It was raining hard as a handful of officers made their way through a little patch of trees in Midtown last week. They found Brandon Peterson standing near a cluster of tents. He had been living there for six months, he said.
Now he had to leave, they told him.
“So get the essentials out,” one officer said.
Peterson immediately started loading things into a wagon. In the past, he would have gotten at least a week’s notice.
“With the rain and stuff,” he said, “I'm trying to boogie at it.”
In September, Anchorage police started enforcing a new law that makes it a criminal offense to camp in certain high-priority areas, like near schools, playgrounds, on trails or on the edge of high speed roads. That means police can clear those areas immediately, without warning. Those who don’t comply can be fined up to $500 or even do jail time. It’s a major shift. Before, the city was mostly limited to a civil process called abatement, which generally gave campers 10 days to leave.
A day of clearing camps
Over the next month, the Anchorage police’s Community Action Policing, or CAP, team will work to clear as many unhoused people as they can from the high-priority areas.
Last Tuesday, officers drove from one location to the next, working off a list of reported camps.
Each time they encountered someone, they asked questions, chatted with the person and assessed the situation. Lt. Brian Fuchs, head of the CAP team, said it's their job to enforce the new law, but they want to be reasonable about how they do it. And, he said, it’s a good opportunity to connect people to resources and services.
“It's both the outreach and the enforcement,” he said. “You get there and you're like, ‘Hey, what can we do to help?’ But at the same time, ‘You're in violation of this ordinance.’”
Help often involves a call to the Anchorage Police Department’s Homeless Outreach Prevention and Engagement team, which has been operating in the city for more than a year. The two-person team works to connect campers to shelter, housing, behavioral health care and other services.
Last week, Fuchs and the officers pulled over on Minnesota Drive. A man was curled up under some blankets by the sidewalk and, under the new law, it’s illegal to sleep on or near high speed roadways. He told officers he would love to stay in a shelter, but at 71 years old, it was too far to walk.
“Would you rather have a ride or a bus pass?” they asked him.
He took the bus pass. He chatted with officers, but he didn’t want to be interviewed for this story. Almost no one the police talked to did.
That day the officers spent most of their time patrolling wooded areas, like Valley of the Moon Park. A lot of the tents there were empty, but in one, two people huddled out of the rain. Officer Gaelan Graves looked around the campsite, surveying the amount of stuff they’d need to pack up.
“You guys think you can get out of here by tomorrow?” he asked them.
“Tomorrow? Possibly, yeah.”
Graves told them they had 24 hours to leave.
Fuchs said legally, they’re not required to give people a lot of time to pack up and move out. Generally though, it’s the right thing to do, he said.
“We're giving everybody in here warnings that they have to leave in 24 hours, giving them the ability to get out of here, and give them a reasonable amount of time to do so,” he said. “They’re going to come back tomorrow, and if these folks are in here, they're going to arrest them, right?”
‘Break that cycle’
A Supreme Court decision last year made it easier for law enforcement to arrest people sleeping in public places. Since then, roughly 220 local governments around the country have criminalized camping in some way.
In Anchorage, police and city officials have said repeatedly that the goal of the new local law is not to arrest people. Instead, it’s to get campers to move out of high-priority areas quickly before camps grow and become more difficult to clear. Since Anchorage police started enforcing the law in early September, they’ve only arrested one person, according to Fuchs.
Usually, Fuchs said, when officers return to an area, everyone is gone. Often they’ve just moved on to camp elsewhere. But sometimes, he said, being forced to move over and over is the nudge that people need to decide to stop camping.
“Sometimes when you say, ‘Gotta be out of here in 24 hours,’ they're like, ‘Maybe it's time for us to take some resources,’” he said. “That's helpful, right? It's a way that we can motivate people to break that cycle of homelessness and get them to treatment, or get them into some sort of sheltering system.”
It’s unlikely his team will clear all the high-priority areas over the next month, Fuchs said. There are just too many people camping. Thea Agnew Bemben, with the mayor’s office, said the estimate is that anywhere from 400 to 600 people are sleeping outdoors, but it’s difficult to track.
“When we look at our data, the reality is that people are going in and out of shelter,” she said. “They might go even and out of detox or hospital. They might go home.”
As police focus on clearing out smaller clusters of tents under the new law, abatements of large encampments are on pause. There’s not enough staff to do both, Agnew Bemben said.
Some of the bigger camps are in high-priority areas where it would be legal to clear them under the criminal code. But people have usually been living at bigger camps for longer and need more time to pack up. It also takes the city longer to clean up afterward.
Agnew Bemben said she regularly hears from Anchorage residents who wish the process was moving more quickly.
“We are making progress, and I understand that for many neighbors, it doesn't feel that way,” she said. “I hear you.”
The municipality uses reports from residents to locate people camping illegally, she said. The CAP team is making contact with about 20 of those people per week, according to the police department.
