City and county officials work to dispel myths about homelessness in community conversation
- Elizabeth Larson
- Posted On
LAKEPORT, Calif. — Dispelling myths, dismantling stigma, explaining changes in the law and offering hope were some of the themes that arose during a town hall in Lakeport that focused on homelessness and mental illness.
The event, which lasted nearly three hours, was held at the Soper Reese Theater on Sept. 27.
Close to 200 people were at the theater for the event, with another 70 online watching the livestream.
Lakeport Police Chief Brad Rasmussen, one of the organizers, told Lake County News afterward that he was very pleased with the turnout, and that throughout the day on Sept. 28 he had gotten messages and calls from people expressing their thanks for the event.
The town hall aimed to offer a contextual explanation of the issues that have led to a sharp rise in homelessness that over the past decade has become increasingly visible and problematic across Lake County.
Partnership HealthPlan of California estimates that Lake County has 1,200 people who qualify as being homeless, including 500 children, said Marilyn Wakefield of Adventist Health.
Rasmussen discussed plans to hire an officer to be dedicated to patrol in the city’s downtown, Lakeport City Manager Kevin Ingram touched on the city’s plan for a homeless navigation center, the county discussed the rollout of a crisis response team to begin in January and officials attempted to answer other questions community members had about the city’s challenges.
The town hall also provided a significant ray of hope in the introduction of a young woman who, thanks to the intervention of police, a crisis worker and local programs, is getting her life back after being without a home or much hope, a situation exacerbated by drug use.
In Lakeport, police and city officials have been working to figure out how to handle the growing number of unhoused individuals as well as those who have mental health problems and are on the streets.
Rasmussen previously estimated that his officers spend as much as 40% of their time dealing with issues surrounding homelessness and mental illness.
Mike Moss, a Lake County Behavioral Health prevention specialist, helped open the event by thanking the Soper Reese for offering the venue, noting it was the first town hall in the community in about five years.
He said he hoped it would be a productive meeting, explaining that homelessness is a “very hot topic.”
His work includes going into high schools and teaching mental health first aid. Moss said it’s important to educate young people on the signs and symptoms of mental health and substance abuse barriers, and suicidal ideation.
“We want to reduce stigma,” he said.
Moss introduced the evening’s speaker panel, which included Lake County Behavioral Health Director Elise Jones, Lake Family Resource Center Executive Director Lisa Morrow, Rasmussen, Ingram and Lakeport Police Lt. Dale Stoebe.
Brad Onorato, Congressman Mike Thompson’s longtime district aide, also was in attendance, and Thompson — who remained in Washington, D.C., due to work in Congress — sent a recorded message thanking everyone for taking part, and hoping to be at a future meeting.
Not on the panel but in the audience were several local leaders, including supervisors Michael Green and Bruno Sabatier, Lakeport Mayor Stacey Mattina and Mayor Pro Tem Michael Froio, Chief Deputy District Attorney Richard Hinchcliff, Judge Shanda Harry, Chief Probation Officer Wendy Mondfrans, Lakeport Fire Chief Patrick Reitz, Clearlake City Manager Alan Flora, Clearlake Police Chief Tim Hobbs and new Lake County’s new Public Health Officer Dr. Noemi Doohan.
Audience members were allowed to ask questions, but also invited to write down their questions — and, Moss suggested, solutions — on cards for further followup by city leaders.
Addressing common myths
A focus of the event was dispelling myths about homeless individuals in the community.
One of those myths, said Rasmussen, is that they are usually violent. Actually, they’re mostly nonviolent and often are the victims of crime, he said.
He referenced the case of Sean Daugherty, a homeless man who was sentenced to 45 years to life in August for sexually assaulting two women living on the streets in Lakeport.
There are other cases in which there is violence, such as a homeless man who made threats against a business owner and assaulted him. Rasmussen said he was in jail for a few days before he was released due to criminal justice changes.
Another myth is that those who are unhoused come from other areas. However, Rasmussen said the majority of those on the streets either have a tie with Lake County.
