Sweeps Aren’t Outreach: Policing Homelessness Still Doesn’t Work

The way to resolve homelessness is to provide people with housing. But many cities continue to use punitive approaches, including deploying police to clear encampments. These policies can and often do coexist with ostensible “services,” sometimes introduced through city-run homeless outreach teams. Why do so many American cities seem vexed when it comes to homelessness, promising to take a compassionate approach while simultaneously framing unhoused people as a threat to public safety?

A big reason for this is that complaint-driven policies prevail in many cities despite being antithetical to resolving homelessness. Mayors and other political figures fear community blowback, and rather than focusing on the real problem—that people are experiencing homelessness—mayors instead adopt policies designed to placate people who are housed and who do not wish to see unsheltered street homelessness.

These complaint-driven policies, centered around deploying police or sanitation workers to places where public encampments are reported, are oriented around “solving” the problem of visible, unsheltered homelessness and persistent encampments. The forced clearing of encampments—often referred to as “sweeps”—can lead to lost or discarded identification, clothing, medications, or other critical belongings. It can disperse people far from their support network, including family who can check up on them or social workers familiar with their cases. It can also lead to arrests or confrontations with police that can exacerbate their houselessness long-term.

This type of policy is nominally connected to services, until unhoused people discover that the services—including permanent housing or social supports—don’t exist, were not what was promised, or come with curfews and other restrictions that cause them to return to the street in frustration. The end result is that homelessness persists, even grows, and that trust between people living on the street and the city governments purportedly offering them services erodes.

A new report from Boston University, Cornell, and a nonprofit, Community Solutions, reveals the extent of punitive and complaint-driven policies within mayors’ offices and city governments across the country. Building on a 2021 survey of mayors and a previous report on the impact of zoning on homelessness, which found that housing policies are often disconnected from homelessness policies, the report’s authors looked at homeless outreach teams across the country, tracking what their goals and missions are and how they operate.

The report reveals that 76 percent of homeless outreach teams in the nation’s 100 largest cities involve the police. And 59 percent of the outreach teams studied are designed to enforce ...

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