STREET LIFE BREEDS STREET MORALS

Many Homeless Survive On Petty Crime, Look Down On Those Who Panhandle

Walk past the tarps the street kids call home and don't ask how these
people got there or why they stay.

Try not to think that they break into your cars, cash in your
discarded soda cans, smoke the butts of cigarettes you stamped out -
and that all those things square neatly with their values.

Forget that they know better than any scavenging bird where to find a
free meal in this town.

Theirs is a different reality than most Portlanders', and with it
comes a different morality.

Mayor Tom Potter and his five-point plan for downtown safety - they
couldn't care less. Among the things Potter announced two weeks ago
to crack down on downtown disorder was a South Park Blocks curfew.
But for these "kids" - some of whom are in their 40s - all that means
is that some of their friends had to move.

They don't panhandle and they look down on those who do. They look
out for one another and often share whatever they have: a little
tobacco or maybe a little meth, some money, a tarp in the rain.

Leave your purse or laptop on the front seat of your car downtown,
though, and it's gone. No second thoughts, no regrets.

"I can get $45 for an iPod," said Nicole Davis, a street kid for the
last three years and a prolific downtown car prowler. "That is a
legitimate business."

Davis is 32. Like many street kids - by several city and nonprofit
counts, there are several thousand - she is well past the age of
adolescent rebellion and has long been eligible to drive and vote.
For whatever reason, Portland street kids tend to be grown, in their
late 20s, 30s and 40s, but they still call themselves that.

Life On The Street

Until recently, Davis slept alongside three white men and two black
dogs under a blue plastic tarp on Northwest Overton Street between
15th and 16th avenues. Interstate 405 hummed overhead. Two bicycles
were tied to a chain-link fence.

One night last week, she stood outside the tarp and wrapped her arms
around herself. The cops were done talking to her for the night. It
was just before 1 a.m.

She said she lives on the street because she wants to. She likes her
drugs, likes her communal life and likes that she has no real responsibilities.

She was upfront about her affinity for "jockey-boxing," or smashing
windows and stealing from cars. Her instrument of choice for breaking
windows is a small piece of porcelain, she said, which will break
windows almost noiselessly and the glass won't fly. She wouldn't say
where she gets it or where she sells what she steals.

Portland police - two officers in particular - have arrested her
perhaps a dozen times. She tells them a lot, but she won't tell them
either where she gets her porcelain or where she sells her hot wares.

"I don't always get caught," she said.

She refuses to panhandle.

"I can't handle the rejection," she said.

She doesn't use the word "panhandle" or "beg," instead calling the
practice "spangeing," a verbified contraction of the phrase "spare change."

She is part of a large, loose organization of street kids who live in
and around downtown Portland. There is no single leader, but there
are several subgroups, which each has a titular head.

Very few of these street kids admit to panhandling, though they
usually say they've at least tried doing it. They leave that to the
people they call "gutter punks," people from Portland's outer reaches
and suburbs who are more bound by alcohol addiction than the small
amounts of meth and, occasionally, heroin that float among street kids.

"Those are the people who worry me," said Ryan Hill, 31, a street kid
on and off for the last decade. "The drunks. The people who aren't
from around here. They have no stake in this city, you know, and
they're unpredictable. I don't panhandle, OK, I tried it before but I
can't do it. If I need my tobacco and papers, I can for it - y'know,
pick up empty cans and get the deposit. I could live off the
Dumpsters at Lloyd Center."

When he can't collect enough cans, he said, he shoplifts from the Dollar Tree.

Outside the city, life - even street life - is far different, he said.

"I should know," he said. "I'm a Beaverton brat. I grew up there and
started out on the street there. Sucks."

Danny Ferry, 30, said he lives on the street because he wants to.
He's made it work for half his life. He has a girlfriend and a bike
and, like most everyone who's lived on the street for long enough, a
criminal record.