Later in the meeting, Marilyn Wakefield of Adventist Health said the point in time count shows that 85% of the homeless individuals counted had lived in Lake County for more than 15 years or had grown up here.
People become homeless “because of circumstances,” she said, urging people to always err on the side of compassion, noting she has a child who has been homeless.
There also is the pervasive — and incorrect — belief that people become homeless due to bad personal choices. That’s not true in most cases, said Rasmussen, explaining that some people are just one paycheck away from being able to house themselves.
Criminal justice changes
Rasmussen said he felt it was important for the community to understand criminal justice changes over the last 30 years, so he and Lt. Dale Stoebe gave an overview of those developments.
They included the three strikes law that went into effect in California in 1994, which resulted in many individuals going to prison for felony crimes.
Stoebe said trial judges previously had a lot of discretion in sentencing, but that has changed due to issues related to prison overcrowding.
He said California’s prison population had an 800% increase in inmates over the 10-year period following the passage of the three strikes law, rising from 5,000 to 40,000. He cautioned that he wasn’t saying it was directly the result of three strikes, but it was the most significant increase in the prison population in its entire history.
In 2005, the case Jones versus City of Los Angeles, one of the first major decisions related to homelessness and criminality, resulted from Los Angeles enacting codes to prevent people from lying or sitting in public spaces. The city was 50,000 beds short from housing enough homeless people, and so the Ninth Circuit Court — which also has jurisdiction over Lake County — ruled it is unconstitutional to prevent people from being in public spaces at any time if there isn’t housing for them.
Stoebe said the justices ruled that by not allowing them to be in public spaces, they were being prevented from being able to sleep. The court concluded that is a violation of the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which prevents cruel and unusual punishment.
In 2011, Rasmussen said California enacted correctional realignment as part of its budget act. That was in response to a federal court mandate that the state had to reduce its prison population.
Realignment resulted in individuals sentenced for all but 60 crimes serving their sentences in county jails, not state prison. The result today is that there are people serving sentences of up to 10 years in the Lake County Jail, Rasmussen said.
Jails have turned into prisons, Rasmussen said, and there is no more state parole; instead, prison inmates are released to local supervision.
In 2014, California’s voters passed Proposition 47, a ballot initiative with the deceptive title of “The Safe Schools and Neighborhood Act.” Rasmussen said it had nothing to do with either.
Prop 47 reduced severity for all drug possession crimes and eliminated felony provisions for crimes like shoplifting and petty theft. Previously, after a certain number of arrests and convictions, an individual could be charged for a felony. Today, a person can be arrested thousands of times for those crimes and they will remain misdemeanors, Rasmussen said.
That was followed in 2016 by the “Public Safety and Rehabilitation Act of 2016,” or Proposition 57, which took away the charging ability for felony enhancements on crimes. Both Prop 57 and 47 were retroactive, which resulted in some people being immediately released from prison.
“That’s why there have been massive amounts of people released back on the streets from prison,” said Rasmussen.
In 2022 there was a change to the felony murder law which Rasmussen said made it more difficult to go after accomplices in murder cases.
That same year, the Ninth Circuit Court ruled in Boise v. Martin, Rasmussen said. That decision was that the city of Boise can’t enforce camping ordinances without sufficient shelter space, a ruling which applies throughout the western United States and Hawaii, so impacts Lakeport.
“If we don’t have sufficient shelter space — and we don’t — then we can’t enforce somebody camping on the public sidewalk under the Ninth Circuit Court decision,” Rasmussen said.
In recent weeks, the Ninth Circuit ruled that San Francisco can enforce some laws if people refuse shelter space and are therefore voluntarily homeless. Rasmussen said the city of Lakeport is researching what that decision might mean for the city.
“The court is starting to look at these things a little bit differently,” Rasmussen said.
Stoebe said realignment reduced the prison population by 2% and Prop 47 reduced it by 5%, which falls far short of the 800% prison increase. He said most prisons are still overcrowded by as much as 50%.
