatever you want to call it, brings in half of the alleged number of homeless in one night. 45 people get arrested. They're not going to Cranston, they're not going to go to the ACI [Adult Correctional Insitutions]. They're going to be brought to the district court and they're going to be let go. They're not going to be held. Where do you think they're going to come back to? They're not just going to say, “Oh, you know something? West Warwick doesn't want us anymore, let's go to Narragansett.” That's not going to happen.

Council Member Mark Dennison: Let's extrapolate that. What happens the next time, when they come back the next day?

Attorney Timothy Williamson: Again, they get arrested. Now they become a bail violator, let's say.

The United States Supreme Court has said that it's not illegal for towns to enforce these ordinances. I'm telling you that in the District Court unless there's something else - some type of assault or malicious property damage - something besides homelessness, vagrancy, camping, whatever you want to call it - I don't think any District or Superior Court judge is going to be apt to put that person in prison, even if they violate their bail.

They're not going to do it because theoretically, you're being locked up for being homeless. Now, if there are other crimes, getting to your issue of behavior, you're right. Those people will be prosecuted and those people will be locked up.

... You guys are in a position right now because it's on town property. You are the landlord that needs to evict these people. They have nowhere to go. You're going to look to the courts to say, “Handle this problem for us, incarcerate them” and I'm just saying to you, right now, you don't have control over that situation.

You don't have control over the judiciary saying, “This person is homeless but hasn't committed any crime other than being homeless.” Okay, maybe he didn't take care of his trash, [but] I don't think that person's going to be incarcerated.

Now, if they do incarcerate him, great. The 70, 80, 90 people that you have right now? There will be a new group coming in. This thing's going to keep going on while we're trying to put together a task force to address all of the issues that were spoken of tonight. Because again, last week, last month, last year, these ordinances and statutes were on the books. And that hasn't done anything to affect the issue of homelessness in our communities…

As it stands, unless you catch somebody illegally having a needle or using legal narcotics, that person, even though they might be using illegal drugs, isn't going to get arrested for that particular crime unless they get caught in the act. The police get there and say, “Who's got needles?” and erybody does this, “Not me” or “I got needles for legitimate reasons that I purchased at CVS because I'm a diabetic and I don't have any place to throw my garbage away. So we throw it over there and then whatever happens, happens.”

The police get there and they're going to try to put together, I guess, a crime scene. But that's going to be difficult. That's going to be expensive too, because the more police you put towards these types of things, they're the same police officers that are not going to be working for the rest of the taxpayers on their normal patrols.