HUFFINGTON
08.19.12
TAMPA’S MAVERICK COP
when President Obama signed the
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which included a 1.5 billion grant for “homelessness prevention and rapid-rehousing.” A
local social worker asked Donaldson to help her find some people
to apply for the housing subsidies,
so he brought her to a camp in the
woods and watched her fill out her
forms. “She’s not doing anything I
can’t do,” he thought.
The truth was that Tampa’s
social-services agencies had lost
so much funding that they could
barely afford to send workers
into the field anymore. But there
wasn’t a single cop in Tampa who
couldn’t tell you where and who
the homeless people were and
where they lived.
Over the next year Donaldson
assembled detailed profiles on every homeless person he met, and
made a map showing Tampa’s
“homelessness hotspots,” and
wrote an eight-page “thesis” entitled “Homeless Engagement and
In tervention Equals Police Work.”
Complaints about homeless people
in his district slowly declined.
He tactics didn’t win universal approval from the higherups. One commander reportedly
dressed him down after seeing
a bunch of disheveled, blearyeyed men hanging out in his office. Then the money from the
stimulus bill ran out and all three
people who’d gotten apartments
through that program ended up
back on the streets. Donaldson
decided that he’d been unwise to
rely on government money, so he
persuaded a local property owner
to let some homeless folks live in
the owner’s dilapidated houses.
The selling point: The men would
fix up the homes with donated
wood and paint, adding value
to the properties and deepening
their own sense of propriety. So
far this “housing gimmick” has
provided homes to five people,
and Donaldson says it’s increased
the value of the homes by thousands of dollars.
LAST YEAR, IN AN ATTEMPT to
stem the flow of homeless people into the county’s courts and
jails, the sheriff’s department in
St. Petersburg converted an old
jail building into what its website describes as “a cost-effective
shelter and service headquarters.” The homeless have their
own term for it: “Jailter.” More