Spokane council, mayor’s office look for urgent fix to homeless laws they passed three months ago

Three months ago, the Spokane City Council approved a new law backed by Mayor Lisa Brown outlawing the homeless from camping anywhere within city limits, though with numerous exceptions and an emphasis on outreach that opponents believed was toothless and would be ineffective.

Police Chief Kevin Hall acknowledged Monday at a City Council Public Safety committee meeting that the camping law has been difficult to enforce, with zero citations issued and zero accepted offers for social services when approached by police.

The law criminalizes camping citywide, but allows for an unspecified notice period and for someone to avoid a citation by leaving. While Hall said there have been citations for other offenses, such as drug use observed when officers made contact with someone, none had been issued under the anti-camping law itself.

This “compliance ends the interaction” approach has also stymied attempts by the police to collect data on the new law, including whether officers were repeatedly approaching the same person for separate violations, Hall said.

“Under the current ordinance, if they comply, we have no legal justification to get their name if they don’t want to give it to us,” Hall said.

City Hall and Councilman Zack Zappone announced earlier in the day that the council and administration would try to fast-track reforms through an emergency law-making process to toughen law enforcement responses to chronic homelessness, public drug use and related issues. Zappone is facing a re-election challenge in November from law-and-order candidate Christopher Savage.

Brown on Monday described the pending changes as a natural next step to strengthen the new law in response to concerns from the community and local law enforcement.

“We’re taking a step forward on the engagement and outreach side with the daytime navigation center and the outreach teams” recently funded by the City Council, Brown said in a Monday interview. “We want to take another step on the enforcement side as well, giving officers more tools in the ordinance to enforce against people who they encounter frequently or with regard to some of the hot spot areas.”

Councilmen Jonathan Bingle and Michael Cathcart, who opposed the new law, argued at the time that it would not be effective at changing people’s behavior or getting them into treatment or other homelessness services, and pointed to the calls for urgency and admission of ineffective enforcement as vindication of those concerns.

“I would say this is why collaboration is necessary,” Bingle said Monday. “Because I think some council members are understanding some things that we learned a long time ago, and those were all things that we said previously, and they were ignored. And now we’re here.”

People have not been accepting offers for social services from officers, Hall noted Monday, though he argued this was at least in part due to officers not being equipped to act as social workers and navigate a web of potential service providers to find a place for someone to go.

“The officers are not going to go through the Rolodex, for lack of a better term, trying to find the right service provider for an individual,” he said. The city needs a “crisis stabilization facility for high-acuity patients, it’s 24/7, no wrong door, whatever the issue is, they take them.”

Cathcart and Bingle noted that the city’s “navigation center,” meant to act as a hub to navigate people to the appropriate homelessness services, will soon only be open during the day.

So where would police take people during the night?

“That is the question,” Hall said. “That is the question we’ve been dealing with for years.”

Exactly what changes will be proposed for the city’s camping law remain to be seen, with Brown saying Monday that there would be “focused interaction to get feedback from some key community leader organizations and some key downtown business organizations” ahead of the release of a draft ordinance.

At Monday’s committee meeting, Zappone called for urgency, proposing that the council approve reforms under an emergency clause that would allow it to take effect immediately, rather than the standard 30-day waiting period after the mayor signs it into law.

Hall did highlight some of the possible reforms ahead, some of which he believed may not need council intervention, including the use of something akin to Seattle’s 2024 Stay Out of Drug Areas law that would allow the courts to bar people from the area where they were chronically offending, such as outside the Ridpath.

Unlike Seattle’s SODA law, which created several large swaths of the city where people could be effectively trespassed if they were charged with a drug-related crime, Hall’s proposal would bar someone from a smaller geographic area immediately near where they allegedly committed a crime.

“(Seattle is) struggling with the SODA ordinance as it stands. … Until they figure out how to make the secret sauce work, I’m watching to see, but I am open to it,” Hall said.

Hall also proposed reserving 10 beds in the Spokane County Jail for chronic offenders and users of emergency services, where they would be contacted by service providers.

“And when we come across those folks – we know right now they all have charges – they will be booked in those reserve beds in the jail, Consistent Care can come in and engage them immediately,” Hall said.

“We have an agreement with the judges to release these folks when they’ve been stabilized,” he emphasized. “The goal here is not to warehouse these folks indefinitely in jail, it’s to get them to a point where they’re stabilized, where they can make an informed decision about their care, and then a warm hand-off to a treatment provider through Consistent Care.”

Spokane’s anti-homeless camping laws have been perpetually in flux since the 2019 U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision in Martin v. Boise, which heavily restricted how cities could criminalize the homeless for sleeping on public property unless shelter beds were made available.

In that flux, Spokane voters overwhelmingly approved a citizen’s initiative in 2023 outlawing the homeless from camping within 1,000 feet of parks, schools and licensed daycares.

Whether that law would have survived a challenge under Martin v. Boise was never decided; the U.S. Supreme Court effectively overruled that lower court decision last summer in the 2024 Grants Pass v. Johnson decision, giving cities more flexibility to outlaw camping on public property.

But in April, the Washington state Supreme Court overturned the voter-approved anti-camping law on technical grounds, arguing it had overstepped the limits for a local citizen’s initiative, but left the door open for the Spokane City Council to reinstate the law. Bingle and Cathcart – and to a lesser extent, Zappone – unsuccessfully attempted to do so.

Instead, the Spokane City Council majority approved an alternative law offered by Mayor Lisa Brown, outlawing camping citywide while emphasizing outreach over enforcement. The law, approved in early July, allows police to issue a citation only if someone refuses to leave and remove their camp once contacted.

On Monday, Bingle wryly suggested that the city’s current struggles with its homeless camping ordinance would be addressed by reinstating the 2023 voter-approved law. There remains little appetite to do so, however. Council President Betsy Wilkerson argued the prior law would face similar obstacles to enforcement. Councilwoman Kitty Klitzke agreed.

“I don’t want to get stuck in sunk-cost fallacies and reviving old ordinances,” Klitzke said. “I want to do something new that actually works.”