"I lived inside for a little while not too long ago," he said,
pushing his bike in a zigzag through wet downtown streets one night
last week. "I didn't know how to do things. You know, things that
everyone else knows how to do, like load a dishwasher. Either there's
a procedure or you have to do it in a certain order, and my friend
was laughing at me because I just didn't know how."

The Beat Goes On

Central Precinct officers Leo Harris and Trent Wiest know all of the
kids. For the last two years, they have worked with street kids by
choice. Most of the time they're in uniform in one of the Portland
Police Bureau's few remaining two-person patrol cars on the afternoon
shift, 4 p.m. to 2 a.m.

They went to Western Oregon University together, joined the Police
Bureau around the same time and got thrown together in that patrol
car by accident. Neither remembers who suggested they work together.

"I just remember that Trent and I didn't really get along and I was
thinking this probably wouldn't work out," Harris said.

Said Wiest: "Yup. Nobody likes me. Ask around."

"Of course," Harris said, "we get along great now. Never would have
thought that."

When they walk and drive through Portland's streets, they talk to
everyone who will talk to them.

The two have become fixtures at places like the homeless hangout
O'Bryant Square, nicknamed "Paranoia Park" or, even more simply,
"Noia Park" for its proximity to offices belonging to the Police
Bureau and Multnomah County prosecutors.

"You see this black notebook?" Harris asked from the passenger seat
late one night last week as their patrol car headed east on Southwest
Yamhill Street. "It's got all the mugshots of the people we come in
contact with and little notes about them, stuff like that. I haven't
looked at it in a year. We know everybody out here by sight."

Cops, Kids Develop Trust

Davis said she talks openly with Harris and Wiest because they are a
different breed of cop, not looking to rough her up or arrest her all
the time, though they have taken her to jail many a time. They just
want to understand her life and get her to change her behavior, she
said. They want to know how she's doing, who she's hanging out with,
and what she's seen and heard lately.

"Hey Nicole," Wiest called out, shining his flashlight into the blue
tarp on Overton Street. "Nicole. Come on out here and chat with us a
little. How's it going? Everything all right?"

Harris and Wiest do this with everyone.

"What are you guys doing here?" Davis said, straightening her fried
reddish hair and fumbling with a hand-rolled cigarette. "You always
catch me at my bad moments."

After they had their talk, Davis said that Harris and Wiest were the
most human cops she had met.

"If they have to arrest me, they'll take me to a trustworthy friend's
place or to a spot where I can hide my stuff so it doesn't get stuck
in the damn property room over the weekend," she said. "Believe it or
not, that means something. That stuff is everything I've got in the world."

Wiest said he and his partner would be nowhere without building those
relationships.

"It's all person-to-person, talking, getting to know each other," he
said. "That's where the trust comes from. Ultimately, we want the
best for them and to keep them safe."

Davis knows that. Believes it, truly, even to the point that she
thinks police occasionally look the other way.

"The cops allow certain people to operate instead of kicking them out
because somebody worse might come in," she said.

Maurice Melvin Miles, 35, was one example of that. Known as "Misfit"
on the street, he recently was extradited to California to serve time
on a parole violation. A fixture on Portland's streets, Miles has a
long criminal record, including convictions for carrying a concealed
weapon without a permit, drug possession, car theft and criminal trespassing.

Yet some in the Portland Police Bureau, who refused to speak on the
record to discuss this matter, would have rather people like him
stayed on Portland's streets because he is a known quantity and is
willing, most of the time, to interact cordially with police. Harris,
however, disagrees.

"Nicole, you're right," Wiest said. "You know you're right. Harris
and I like to operate with a known quantity, deal with people we
know. Makes everything easier and, really, safer for everybody."

The cops are honest with her, so she's honest with them. They listen,
so she does in return. They respect her even though they disagree on
many things, and so she respects them, even when she doesn't agree
with what they tell her.

"That's the values of the street," Davis said. "Be real. Don't mess
around. I'm out here so I can be who I am. I'm not going to change
that just because they have a badge."