New Anchorage police team aims to improve homeless outreach

Sunlight was beginning to melt the layer of frost coating the line of parked vehicles when Anchorage Police Officer Ruth Adolf and police department social work navigator Tanya Vandenbos arrived at the homeless encampment along East 54th Avenue.

Adolf stopped the police SUV just across from a large RV and a van. Nearby, a handful of tents and tarps were clustered beneath bare-limbed trees. The camp was quiet.

“This is where they had the motorhome fire not too long ago. It’s pretty sleepy. It’s still early,” Adolf said.

In the passenger seat, Vandenbos held a large zip-close bag of medical supplies, a burn kit they’d picked up from the clinic at Brother Francis Shelter the day before.

The recent fire destroyed the vehicle and left a man with third-degree burns on his abdomen, Adolf said.

They hoped to find him.

Now that he’s out of the hospital, “he has to go to a clinic daily to have wound care,” Vandenbos said. “To go every day with no transportation is tough. We’ll do anything we can do to help take some of that burden off.”

Adolf, a crisis intervention team officer, and Vandenbos, a behavioral health and chemical dependency counselor, are the police department’s new Homeless Outreach, Prevention, and Engagement Team, also known as the HOPE Team. The duo is the city’s newest tool for addressing unsheltered homelessness, or when people live in vehicles, tents or on the streets. The team officially launched last month, though they started outreach work in late July.

The HOPE Team’s major goals include helping connect homeless residents to services and to “establish positive police contacts,” said Lt. Brian Fuchs, who oversees the HOPE Team.

“It’s really about trust and relationships,” Adolf said. “That’s huge. If you have that, I think then you can actually maybe go forward. And that’s our hope, right? We want people to get connected to services.”

Another piece is public safety.

Victims in camps often don’t report crimes, Adolf and Vandenbos said. The goal is to build trust with victims, potentially enough to where Adolf can take a formal police report, or at least help the person get services.

Any information the HOPE Team can gather from victims can help the department establish investigation leads, Fuchs said.

“Ultimately that’s going to establish a very strong public safety environment, not only for the homeless community, but also for the community at large,” Fuchs said.

Fuchs said he hopes the relationships Adolf and Vandenbos build on the streets will allow crime victims to feel comfortable coming forward and being heard. “Ruth and Tanya both have the ability then to direct resources to assist them,” he said.

So far, the HOPE Team has contacted about 375 different people and helped house 20, and was able to get one person into substance use treatment, Fuchs said.

“Part of what makes this role so special is that we can be the voice” for people experiencing homelessness, Adolf said.

Then, “they know that they’re not alone in this and they have support. There’s a lot of advocating for second chances,” she added.

‘One person at a time’

APD in the last decade has attempted to put a larger focus on “community policing” strategies, which take a more active, rather than reactive, role.

Its Mobile Intervention Team pairs a crisis intervention officer with a mental health clinician to respond to calls. Adolf and Vandenbos were the Mobile Intervention Team’s founding pair, Fuchs said. Since then, the city has expanded the program to five teams, and the pair are now piloting the HOPE Team. It is funded through the department’s regular budget, as Adolf and Vandenbos already held positions.

Where much of the Mobile Intervention Team responds to calls for police service that involve a mental health element, the HOPE Team’s day-to-day work is solely focused on homelessness.

Instead of responding to calls, Adolf and Vandenbos are out and about, visiting camps and checking on homeless residents.

And where the department’s Community Action Policing Team has long focused on the enforcement aspects of homelessness — abating camps and investigating crimes when campers are victims or suspects — the HOPE Team fills a very different role.

Their work is often about trying to meet immediate, critical needs, Adolf said. It looks a lot like triage.

“We really have to do it one person at a time, but just think outside of the box and be as creative as we can for that particular situation, and then the next person is going to be totally different,” Vandenbos said.

Their first mission on that frosty October morning: deliver an array of supplies to the group on 54th Avenue.

The first stop of the day had been the Midtown Walmart to pick up a donated $100 gift card through one of the retail giant’s philanthropic programs. It would help those who’d lost all their belongings in the fire to buy new necessities, like warm clothes, socks and underwear.

Next, Vandenbos and Adolf stopped at the Lutheran Social Services food pantry to grab cake-baking supplies, cereal and other food for the group. Since the fire, nine people were now staying in a different RV, Adolf said.

A bus pass was for Virginia Christie, who often does the grocery and supply runs for the group, they said.

Soon after the HOPE Team arrived, Christie popped out from behind the old van.

She was happy to see the team, though she appeared a bit frazzled. After the fire destroyed their RV, she and Luis Gibson got the van. They were trying to get to the DMV that morning to register their ownership, but it needed a starter and maybe some new wiring before they could drive it. And Gibson didn’t yet have his new ID.

