How Edmonton is removing encampments as cold weather arrives

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The City of Edmonton and police are continuing to crack down on homeless encampments as winter approaches.

The first light dusting of snow arrived in parts of the city on Monday. With temperatures forecast to dip to -5 degrees C overnight, about 1,000 Edmontonians will sleep outside in the cold this night while around 725 others head indoors to emergency shelters, according to Homeward Trust‘s most recent counts on the By Names List.

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The city and Edmonton Police Service (EPS) maintain encampments are not safe for the occupants or neighbours and should be taken down as soon as possible. There’s risks of tents catching fire, of violence, of freezing outside, of drug poisonings out of view.

But for some people emergency shelters aren’t an option, and an advocate warns forcibly moving camps puts vulnerable people at greater risk by further exposing them to the elements, of potential violence in shelters, and uproots them from important social connections.

Here’s how the city and police are handling encampments this winter.

Time to go

Five tents stand behind the trees in a forested area on the north side of Rowland Road at Alex Taylor Road in the early afternoon on October 10. Clothes hang between trees near a makeshift fence made of sticks. Smoke rises from a small fire a couple metres from a tent.

Two police officers and a city park ranger with the high risk encampment team enter the camp, identifying themselves to its four occupants. The Edmonton Police Service invited Postmedia to follow along to witness the police and city teams’ work.

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One person walks off the site as the encampment removal team arrives. Acting Sgt. Chris McFarlane speaks to a different woman inside a tent and tells her it’s time to go. There are bags if she needs them. He asks if she has someone to help her pack up, if she has water.

She has about 30 minutes to move along before city clean-up crews throw out everything she can’t carry away.

“Just grab what you that can fit in here OK? Because you just have, as you said, about that half hour, OK?” McFarlane says. He asks her to put out the candle in her tent so it doesn’t get knocked over.

The woman, who identified herself as Laura, tells the officer all of her belongings were thrown out by city clean-up crews at her last campsite. They came when she was away. She went to the province’s navigation centre to get ID but it was closed. She’s still trying to find housing.

Risk factors

McFarlane shows Postmedia a map on his phone with locations of the 311 complaints about encampments. There’s been six complaints about this site since Sept. 28.

Park ranger J. J. Russell said his boss, a sergeant, decides which camps the team should visit first based on risk factors.

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“Priority is going to be schools at risk, seniors homes, anything we don’t want encampments being too close to. Then it will go to call volume, risk factors like fires, pets,” he said.

The role of park rangers is as a liaison between the city and police. Rangers may lay bylaw tickets while police handle anything criminal. When he arrives at a camp, the first thing Russell does is ask people staying there what resources they have access to, he said.

“If they had contact with the navigation centre, that was my first line of questioning,” Russell said. “What can we do about not seeing you guys as often? Have you got in touch with housing?”

Someone from the City of Edmonton will check out reporter camp sites on the 311 internal mapping system first to see what’s there, if anything, before scheduling clean up crews.

EPS Deputy Chief Warren Driechel said apart from tents near schools or public buildings, they prioritize any that reappear in the same location, if there’s been violence before, and the volume of complaints, among other factors.

The city threw out its encampment “risk matrix” earlier this year. That matrix, because of its criteria, meant most camps would be categorized as “high risk” and scheduled for quick removal.  They don’t use that tool anymore, but Driechel says they apply the “fundamental ideals” of that matrix.

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Officers, however, have discretion. There have been times a person can remain a bit longer if there’s a very good reason, Driechel said. But he worries that doing so could be risky for the person staying there.

“We’re allowing some latitude, (but) we’re not letting them linger for a long time. We’re definitely trying to appeal to people in those encampments to move on,” he said. “There’s a lot of compassion that gets shown, especially from the high risk encampment team, for the individuals in encampments, but we’re not letting them linger for a couple days again, because we just don’t want to have to come back the next day and something’s happened to them.”

When police announced a no-tolerance approach to camps this year on the launch of Alberta’s navigation centre, Driechel saw changes that were desirable.

“We’re definitely trying to appeal to people in those encampments to move on. And we saw that behaviour change very quickly back in January, where once we started to go on the larger encampments, and we would start to approach people who would start to pack up on their own,” he said.

