Homeless people who face a ticket or arrest by San Diego police are being offered a chance to have the infraction cleared if they agree to stay for 30 days in one of the city’s large tented shelters, reports the San Diego Union-Tribune. Police Capt. Scott Wahl said the new program could help stabilize lives and get people connected with services, while also allowing officers to enforce laws on the street. “I feel like we’ve started this division because we wanted to be a positive impact on ending homelessness,” Wahl said. The division includes homeless outreach teams and officers who enforce quality-of-life laws that often involve homeless people. “We’re all trying to do our part in ending homelessness, and we want to do it in a way that’s compassionate, but also has accountability,” he said.
Officers last summer began offering shelter beds in lieu of citations to homeless people who had been accused of encroachment, illegal lodging, littering or other minor quality-of-life infractions. About 300 people took the offer, but there was a problem. “We noticed that 67 percent of people blew out the back door on the very first day,” Wahl said. “They’re circumventing the criminal justice system intentionally.” Under the new policy, if somebody leaves the shelter before 30 days, the citation will be enforced. The program addresses quality-of-life infractions in neighborhoods and gives homeless people a month to learn about programs that could help them find housing and overcome issues related to their homelessness. In the first few weeks, 46 percent of people brought in under the new program walked away before the 30 days were up.
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Really the best way to find out what the conditions are like at the Homeless Shelters is to have a reporter go undercover for a week and tell it as he/she see’s it. Whatever happened to real investigative reporting? I tried doing the shelters, think Japanese internment camps we did in the 40’s for Japanese Americans. Well not quite that bad but I bet you would leave in under 3 hours. Another is ask the EMT (Ambulance people) what They think of the shelters, if they tell you, as they are told not to discuss anything about the Shelters per S.D. City Council. Think! Every homeless person skipped out after the first day That tells you how bad they really are. Not every homeless person is out to scam the city or steal or do drugs, etc… Some of us have just bad luck or made bad decisions or had a calamity or laidoff. The fact that the city points out right away how the homeless are “circumventing the law” is something that I would be first to point at, are our politicians, how many times have they been caught lying?