Leaders tout progress in Spokane’s new approach to homelessness

In October, after more than a year of back-and-forth over what role police should play in Spokane’s management of the homeless, city leaders landed on arguably the strictest criminalization in years: a citywide encampment ban.

It was a major pivot for a mayoral administration and council majority that had long resisted enforcement-heavy approaches to camping and obstruction, and that had earlier approved a law centered on service outreach over criminal enforcement. That approach faced sustained backlash from local business owners and residents who argued the lack of teeth made it impossible to address safety concerns.

What seemed like the last straw for reticent progressive council members, however, was a report from Spokane Police Chief Kevin Hall showing not only zero citations under the earlier law, but no one accepting social services when police offered to connect them.

This changed dramatically after the city toughened its laws, giving officers full discretion whether to issue a citation for violators, Hall reported in February. In the first three months, officers contacted nearly 1,500 people and issued 730 citations. They also offered services roughly 900 times, with 265 people accepting that offer.

“That’s 265 more than we ever received prior to the ordinance being implemented,” Hall told the council.

Coupled with a police emphasis program on chronic offenders living on the streets downtown, local business interests that had long been critical of the city’s approach are reporting marked improvements.

“I think the data demonstrated pretty clearly that, since October, conditions downtown have improved,” said Emilie Cameron, president and CEO of the Downtown Spokane Partnership, which represents downtown businesses. “Foot traffic increased year over year, and anecdotally we’ve heard from the public that they feel reassured when they come downtown that their safety is a priority.

“There’s still more progress to be made, but we’re encouraged that conditions are improving,” she added.

Many, particularly skeptics of law enforcement, had remained wary that a tougher police approach would markedly improve the situation for people on the street; five months later, some of them are converts.

Anwar Peace, a longtime police accountability activist and former member of the city’s Human Rights Commission, now works for the Jewels Helping Hands-run Homeless Navigation Center, the center of the city’s hub-and-spoke model of shelter services. In an interview, he praised the police department for being respectful toward those living on the street and for working closely with service providers.

“Because our navigation center is on the front line, we see what happens when police push out a camp,” Peace said. “And even though they’ve been told their encampment can’t take place, officers are still willing to give leeway for people to leave their stuff and slowly transfer stuff from the encampment to here so they can find another avenue.”

Julie Garcia is the founder and leader of Jewels Helping Hands, which the city contracts to run the navigation center, and has long been a critic of the city’s approach to homelessness. For years, she has had a consistent demand: if the city wants to remove the homeless from their encampments, give them somewhere else to go.

Garcia is still quick to note where Spokane’s resources fall short – there isn’t enough housing or robust treatment services – but “I have a lot more hope than I’ve ever had in homeless services at this moment,” she said in an interview.

A lot of this Garcia attributes to a more coordinated approach to homeless services the city has taken under Mayor Lisa Brown. There is less redundancy, clearer expectations and, with the navigation center, a front door to the broader system, Garcia said. But even as the laws got tougher last fall, which gave Garcia some pause at the time, the police have been good at offering the homeless an alternative to simple removal.

“I’ve actually witnessed some police interactions with people experiencing homelessness and have seen them have the option of being able to go and get connected at the navigation center prior to being cited,” Garcia said. “That’s a big difference.

“And what I’m seeing at the shelter is people that I never thought would be able to maintain at a shelter, coming in, accessing beds and continually trying to get on the right path,” she continued. “And that happens only because, one, there’s not a lot of options. And two, the police are at least giving them the opportunity to gain access.”

Hall is just as quick to point out the gaps in the system: the city doesn’t have enough permanent supportive housing as people are getting off the streets, nor does it have the 24-7 medication assisted treatment center where he would like his officers to be able to drop people off when they’re ready to get clean.

The resources that do exist can get backed up, especially at night when the navigation center closes.

“Particularly at night, when my officers say, ‘You can’t be here, where can I take you,’ and then they find out there’s nowhere to take them – then, quite frankly, my officers are leaving them there because there’s nowhere for them to go,” Hall said. “If you’re effectively asking them to go into a dark alley so that nobody sees them, then they’re putting themselves in danger to be victimized, whereas they might be safer out on a sidewalk where people can see them.

