Addressing homelessness
The Team Tulare walk revealed what a lot of us were thinking: the “homeless” are a curse on the downtown!
In effectively dealing with the “homeless” the first thing we need to do as business owners is STOP calling them “homeless” unless they are truly without a house! The term “homeless” is used to characterize a group of people with several subsets:
- Those without houses
- Drug addicts
- Mentally ill
- Petty criminals
- “Rough” or Urban campers
With such a diverse group of personalities included in the all-encompassing term “homeless,” we have to start differentiating in order to effectively eliminate this blight on our business district.
The Downtown Association has singled out two groups that seem to represent the largest sub-groups of this street-living populations: Petty criminals and mentally ill.
A meeting scheduled between the Downtown Association and the County Mental Health Department has been postponed however we look forward to meeting with them soon. The Association is examining the idea of hiring a part-time licensed social worker to identify and classify the mentally ill on our streets as we seek to find long-term solutions for them.
In dealing with petty criminals one thing we must keep in mind: We need to be the victims. In order to prosecute a criminal the police need three things:
- Place
- Suspect and
- Victim
We, as business owners or employees of downtown businesses must insist that we are ALWAYS the victim!
It’s easy in a situation where a thief takes a purse to identify the victim. What’s harder is when a mentally disturbed person is sleeping in front of one of your doorways. Is he the victim because he’s sleeping on the streets? Or, are you the victim because he’s blocking your entrance? In every case like this, you must insist that you are the victim. You are losing money if he prevents a customer or client from entering your business and loss of potential income makes you a victim.
Because you are the victim, it is absolutely essential that you report every incident to the Tulare Police Department. Even if the vagrant moves on it is always a good idea to call PD and request a “welfare check” on the individual in case they are in distress or are publicly intoxicated and might be a danger to themselves or others.
As with the case with our ABC News video, if you have surveillance video of a theft please forward it to the Downtown Association office by emailing it to john@tularedowntown.com as we will use the video. Typically, we forward it to the PD and we will ask you if a report was filed. We will upload the video to Youtube.com and send an email with an embedded link to it to all of our members whose email is on file with us. We will also request a mugshot of the suspect from PD and forward it when one is available.
If we expect someone to come rescue us from this problem, unfortunately the help has already arrived and it’s not enough. Politicians have aligned on the side of the “homeless” forgetting that it is we, the business-owners and home-owners/renters who build society. We are the ones whose existence should be cherished. By taking an aggressive approach to dealing with the problem ourselves, we can stem the tide of vagrants preying on us and our customers.