Street Outreach Services, or SOS, was officially launched in 1996, when one counselor from the Midtown Community Court paired up with a community patrol officer from a precinct station located next door. When it soon became clear there was too much referral work for a single ad hoc team, the Court started the SOS program and worked with the New York Police Department to launch it in three local police precincts.
Along with Broadway theaters and other tourist attractions, the familiar sights of New York City's Midtown neighborhood in the late 1980s and early 1990s included low-level crime, such as drug abuse, theft, prostitution and vandalism. The impact of these offenses was felt by residents, shopkeepers, employers, commuters and tourists. Once a source of civic pride, Times Square had become a symbol of New York's decline. The Midtown Community Court was launched in 1993 to address these problems by sentencing low-level offenders to perform community restitution and receive on-site social services like substance abuse treatment and mental health counseling.
The Court also had a mandate to test new approaches to problems in Midtown. Over the years, the Court has housed such unconventional programs as community mediation, job training and medical services. However, none of these initiatives directly addressed a highly visible neighborhood problem: the continued presence of large numbers of homeless people and the threat they posed to neighborhood order. Knowing there was a good chance that many of these individuals would find themselves in court sooner or later, court officials and local police wondered if it was possible to aid them before they broke the law.
Solution
Planners saw in the persistent homeless problem a chance to expand the Court's work. They proposed an outreach program that paired police with case workers from the Court's social service clinic. The idea was to "engage in aggressive crime prevention, meeting the problem where it is and intervening," explains John Feinblatt, then the coordinator of the Midtown Community Court. Police precincts usually send out community patrol officers to get to know the people who inhabit their beats. The twist here was to send out case workers along with the police, to walk the streets together in outreach teams. Unlike typical police patrols, the outreach effort wasn't going to be about arrests or "sweeps" of the homeless from sidewalk encampments. Instead, the outreach teams were going to focus on getting the word out about services at the Court and persuading people to come in for treatment and counseling voluntarily.
Implementation
Street Outreach Services, or SOS, was officially launched in 1996, when one counselor from the Court paired up with a community patrol officer from a precinct station located next door. When it soon became clear there was too much referral work for a single ad hoc team, the Court obtained a grant from the Open Society Institute to institutionalize the program in three local police precincts. Currently, three counselors divide their time between searching for clients on the street, working with clients when they come to the courthouse for help, and tracking the project's results.
SOS sends out six outreach teams each week, at various hours of the day or evening. One counselor typically accompanies one or two police officers. The team travels together in a police van to sites where the homeless are known to hang out. They make an average of 10 contacts with prospective clients during sessions ranging from one to four hours long. They describe services available at the Midtown Community Court and distribute business cards with their names and phone numbers at the courthouse.
When clients show up at the courthouse, the outreach workers question them based on a form that yields a simple assessment: housing needs, employment, substance abuse, eligibility for benefits. The SOS workers then prioritize the issues requiring attention and devise a treatment plan. Positive word of mouth is a major sales point for the program: former clients are encouraged to revisit their old street haunts after being helped by SOS to explain the program to their friends.
Obstacles
- The target population is notoriously difficult to work with. Helping them make positive changes is an incremental process and very labor intensive.
Not all police officers are enthusiastic or suited for outreach work. Successful outreach depends not only on motivation but also on personality and general aptitude for chatting up the homeless on the street. - Police officers patrolling in full uniform, with guns visible in their holsters, can be intimidating, hampering engagement with clients. Police from one precinct do outreach in plainclothes. In another precinct, police supervisors believed that cops on outreach assignment should be identifiable as cops. The officers worked out a compromise: they wear the polo shirts and shorts of cops who patrol on bicycles, and they keep their guns out of sight.
- The idea of police patrolling with counselors appears to raise a civil liberties issue. The presence of a police officer at the counselor's elbow may be inherently coercive, as the same officer might show up later to arrest the person who earlier refused an offer of help. The SOS experience indicates, however, that as police officers become versed in the outreach approach, the specter of coercion diminishes. "When I'm doing regular patrol, and I come across a homeless problem, I'm not looking to chase them away," says Officer Doug Delillo. "I refer them to the Court or to other places where they can get help."
Results
In two-and-a-half years, from November 1996 through August 1999, SOS outreach teams persuaded nearly 656 people to come in for help. Each client made an average of 4.1 visits—an encouraging sign that the program has succeeded in engaging clients over the long term. Overall, the SOS teams made more than 440 excursions and recorded about 3,900 contacts with people on the street. SOS has recorded at least 54 people who are "off the street" through their efforts—40 people who have been placed in transitional or permanent housing and have remained there for 90 days or longer, and 14 people whose return to locations outside of New York City have been facilitated by SOS counselors.
SOS remains a work in progress. Areas needing further refinement include the size of the program (three outreach workers hardly meet the demand in the Court's catchment area), formal training for the police officers, the optimal schedule for outreach patrols, and evaluation of the program's impact. Such questions, however, reflect a successful start more than any fundamental flaw. SOS demonstrates that putting police together with counselors on patrol can help to connect clients with available social services, given a mutual commitment to the project and a willingness to communicate.