“It’s a level of compassion that the officers are really trying to balance here,” he added.

But Hall is pleased with the progress that his department has made in a short time with the resources available to the city.

“I do feel like it’s been successful,” he said. “Police officers are often asked to fix social problems, and the only tools we have are enforcing laws. We can do it in a thoughtful, intentional way so that we’re not causing harm – and that’s something I always think about: are we causing more harm than good when we’re applying this?”

Focused downtown

When the city moved to a tougher approach in October, Hall also launched a six-month pilot program to focus resources, time and attention on what originally was dubbed the “Downtown 10” – it grew to 17 people before Hall, hoping to keep the data from getting muddy, stopped new names from being added. This was a handful of people camping downtown who were most frequently in-and-out of hospital emergency rooms or jail for low-level crimes .

These “high utilizers” were a population that tended to be the most resistant to receiving treatment or reluctant to be placed in a shelter, and in some cases, had been trespassed from facilities.

“This is a group of folks that we don’t have answers for,” Garcia said. “They can’t come into our shelter, they’ve been trespassed or banned, but we still need a place for them.”

They also have an outsized impact on the community. During the summer of 2024, Spokane police launched a program that deployed police, behavioral health units and service providers to the downtown precinct to engage with the homeless and try to tackle drug use. Over the first four weeks, police made contact with 143 individuals who collectively had 2,192 arrests – but half of that arrest record belonged to just 22 “frequent flyers,” as Hall described them. While roughly half had a minimal arrest record, 71 accounted for 2,033 of those prior arrests.

In late 2024, the city relaunched a decades-long effort to focus on this population, this time calling it the High Utilizer Initiative.

An offshoot, the Downtown High Utilizer Initiative was launched in October. While the broader initiative doesn’t necessarily involve jail, the downtown offshoot did seek to keep homeless chronic offenders in jail for longer than they normally would for their low-level crimes – long enough for them to be connected with treatment and social service providers with case management provided by Consistent Care.

In a February presentation, Hall cautioned that jail was meant to be a leg of the journey, not the final destination.

“Other programs in the state have claimed success in recidivism because their individuals were no longer committing crimes,” Hall said. “When we dug into their data, we found out that’s because they were spending, on average, 200 days in jail.

“We are very cognizant about how long our folks are in jail, and if they’re receptive to treatment, we get them out as fast as possible,” he added.

By February, seven of the “Downtown 17” were in jail, with four accepting either treatment or social services. Another four had left jail and continued to receive services, four more were engaged with case management without ever stepping into the jail, and two were unaccounted for.

“This has had an astounding success,” Peace said. “This has been a change in how the department works and flows: Let’s not just lock up the problem, but try to address the root causes. I’m really proud of Chief Hall and the work his command staff has done.”

“I always think we can do better, and so, yeah, as good as this is, there are people who still aren’t engaging, who are still refusing services,” Hall said. “But I do think it’s successful from the standpoint of the community who were victimized by these folks over and over and over again, and who were just cycling in and out of the ERs or in and out of jail.”

Clogged courts

While the city’s new approach to homelessness has led to more people in treatment and entering the shelter system, those hundreds of new citations are also clogging up a municipal court system that was already strained by its caseload.

Jacquie van Wormer, recently hired as administrator of the municipal court, estimated the court was seeing hundreds more cases filed under the new law. The court’s three judges were regularly hearing 120 to 150 cases every day, with people packing the hallways between the relatively small courtrooms, van Wormer said in an interview. Community court, where most of these camping citations are being heard, is seeing a record caseload – as many as 360 cases a day.

The court is trying to find ways to be more efficient with its cases to stay on top of the growing caseload, van Wormer said. In a recent presentation to the City Council, however, she noted that efficiency can only stretch so far.

“I’ll be honest, in just my few short weeks here, I’ve got to tell you it’s probably the leanest operation I’ve seen in my career,” she told the council.

“We don’t have a lot of space in our current facilities, and because we have only three elected judged and three commissioners, and of course limited clerks, it’s not like we can really expand dockets within our current resources,” she acknowledged in an interview.