POLICE CHANGE POLICY ON HOMELESS

Needy to Get Help Instead of Jail Time

The last time Jessie Pullins visited the former Howard Johnson's hotel
on Loyola Avenue, he went for dinner. He wasn't invited, though, and
he didn't go through the front door. At the time, he was scrounging
for food in the trash and dodging cops, a homeless crackhead caught in
the alligator grip of addiction.

On Wednesday, he arrived at the hotel, now a Holiday Inn, as an
honored guest of the New Orleans Police Department. Immaculately
groomed and sober for the past eight years, he told a group of more
than 40 officers how he used to sleep on a piece of cardboard, gather
up his entire life into a shopping cart, earn $60 in a day by
collecting cans, then give $59 of it to his dope supplier.

With Pullins' plaintive story, the New Orleans Police Department
quietly set into motion a radical new policy in dealing with homeless
people. If the program works, the days of mass round-ups and summary
arrests for obstructing the sidewalk are over, Capt. Louis Dabdoub III
said.

"We're going to try to do something that's never been done before in
the city," said Dabdoub, commander of the 8th Police District, which
includes the French Quarter, Central Business District and the bulk of
the city's homeless population. "What we've been doing with all the
arrests has been a no-win situation, both for the homeless and for the
police."

After working behind the scenes on the program for nearly a year,
Dabdoub used a special roll call of his supervisors and detectives to
launch what could become the city's boldest initiative ever in dealing
with people who have no place to stay: Instead of arresting them,
Dabdoub said, officers will now call for a "homeless assistance unit"
to direct the street dwellers to a shelter, hospital or substance
abuse clinic.

The unit, a specially outfitted $30,000 van donated by the private,
nonprofit foundation Baptist Community Ministries, will be staffed by
graduate students from local universities. The volunteers, most of
them social work students, will steer the homeless to appropriate
programs, Dabdoub said, eliminating the former policy of giving them
one-way tickets to Orleans Parish Prison.

"Going out and arresting them is not the right way to deal with the
situation," Dabdoub said. "It might be the way we've been trained, but
it's not the right way to resolve this problem."

Arrests will be reserved only for homeless people who are violent or
suspects in serious crimes, Dabdoub said.

Ending the Cycle

At the roll call, Martha Kegel, executive director of Unity for the
Homeless, explained that arrests often help to keep a homeless person
homeless. Many times, jailed homeless people will miss important
doctor appointments or social service visits, won't get needed
medication, will linger in prison because they can't make bail, and,
frequently, will lose identification cards and other paperwork needed
to get into shelters. Additionally, homeless people with jobs are
likely to return to the ranks of the unemployed.

"There's a misconception out there that putting a homeless person in
jail is doing them a favor because they get a roof over their heads
and three meals a day," Kegel said. "But in most cases, it's a real
setback for everyone. If it's possible to avoid making an arrest, it
really helps us do our jobs moving people out of homelessness."

To accommodate the new program, Dabdoub has rallied assistance from
the city and several other agencies. Dr. Dee Harper, a Loyola
University criminology professor, will coordinate volunteers for the
van. U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., secured a $249,000 federal
appropriation to get the program rolling and lay groundwork for a new,
state-of-the-art shelter, on the drawing board for construction within
the next three years. City Council member Jacquelyn Brechtel Clarkson,
whose district includes the French Quarter, helped shepherd the
federal, city and private funding.

Kegel said the new spirit of cooperation "is quite a sea change for
the city and the Police Department. In the past, Parish Prison was
treated like one big homeless shelter."

Recent studies have pegged the chronically homeless population of New
Orleans at about 1,400, she said, and many of them travel an endless
circuit from prison to the street and back to prison.

Dabdoub said that when the program kicks off later this
month:

- - The New Orleans Mission will have about 220 additional beds, most
of them donated by Criminal Sheriff Charles Foti's office.

- - Several shelters will expand their daytime hours.

- - The Sheriff's Office will begin providing transportation from
Parish Prison to homeless shelters for inmates who are released after
midnight but have no place to go.

- - The city will help subsidize shelter fees for homeless people who
don't have money.

- - A "homeless contact sheet" will be distributed to all police
officers, listing all available shelters and programs.

- - Homeless people and the formerly homeless, such as Pullins, will
work as police liaisons.

In getting the program off the ground, the liaisons will be introduced
in three districts that have the lion's share of the homeless people:
the 1st, 6th and 8th. Other districts may be added later, Dabdoub
said. The idea is "to put a face on the homeless problem," he said,
adding: "In order to start changing perspectives, you need to
personalize the process."

Fighting Misconceptions

Pullins, 47, is scheduled to work with officers in the 6th District,
which includes Central City and parts of Uptown. But first, he is
slated to address several more groups of officers at police roll calls.

"I think it's a great idea," said Pullins, who has been clean for
about eight years and now works at a local hotel. "It's an opportunity
to change the concept of a homeless person and bridge the gap between
police and the street community."

To most homeless people, Pullins said, police officers aren't the
enemy. If anything, they are considered obstacles to be avoided in
order to get sleep, food and, frequently, alcohol or drugs.

"There is a misconception that homeless people want trouble, that they
want to do damage," he told police supervisors at Wednesday's roll
call. "But, really, all that most homeless people want is to just make
it through the day."

An Army veteran who worked as a mechanic before he got hooked on crack
in the late 1980s, Pullins said he lifted himself from the street
through a program at Ozanam Inn, one of the city's busiest shelters.
After he stopped doing drugs, he landed a steady job and married a
former homeless woman he met while handing out clothes at Ozanam. He
honed his public speaking by giving testimonials at the shelter about
his rehabilitation.

One of the people he addressed at the shelter was Greg Winfield.
Suffering from alcoholism and drug addiction, Winfield appeared to be
one of those hopeless cases, but at some point, Pullins' words got
through, and Winfield pulled his life together.

Today, Winfield, 45, works as a food service manager at Ozanam Inn.
Last week, he joined Pullins as a police liaison.

"Homeless people don't want no trouble," he said. "All we want is
somewhere to go."