ADDICTIONS KEEPING HOMELESS ON STREETS

On Any Given Day In Shelby County, 2,000 Find Themselves Without A Place To
Live

MEMPHIS - Under the stench of urine and an unwashed blanket, Johnnie Jones
dug a wedding band out of his jeans pocket and slipped it on his left ring
finger.

Addiction robbed him of his marriage years ago.

"It's alcohol. Not crack," the homeless 45-year-old said.

Jones has been on the streets for the past two decades, a mainstay at the
soup kitchen and day-labor line.

His family now consists of the other blanket-covered heaps of humanity
dotting the Memphis landscape on a frosty November night.

He and two others were huddled amid dirty clothes and trash on a loading
dock at the corner of Front and Pontotoc last month, where police and
homeless advocates found him as they fanned out across the city through the
early morning hours for their annual head count.

The volunteer effort is headed by Pat Morgan, chief of the private and
publicly funded advocacy group Partners for the Homeless, which works to
match services with the needs of the street dwellers.

About 20 volunteers usually find some 250 people on the streets each year,
and though tallies aren't in yet, they expected to have a similar total
this year.

On any given day in Shelby County, about 2,000 people are literally
homeless - on the streets, in emergency shelters, jail, short-term mental
health facilities or some type of transitional housing.

The counters know where to find the ones on the street, pointing flashlight
beams into overpass nooks and crannies, downtown around the mall, trickling
into Midtown and out Summer Avenue.

Morgan interviews each quickly to gauge what types of services they need.

"You got a place to stay tonight?" she asked again and again.

She knows so many of the homeless by name, begging them to get treatment
through a variety of programs offered around town.

Morgan said there are almost always beds available at many of the alcohol
and drug treatment centers that serve the homeless.

But staying high is worth staying outside to Kevin Johnson.

He said he stays with his sister from time to time and makes it to the
emergency shelter on the coldest nights.

Homeless for several years, he loves to work with his hands, be it
construction work or laying bricks.

"I work. It's just my drugs. It's just my addiction," Johnson said.

The volunteers found him walking south on Fourth Street with a beer in his
hand. He admitted he was heading to a dealer's house, but one look at the
police accompanying Morgan made him change his mind.

Not long afterward, another homeless man was easy to spot "fishing" at
Exchange and Second.

The 39-year-old from Marked Tree, Ark., had just used a coat hanger to fish
a rumpled five-dollar bill from a self-service pay-to-park lot.

He said he spends about $200 a week on cocaine and scores dollar bills
pretty regularly at the parking lots.

"I need treatment. I know I do," said the man, who asked that his name not
be used.

Typically the volunteers find more than 50 homeless people downtown. Last
week, they found only 20, and most of those were not out in the open.

The police attribute this, in part, to tougher enforcement of panhandling
laws in recent months.

"The tolerance is gone," said Memphis police officer Tommy Mote.

Working the downtown area in plainclothes and an unmarked car, Mote and
officer Ronnie Williams write tickets for panhandling and other
misdemeanors and, like Morgan, know many of the homeless by name.

The misdemeanor citation amounts to a warning, and if someone is caught a
second time they are found in violation of a court order.

The citations force many into jail or drug and alcohol rehabilitation. But
the sobriety is too often a temporary state before the police see the same
folks out on the street and under the influence.

The officers are empathetic.

"How you doing Jimmy?" Mote greeted Jimmy Seymour in the near-deserted
Court Square.

Seymour tugged at his beard incessantly.

"I'm kind of down today."

A few yards away, James Shannon was bedded down for the night in the Court
Square gazebo.

Shannon, 46, said he's been homeless for four years. He said he lost his
right leg in a shooting when he was 18. Crutches lay beside his sleeping bag.

"They say I have mental illness. I say OK.

"They say I grew up like that, but I don't know what it is."