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“We’re not going to eliminate people living on the street. We know there’s a homeless problem. We know that there’s people living on the street, but if we can change some behaviours and understanding what’s acceptable within those environments, that’s, I think, a big win.”

Sometimes they find dangerous things at camps. Officers point out propane tanks, broken glass, small empty bags they suspect were used for drugs.

They find a hunting bow with arrows inside a case in an abandoned tent.

Five city workers come in white protective coveralls with bags and garbage pickers. They fill several small, white pickup trucks with the items left behind.

‘It’s scary all the time’

Joseph Marsh had been camping in that spot with his wife and dog for about two weeks, but they have been living outside in Edmonton for about 10 years. They picked this location because it’s not far from the Hope Mission where they can get food.

“When it gets to -40, you don’t want your only heat source to go out and then have nothing.”

Moving again is stressful. He doesn’t think 30 minutes is enough of a warning to pack up — last year they had 24 hours. And moving means he will need to look for the things he needs all over again, all while trying to keep up with requirements to secure a new, permanent home.

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“It’s filled with a lot of stress and anxiety every time you have to move. No matter how hard you try, you always leave something behind,” Marsh said. “As long as we’re not leaving each other behind us, I guess that’s all that matters.

“It’s a vicious circle, but it goes round and round. It’s just to survive. And then somehow, in the midst of all of that, I’m supposed to find time to work for housing.”

He’s doing his best to make himself as self-sufficient as quickly as he can. He thinks the navigation centre is a good idea but didn’t find all the help there he was hoping for.

“You know, I don’t feel like the greatest person being homeless. I don’t even remember what it’s like to not be homeless anymore,” he said. “I worry constantly about everything, because it feels like I’m in the constant, an unending state of fight or flight. And, yeah, it’s a lot.”

But even if he wants to go indoors, emergency shelters come with their own problems, even violence.

He feels overwhelmed with stress and anxiety if he’s really hungry and needs to go to Hope Mission. Marsh said he’s been beaten up multiple times by people he didn’t know. Assaults at Edmonton’s two largest homeless shelters were on the rise earlier this year, Postmedia reported in June.

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Staying outside, though, is difficult and even scary — whether the danger is the cold or other people. He and his wife take turns sleeping so someone can stay alert.

“There are some bad people out here, and bad things are known to happen,” he said. “It’s scary all the time. There’s so much unknown danger. I wasn’t taught or raised how to do any of this, I was very sheltered. Surviving is scary, sometimes.”

A social services worker spoke with Marsh’s wife trying to help them both find somewhere to stay. There was a space available for his wife, but not for him — they would have to separate.

Helpful or harmful?

Driechel said there is a “stigma” around how the police encampment removals work, that some people think they are “just taking down the tents.” He says the goal even before the sped-up camp removals began earlier this year was to get people help and coordinate services for them.

“The conversation was about how do we get people off the street? It was about the people living in encampments. We were seeing some pretty horrible deaths in relation to people living in encampments from drug overdoses and fires, exposure,” he said. “Everyone thinks that we were just there to take down the tents. This is about the people living out there, how can we support those people better.”

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Members of EPS’ help team including workers with the Mustard Seed were at the campsite speaking with occupants offering help with getting access to social services and housing.

But long-time advocate Jim Gurnett, with the Edmonton Coalition on Housing and Homelessness, thinks the current strategy only makes it more dangerous for people being moved during the winter.

He thinks the current situation is the worst he’s ever seen in his 25 years as an advocate. He started seeing people sitting in doorways wrapped in blankets outside as the only option left for them.

“There’s nowhere for those people to go, and so they’re just going to walk 50 metres down the back alley and do the exact same thing again, because they have no one,” he said.

“No, they’re not making it safer and less dangerous.”

If safety is the desire, Gurnett says there needs to be a diversity of types of shelters for different needs, a serviced campground where people can legally live outside or, optimally, non-market housing including supportive housing for everyone.

“Those are the only ways to make it less dangerous. Shuffling the people around, attacking them day after day ’til they have nothing and are mentally strung out, does not make life less dangerous. It makes it worse,” he said.

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[email protected]

@laurby

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