HUFFINGTON
08.19.12
TAMPA’S MAVERICK COP
completed a three-year-prison
sentence and had come to stay
with him in the woods behind a
furniture warehouse. Glassmyer
told Donaldson he’d had enough.
Donaldson has come up with
his own special jargon for his job,
much of it inspired by the business
and pop-psychology books that
he fills with highlighter. When he
comes across a piece of information that he thinks he can use to
help a homeless person turn his
life around, he’s calls it “the hook.”
Glassmyer’s “ hook” was his sheer
desperation, but about a year later,
it was evident that his desperation
hadn’t quite propelled him into
becoming the optimistic, organized,
self-reliant citizen Donaldson still
hopes he’ll become. “Gerald?” said
Donaldson, looking irritated, after Glassmyer handed back a blank
form. “When I give you paperwork
and say fill it out? Fill it out.”
Glassmyer launched into a
lengthy explanation: essentially,
someone had told him he didn’t
really need it. Donaldson glared
at him. “This is why you’re
homeless,” he said.
Donaldson believes that there
are a number of psychological differences between most poor peo-
ple and those who end up on the
streets. He thinks that homeless
people tend to be more passive and
withdrawn, more reluctant to seek
help when they need it, more pessimistic about their prospects for
success, and more likely to give up
at the first sign of adversity. They
lack “survival skills,” he say, and
he sees it as his duty to change
that. He says he can’t help them
get off the streets without first “retooling their minds.”
SPENDING A COUPLE OF DAYS
with Donaldson one gets the impression that he doesn’t have many
opportunities for self-expression
outside of his conversations with
the homeless. Asked about his
personal life, he’s uncharacteristically concise: “I’m divorced.”
What does he do in his free time?
“ I don’t know. Jog.” He’s a font
of wisdom culled from books like
“Freakonomics” and “The Tipping
Point”— stories about how success come to those who challenge
conventions. And he believes that
most of the conventional thinking
about homelessness is wrong.
No, homeless people don’t usually want to be homeless. No, most
of them aren’t screwed-up beyond