Burns covered nearly half his stomach. Vandenbos and Adolf urged Gibson to get to the medical clinic.

Vandenbos pulled out her phone and looked up the price of the part needed for the van — about $120.

“I need for him to feel confident, so that he’ll go get his wound taken care of and not worry about this,” Vandenbos told Christie.

Adolf and Vandenbos would go pick up a starter later, they told Gibson and Christie.

Hopefully, they could find some donation funds to pay for it.

“If that’s what gets him to the doctor, then that’s what we’ll do,” Vandenbos said.

A dangerous environment

National studies show that people who are homeless face a greatly increased risk of violence and victimization.

The group on 54th Avenue was staying at a large former Midtown encampment on Fairbanks Street in June when two men robbed another man at gunpoint and fired 17 rounds into the crowded camp, killing one man and wounding another, police charges say.

In August, another man threatened and fired a shotgun at people in the Midtown camp on Eagle Street, according to police charges. The group was also staying in the camp when that happened.

In both incidents, those men weren’t a part of the camp, Christie said.

In Anchorage, many people living in camps are victims of “significant crimes,” including physical and sexual assault and theft, and they are frequently targeted by dealers looking to profit off of addiction, Fuchs said.

On the previous day, in a wooded area just behind Dempsey Anderson Ice Arena, Adolf and Vandenbos encountered a man who’d been hit by a car just hours before.

He’d been injured during the hit-and-run, likely suffering a broken collarbone, but there was no police report, Adolf said.

“He just walked back to camp and went to bed,” Vandenbos said. His friend in the camp alerted the HOPE Team to the situation, but he didn’t want to go to a hospital or talk with them.

So, after visiting 54th Avenue, they went back to check on him. He still wouldn’t go to the hospital, but there was some progress: This time, he spoke with them. He asked them for a sling. Adolf and Vandenbos would go to a clinic and get him one, they said.

Often, the HOPE Team’s work is “just about being there and checking on people … letting them know that they’re not alone and that there are people out there who are going to check in and that care about what happened,” Vandenbos said.

Nationally, police involvement in homelessness response has been criticized as criminalizing, ineffective or traumatizing for vulnerable people. Fuchs said he’s heard some of that same sentiment from the Anchorage community.

But due to the nature of policing, “we are definitely part of the team to respond to homelessness,” he said.

So, “we have to have a group or a team that could connect with that community in a very positive manner,” he said.

‘Good ones’

On Third Avenue, just across the street from Brother Francis Shelter, a woman slept on the sidewalk beneath a jumble of tarp and blankets.

Adolf and Vandenbos had seen her on the street the day before, recognizing her from their time on the Mobile Intervention Team a few years ago. The woman had been incarcerated for a while and was now on the street with nowhere to go.

Adolf, crouching next to her, asked if she would go to the city shelter on 56th Avenue.

“I’ll think about it,” the woman said, and asked for a cigarette. Adolf pulled two from a pack stashed in the SUV.

Cigarettes are a “big commodity” on the street, Adolf said. She doesn’t condone smoking but it helps people feel safe and secure, and giving them away builds trust, she said.

The woman called Adolf and Vandenbos the “good ones.”

Adolf and Vandenbos would check on her again later. Hopefully, by that time, she’d be ready to go to the shelter.

Adolf, who’s spent 17 years as an officer with APD, views many of the people she meets on the street as inherently good people who’ve experienced trauma or made a bad choice in life, and who are now stuck in the cycle of homelessness and survival, she said.

“It’s very complicated. It’s not just as simple as, ‘Go find a job or go apply for housing.’ There’s a lot of barriers,” Adolf said.

Their aim is to help people get through those barriers, large and small, Vandenbos said.

The HOPE Team’s next stop: the weekly pop-up outreach event at Davis Park in Mountain View.

Working with local service providers is a key part of the job, Vandenbos said. It’s important to know what resources are available and what the eligibility requirements for programs are, she said.

The large encampment sprawls in a wooded area behind ballfields, and in another area across the street next to a snow dump site. Many people living around the park have pets, and Adolf and Vandenbos had loaded the back of the SUV with supplies, dog and cat food and treats.

Adolf fed a dog named Sable treats through the driver’s window of Nathan Gartelman’s truck.

Vandenbos and Adolf encouraged him to get somewhere safe and warm. Could Gartelman spend the winter with his mother again?

Later, Adolf crouched next to a woman, speaking softly to her as medics attempted to cut a ring from her swollen, infected finger.

“When we have these opportunities to connect with people like that and hear their story, and then eventually get them, maybe, hopefully, to where they want to be — if we can walk alongside them and accompany them in the journey, it’s the most powerful thing,” Adolf said.