A split vote of the Visalia City Council on Monday, August 12, altered the city’s municipal code to again make camping in city parks, recreation areas and other public spaces illegal.
State-Forced Change to City Code Doesn’t Help Homeless
The changes to sections 12.32 and 12.35 of Visalia’s municipal code allow police to resume detaining people living in city parks or to force them to leave. The alterations also renew the city’s authority to remove highly-visible encampments established by unhoused citizens on public property. The code changes are effective as of Monday’s vote.
The changes were enacted under duress, according to council member Steve Nelsen.
“(Governor Gavin) Newsom is threatening to withhold funding where local agencies don’t make homeless camping illegal,” he said. “He’s putting the onus on counties and cities under the veiled threat of losing funding, which is not, again, a good solution to what we’re trying to deal with.”
While the council’s hand was forced at the state level into amending the city code, changes in local law were presented by supporters as boosting public safety. Detractors, on the other hand, see it as working against years of effort to shrink Visalia’s homeless population, which is estimated at 1,600 to 1,800 unhoused. Reports from US Housing and Urban Development say homelessness is at an all-time high, climbing 12% from 2022 to 2023.
Asked for his opinion on the changes to the law, Visalia police chief Jason Salazar voiced his department’s support for it, but with reservations. It will not help with the city’s growing population of unhoused people, he said.
“It gives us another tool to take enforcement where we need to throughout the city to address the issues we do have. Obviously, our parks are a concern,” he said. “This is certainly not the answer to the problem. And that’s one of the questions that’s been posed to me a number of times. Will this help solve it? It doesn’t do that.”
Visalia police will continue to “offer outreach services as much as we can,” he added.
Authorities Split on Camping Ban Effectiveness
Council member Emmanuel Hernandez Soto cast the lone no vote in the 4-1 decision to approve the camping ban. The threat of lost money, he said, wasn’t enough to overcome his common sense.
“Of course we want parks to be safe for families to use,” he said. “I just don’t believe this ordinance change will do that.”
Soto said the council could address the problem at its root by providing viable alternatives to living in the city’s parks and public spaces.
“I think an emergency drop-in shelter would be more effective in a lot of these scenarios where we receive complaints from our constituency, so I won’t be supporting this and hope that we can talk about funding to open an emergency drop-in shelter in the future,” he said.
Mayor Brian Poochigian, on the other hand, believes holding the homeless in police custody is to their benefit.
“Before when somebody was committing a crime, they’d get arrested and they’d get held for a couple of days,” he said. “And officers would say those couple of days were very key because now someone’s being held, and now they’re thinking about the consequences of their decisions. At the same token, they’re being offered services right there because they’re trying to rehabilitate these individuals.”
Poochigian sought validation from Salazar, offering the police chief an opportunity to tout the benefits of incarceration.
“By having this ordinance in place, hopefully our hope is you can try to say, ‘Hey, you can’t camp here,’ and try to push people toward services, correct?” Poochigian asked.
Chief Salazar said that was an unlikely outcome.
“I don’t know that it will do that, because we’ve been doing the same thing during the day, and it hasn’t really accomplished that either,” he said. “There are still gaps in the available resources that need to be filled that this ordinance won’t change.”
Homeless Advocates Share Empathy, Alternative Approaches
Despite the rebuff from his chief of police, Poochigian restated his desire to protect the populace, especially children, from the possible threat that the homeless present..
“Our kids deserve safe parks,” he said. “I think this ordinance accomplishes that.”
Advocates for the homeless who addressed the council in opposition to the camping ban did not deny the need for change. One such advocate, who gave her name only as Taylor, recalled the story of a child who found a prophylactic in one of the city’s parks.
“I empathize with the woman whose child found a condom on the ground. There are needles on the ground. No one should have to deal with that,” she said. “I also realize this is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Like (council member) Nelsen said at the last meeting, we need to get at the root of the issue.”
Police intervention will not accomplish that, Taylor said.
“Citing the unhoused and removing their things does nothing, and at best addresses the symptoms,” she said.
Julia Doyle, another advocate, urged the council not to ban camping. She wanted more effort, especially as multiple projects to aid the homeless are on the verge of opening. Yet more is needed.
“I know it’s not enough. Is there anything the city can do? Is there any task force?” Doyle said. “I know you’ve had task forces, I know you’ve done things over the years. Are there other things we can be looking at as a community?”
