During the Colorado Springs City Council’s Oct. 21 Budget Town Hall, Kris Molinari, a case consultant and investigator with the Colorado Office of the Child’s Representative and the Colorado Office of Respondent Parents’ Counsel, described a common experience for the region’s homeless population.
“You return to your campsite and find it’s been cleared by the Homeless Outreach Team,” she said. “Your tent, your clothes, your children’s photos – all gone, along with the important paperwork your caseworker and the court gave you, and the phone number for your attorney. It’s taken months to get documents you needed, to get copies of your birth certificate, social security cards, so you can get that ID that you need for that job, apartment, benefits, et cetera. Now it’s gone. On top of that, you have to face a very frustrated case worker who has gone months trying to get these documents for you only for you to say that you’ve lost them … This isn’t a one-time occurrence. This is a daily reality for our clients and the professionals trying to help them. It’s a cycle that repeats endlessly, funded by your tax dollars, yielding little to no results.”
Max Kronstadt, an organizer with the Colorado Springs Homeless Union, says Colorado Springs’ 2018 outdoor camping ban allows the Colorado Springs Police Department’s Homeless Outreach Team (HOT) to seize property. “Colorado Springs has a camping ban and various ordinances banning camping, or in certain areas sitting or lying down, so that empowers CSPD to come and give people tickets and take their stuff,” he explained. “When I go out and talk to people about what are the things you’d like to see the city do differently, that’s one of the big things they say, ‘Well, the police are just taking our stuff, giving us tickets we can’t pay.’ It leads to cycling in and out of jail and doesn’t help anything.”
Kurt Haehl has been homeless in Colorado Springs for 14 years and says the loss of property is part of the ordeal of being homeless. “Your wallet sometimes gets taken, your food stamp card and all that,” he said. “You have to get that renewed and it’s just a hassle. I mean, it just brings us down more than it helps us. They take from us and expect there’s nothing for us to do.”
CSPD’s Public Relations Manager Ira Cronin explained how camp removals work. “When CSPD notifies people who are camping that they are violating city ordinances, we verbally inform them and post a written notice giving them a specific time frame within which they need to vacate the campsite and remove their belongings,” he said in an email. “We give the community members a specific amount of time that the city has allotted for specific camping ordinances to vacate the site so they can prioritize what they take with them. After that time has expired, and the camp has been vacated Neighborhood Services handles the clean-up. If, during the clean-up, Neighborhood Services determine there are items of value or that might be of importance to the community members who have vacated the site, Neighborhood Services will give the item or items to CSPD, and CSPD will hold those items in personal property for 60 days.”
Kronstadt has watched clean-up operations himself. “The police will say they sort out identifying documents, but they often don’t, because they just take a claw to a tent and put it in the dumpster or the back of a van,” she says. “If there was an ID in there, then all of a sudden it’s in a dumpster.”
Cronin acknowledges that some items are not held by CSPD. “CSPD does not have the ability to seize tents, sleeping bags, couches, chairs, or many of the more oversized, large items left behind and place them into property to hold,” he said. “To do so would overwhelm our evidence system.”
Haehl says trying to reclaim confiscated property from CSPD can be a difficult process. “When you go to claim it, they claim they don’t have it,” he said. “Then you go to the next department that might have it, and that would be El Paso County, but then it becomes CDOT’s property, and they just throw it away. They don’t hold accountability for your stuff. The only thing they hold accountability [for] is the fact that they came by, you didn’t remove your stuff, so they took it [and] threw it away.”
Cronin says CSPD attempts to return seized property to owners. “When we have items, and we know who they belong to, CSPD will make every attempt to contact them by looking up a last known address, and we will send a letter,” he said. “If we have a phone number for the individual, we will try to contact them. If we know they frequent the Rescue Mission, we will notify the rescue mission. CSPD will also attempt to locate individuals who may be in the El Paso County Jail or the Department of Corrections. We try all the avenues available to locate individuals whose property we know we have.”
Molinari is hoping for policy change. “I want to be clear, this isn’t about pointing fingers,” she said. “The Homeless Outreach Team, the police, the city workers, they’re doing what they’ve been asked to do, but we need to ask ourselves, ‘Is this the most effective use of our resources?’ … In my many years of working directly with this population, I’ve yet to meet someone who has been positively impacted by the HOT team. Everyone I’ve spoken to is scared and resentful, seeing them as punitive. However, I’ve heard countless stories and appreciation for our fire department’s homeless outreach efforts. This tells us something crucial – our homeless population isn’t resistant to help, they’re resistant to help that doesn’t actually help. They’re resistant to help that’s not sincere, sustainable or dignifying.”
People looking to reclaim property from CSPD can call CSPD’s evidence unit and make an appointment to retrieve their belongings. “If the individual knows CSPD has their belongings, they can come to the evidence office to claim them,” said Cronin. “It’s easiest if they have a state-issued ID, or we can use other types of photo ID. We prefer they call first and make an appointment, but we will work with them if that’s not possible. It may take several days from a cleanup of items to the evidence unit located at 224 Rio Grande Street. The evidence unit can be reached at 719-444-7744.”
[Oct. 30: The online version of this story has been updated to change “Cronin admits” to “Cronin acknowledges.” — ed]
