69����

It would pair patrol officers with local social service caseworkers and specialists to handle homelessness separately from vagrancy, public intoxication, aggressive panhandling, fights and other misbehavior that led the city to remove the seating from the two riverfront pocket parks last year.

Janesville police Sgt. Ben Thompson joked that some department members now internally refer to its removal of seating at Firehouse and Volunteer parks as “Benchgate.” But Thompson said the police department is not second-guessing the move.

“It was just like complaint after complaint after complaint from business owners,” Thompson said. “I don’t know how many phone calls I took from John Q. Public saying ‘Hey, I was trying to go get a coffee. I was trying to go here or there, and I was harassed. I don’t feel safe coming downtown.’”

Thompson and Police Chief Chad Pearson say the department has been working with downtown businesses and BID officials throughout the winter on the partnership with Rock County Human Services crisis caseworkers and social workers from other nonprofit agencies.

The idea would be to respond to a call about a homeless or vagrant person with police and trained social workers acting together to pinpoint underlying causes of an individual being unhoused downtown.

It’s not reinventing the wheel, because the police department has run a homeless outreach task force since 2018 called HOT, short for “Homeless Outreach Task Force.”

Under the new model, police would have a broader group of social service experts to draw on to identifyissues leading to homeless, such as mental illness and other personal crises.

Pearson says it’s a process of breaking down silos across multiple government agencies and nonprofits to find ways to combine social service workers and police who’ve got varied skills, tools and resources to tackle a shared problem.

Day shelter

There has been no formal talk on establishing a day shelter for the homeless downtown, but Janesville PD and BID officials on the task force also say they have toured a day shelter in Beloit, and they intend to tour another such shelter in Fond du Lac.

Pearson said the visits are to help police and the downtown group evaluate if a similar day shelter model might work in Janesville.

“We want to establish something along that line where people can come comfortably to be able to gain direction and guidance on getting resources that will meet their needs,” Pearson said. “Arresting people to get them out of homelessness is proven not to work. Arresting somebody who has nothing puts them further into nothingness.”

In the past, patrol officers have been tasked with ticketing, arresting or moving along homeless people. Deputy Police Chief Mark Ratzlaff says that’s proven to be a short-sighted and unsuccessful approach because it leads to the public stigmatizing all homelessness and considering it a problem law enforcement is responsible for eliminating.

Pearson said that in the past, Janesville police have used equipment removal like the temporary elimination of tables and seats in the two riverfront pocket parks. Pearson said police at one time, for instance, similalry dealt with a rash of drug dealing and fights at Fourth Ward Park’s basketball courts.

The city removed the basketball hoops for a period of time and eventually replaced them with new ones.

“It’s years later, but you know, that’s what we’re trying to do with Fireman’s Park. Yes, we want to put the benches and stuff back in. Yes, we want to move forward, but we have got to get our arms around the distinction between vagrancy and homelessness and get a co-responder plan in place.”