Taylor and Doyle both cited a “lack of community” – having no one to turn to in a time of financial or medical hardship – as a basis of homelessness.
“That’s usually the root cause, having nobody,” Doyle said. “Throwing something at that so we can get to the root cause, try it again. We’ve had it in the past. Try it again.”
‘Where are they going to go?’
Doyle said the best approach to getting someone off the streets is restoring their sense of belonging to a community they can count on.
“I’ve seen the progress of all these people when they’ve been given help and assistance, and a place to live, and dignity and humanity,” she said. “And I don’t have any answers. And I know that the problem is that nobody has any answers. But is this really the answer? Where are they going to go?”
Taylor said people in trouble – financially, mentally or personally – will turn to whatever help they can find in their emergency.
“When you don’t have people to go to, you go to people in your neighborhood that aren’t the best influence,” she said. “When things like this happen, we need community. We need to lean on our neighbors, lean on the people that we can trust. And when we create these ordinances, they break down the trust we have in our neighbors.”
Rehabilitation can get people off the street, she said, while arresting or shooing them away will not. Deterrents are not effective, she believes.
“Don’t you think living on the street would be deterrent enough?” she said.
Chief Salazar doesn’t know where the displaced homeless people will end up either.
“They’ll go somewhere they think we won’t find them,” he said. “There’s a lot of speculation. Could they go to the business district? Could they go to another park potentially? They tend to be fairly creative. Really, it’s survival mode.”
His department is already facing this situation when moving homeless people out of public areas during daylight hours. He presented it as an endless loop leading nowhere.
“We tend to end up playing this game where you move them from one spot to another spot, and then you come to that spot, and they’re back to the original spot,” he said. “That’s the frustration in how we deal with this, which obviously speaks to the need for more resources and places for them to go to kind of fill those gaps.”
Moving the Homeless Makes Finding Solutions Harder
Salazar’s response about playing hide-and-seek with the homeless came in response to questions from council member Soto. Where, Soto wondered, would the people end up.
“We don’t know where they’re going to go,” Salazar answered. “We’ll move them out of the park.”
Would an open emergency shelter, Soto asked, be useful?
“I’ve been an advocate for an emergency shelter as something we could just do a drop-in into, low-barrier,” Salazar said. “There’s challenges presented by that, but it’s a resource we do not have that I think is important.”
An emergency drop-in shelter would address several issues that keep unhoused people from finding the help they need. It would also remove responsibility from the shoulders of police, who Salazar said are simply not trained and equipped to deal with issues best left to social workers.
“Moving unhoused people makes it more difficult for service providers to find them,” Salazar said. “If you have a place where you can try and focus your efforts that certainly helps them. Our officers do their best to offer them resources, but that’s not really our role or our expertise.”
Mayor Poochigian then asked Salazar if the Visalia Police Department had assistance to offer the homeless individuals its officers encounter now.
“It’s a difficult question to answer. It’s a yes and a no,” he said. “It depends on what resources are available at the time and who we have available to us. There’s not a lot of resources in terms of a place we can send someone right now. It’s going to depend on what the issue is, how they get placed into those services.”
He described the situations officers face and how they can respond.
“It depends on what the issue is. The HOPE Team has two mental health clinicians that ride with them, so if it happens during that time it’s much easier for us to deal with because we have that direct connection that they can start making placements or making calls to do that,” Salazar said.
The Homeless Outreach and Proactive Enforcement (HOPE) Team is the city police’s response to “transient-related” issues through “a strategy of enforcement, prevention and intervention,” according to their website. But the HOPE Team is not available around the clock.
“When things happen after hours, it gets a little more difficult depending on the situation,” Salazar said. “We have places that we can call and ask for help, yes. We don’t have enough. A lot of the time, it’s all about timing.”
No matter what time the encounter takes place, however, officers often get requests for help getting off the streets. They do what they can. But without an emergency low-barrier shelter, often they have no effective help to give.
“That’s when to strike, when the iron is hot,” Salazar said. “If someone says they want services, you need to have something available right then. And if you don’t, you probably missed an opportunity.”
Where are they supposed to go? Let’s help our own before helping foreigners!
We need to provide a space for these people. Like Reno has Tent City, and provides many things for these homeless.
Go up there and check it out! Do something, have an alternative place for these HOMELESS to go.
Every election year we vote on some band-aid solution for homelessness and mental health that just moves money around. Nothing ever addresses the root causes of the issue. The best we can do is kick them down the road to where they will be out of sight and out of mind