The City of Boulder may have taken an important preliminary step in addressing a racial disparity in arrests, but it’s business as usual when it comes to police interactions with the homeless population.
Boulder continues its tradition of alienating the homeless by failing to ask outside investigations firm Hilliard Heintze to include socioeconomic factors, particularly homelessness, in an evaluation of the police department’s arrest statistics.
The city announced its decision to hire an outside firm to evaluate the police department earlier this year, in part because a late 2014 analysis by USA Today ranked Boulder second in the state for the largest disparity in the frequency of arrests for blacks and “non-blacks” between 2011 and 2012. During those 12 months, the Boulder PD arrested black people nearly five times as often as non-blacks, with 568.5 black people arrested per 1,000 people, compared to 117.8 non-blacks per 1,000.
And while an evaluation of racial arrests is necessary to improve how the police force serves the Boulder community, the city’s failure to evaluate any possible disparity in homeless arrests ignores years of public outcry about how the City of Boulder treats its homeless population.
In addition to the USA Today analysis, Sarah Huntley, communications manager for the City of Boulder, says the impetus for the Boulder PD evaluation is strained race relations across the country — high profile incidences like the death of unarmed 18-year-old black male Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
Huntley was not part of the research and development staff that made the choice to evaluate only the police department’s racial arrests. However, she notes that collecting some pieces of socioeconomic data are difficult simply because police don’t gather information about income. She adds that occasionally the line for “home address” will be filled with the word “transient” when the arrestee is without a permanent home.
When asked why the city wouldn’t include this in its evaluation of the police force, she offers a number of problems with collecting data about arrests of homeless people.
“The first problem is, we don’t have a total count of how many homeless people are taking up residence in Boulder, so comparing can be difficult,” Huntley says. “The other thing that is sort of difficult in this area … we have a transient population that is a little more difficult to discern from the typical homeless individual or family. They refer to themselves as ‘homefree’ — it’s a chosen lifestyle as opposed to a particular socioeconomic class.”
While police officers gather a fair amount of information on arrestees, Huntley says municipal court is where detailed data is collected on people’s living situations, and that the city’s municipal court has done a number of studies on the effect “of some of our municipal ordinances on the homeless and transient population.”
These ordinances include a camping law that prohibits anyone from camping within a park, pubic space or city property, with camping defined as the use of a shelter while conducting typical activities of daily life, such as sleeping or eating. By the city’s definition, shelter includes any cover or protection from the elements other than clothing.
“When folks talk to the city, usually in the form of feedback to City Council but sometimes to city staff, about the impacts of ordinances, they often say these populations are disproportionately affected, but in part it’s because these populations might be the ones who are more likely to, for example, be camping out on the municipal lawn,” Huntley says. “I’ve never seen a wealthy family put [down] a sleeping bag or a tent and try to make that a camping space. They usually go to an approved camping space.”
Over the years, the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado has taken issue with Boulder ordinances that essentially criminalize homelessness, including the camping ban and severe restrictions on panhandling. Mark Silverstein, ACLU legal director, says that in Larimer County, the sheriff ’s office was able to collect and release data on the number of prisoners in the jail that listed either homeless or transient as their address, allowing officers to run numbers on the amount of jail time taken up by homeless people.
“I would imagine that data could be captured in Boulder County Jail too, because they always take the address [of the arrestee],” Silverstein says.
Boulder Weekly contacted Hilliard Heintze to see if the firm would be capable of evaluating homeless arrests if the City of Boulder were to request such an investigation, but their chief communications officer was unable to provide an answer by press time.
Tony Robinson, chair of the University of Colorado Denver’s political science department, has done extensive research on homelessness in Denver, and this spring released a study with Denver Homeless Out Loud called No Right to Rest: Criminalizing Homelessness in Colorado.
Robinson says it’s “definitely true” that very few cities track or report on police interactions with homeless people, but the limited studies that have been done show that homeless people are more likely to be targeted by cops and up to 10 times more likely to spend time in jail than housed people. However, their crimes are less likely to be violent in nature.
“Yes, it is a real issue that cities around the nation are, we all know, targeting homeless people and spending a substantial amount of money on enforcing those crimes [of homelessness: panhandling, loitering, public drunkenness, public urination],” Robinson says.
Robinson says he understands why a city would want to examine their police force’s racial relationships, but he adds that there is overlap in understanding racial relationships and interactions with transient populations. The “common thread,” according to Robinson, is gentrification of public spaces.
“As [cities] do that, a common obstacle that city leaders think they face is the appearance of unruly spaces: spaces that appear unruly or ungoverned or not attractive to the global corporate class,” he says. “In that regard, young, male nonwhite populations, as well as poor, homeless populations, commonly violate the sense of urban order that officials have. So both of those populations will be targeted and driven out of protected downtown space.
“So in that regard, it’s a common issue that you would not just want to know how often are [police] targeting black people, but also how often are they targeting homeless people.”
