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San Diego police response to homelessness gets renewed scrutiny amid staffing shortages

A San Diego police officer oversees the clearing of a homeless encampment in the Midway District, Feb. 2, 2022.
Matt Bowler
A San Diego police officer oversees the clearing of a homeless encampment in the Midway District, Feb. 2, 2022.

The San Diego Police Department's overtime spending is expected to end the fiscal year $6.9 million over budget, according to a recent budget monitoring report. The department says it is also facing new staffing shortages, possibly linked to resignations in the wake of the city's COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

In light of those trends, some local policymakers are reviving a perennial debate in San Diego over what role police officers should play in managing the homelessness crisis.

SDPD's Neighborhood Policing Division "is regularly called upon to focus the majority of its efforts on homelessness," Police Chief David Nisleit told the City Council's budget committee Wednesday. The division has a budget of $27.9 million, and responded to more than 13,000 complaints about homelessness made through the city's Get It Done app between July and November 2021.

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"The Neighborhood Policing Division's goal is to be a conduit connecting homeless individuals within the community to the available resources and services throughout the city," Nisleit said.

But some council members are unconvinced that the police are the best people to be that conduit, or that police presence is necessary at every call or complaint related to homelessness.

City Council President Sean Elo-Rivera said he is struck by how often police officers are sent to a situation related to homelessness where no crime is being committed. The city should have a way of assessing whether a situation's risk of violence is low enough to be handled by unarmed civilians, he said.

"Let's free (police officers) up to do the work that they are tasked with — which is, again, more than they should be tasked with," Elo-Rivera said in an interview with KPBS. "To me, that would be a way of expanding overall capacity without necessarily increasing the size of the force."

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San Diego police response to homelessness gets renewed scrutiny amid staffing shortages

Still, Elo-Rivera said he needs more information before he would support reassigning officers in the Neighborhood Policing Division to other duties.

San Diego does have access to a new, county-funded "mobile crisis response team" of unarmed behavioral health experts that gets sent to mental health, drug or alcohol related emergencies. But Nisleit said the team is too small to provide any meaningful relief to the demands on sworn officers.

San Diego police response to homelessness gets renewed scrutiny amid staffing shortages

The county also has "psychiatric emergency response teams" that provide first contact with people in a mental health crisis. But those teams are always accompanied by police, so expanding their use would not necessarily free up more officers to backfill patrol vacancies or respond to the growth in calls for service.

RELATED: City-led cleanup operation of homeless encampment in Midway begins

"The bottom line is there is nobody else right now to address those types of concerns," Nisleit said.

Police are required to accompany staff from the city's Environmental Services Department when crews are sent to clean up or clear homeless encampments. Nisleit said the police presence provides security, but did not say how often those operations result in violence.

Former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer ramped up the cleaning and clearing of homeless encampments in the wake of the 2017 Hepatitis A outbreak. The program, called CleanSD, has continued under Mayor Todd Gloria, although Gloria's current budget aims to reduce police overtime spending on the program by $1 million.

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