Now, a new case, Johnson v. City of Grants Pass, is seeking to have the court reevaluate use of public spaces. In Grants Pass, located in Southern Oregon, officials have enacted ordinances against camping including one that allows them to exclude from public lands people who have violated city rules.
During that portion of the town hall, a man in the audience asked about the percentage of people on the streets who came from the prison population.
Chief Probation Officer Wendy Mondfrans said less than 100 people in Lake County who are on probation are homeless. “So it’s a very small number.”
Another attendee asked by the Boise decision hasn’t been challenged, as judges are not supposed to legislate from the bench, which drew applause.
Ingram said that issue has come up a lot, and now Gov. Gavin Newsom has asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on decisions conflicting with each other like Boise and Grants Pass.
“It is creating a lot of confusion,” Ingram said.
Changes in mental health treatment
Lake County Behavioral Health Director Elise Jones gave a brief overview of mental health treatment in the United States and how it has changed.
During her portion of the discussion, Jones recounted living in a tent while attending Mendocino College.
“America has a pretty dark history of how we have treated people with mental illness and substance abuse,” she said, which had included brutal treatment of people with developmental disabilities and people of color.
People with mental illness could be institutionalized against their will, and they had no rights. Jones said that began to change with the 1967 Lanterman-Petris -Short Act, which ended inappropriate, indefinite and involuntary commitments.
Jones mentioned President Ronald Reagan’s actions to close state mental hospitals in the 1980s.
That was a reference to the effort by Reagan — whose 1960s governorship in California had included rolling back mental institution funding — to repeal most of the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980, or MHSA.
MHSA had been signed by Reagan’s predecessor, President Jimmy Carter. The legislation provided grant funding for community mental health centers throughout the nation. Reagan’s action was a blow to that legislation and the funding it provided.
Today, Jones said we are still seeing the effects of state mental hospital closures.
There are new initiatives underway to address mental health, including CARE Court, which is being rolled out in California, as well as the county’s mobile crisis response and CalAIM, an effort to improve health outcomes for Medi-Cal enrollees.
Jones said not every homeless person has mental health issues, but mental health and substance abuse makes it hard to gain stability in housing. Additionally, it’s hard to get well without housing.
The Collier Avenue housing project in Nice, aimed primarily at helping people with mental health issues, is set to be complete in fall 2024. Jones said it is meant to be a permanent supportive housing project with staffing on site.
Additionally, the 35-bed warming shelter at the former juvenile hall is going to remain open going forward. Jones said that, with COVID-19 — which had been the reason for the site’s opening as an emergency shelter — the county wouldn’t have the shelter. “So there is a silver lining in everything.”
It was explained later in the meeting that Redwood Community Services and the county of Lake are working on a contract to transition the emergency shelter to a 24/7 transitional facility during a two-year contract which the Board of Supervisors is expected to consider in an upcoming meeting.
Jones also shared plans for the mobile crisis team, which she called “a whole new paradigm” for dealing with crises, which are caused by psychosocial circumstances. It will roll out in January.
The team will go into the community in real time, going to people’s homes to help them. They will have a therapist go with them in person or be available to communicate via a tablet.
She called it a “living room model,” in which a person in crisis can be surrounded by supportive people in a safe environment and therefore they may stabilize. In addition, people can use the nationwide Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling 988.
From the police side, Rasmussen said they are now up to full staffing after two years of running at 48% of staffing.
With staffing improving, Rasmussen said his plan is to assign one officer to work full-time and exclusively in the city’s parks and on Main Street. The proposal, which drew applause, will focus on building relationships with business owners and others who frequent the area to make a positive change.
Lake Family Resource Center Executive Director Lisa Morrow said she appreciates the partnership with the Lakeport Police Department. She said her organization’s fantasy is that they have crisis responders in every law enforcement agency.
“It does come down to money and funding,” she said.
Alicia Adams, LFRC’s community crisis responder who works with Lakeport Police, is “a program of one” supported by a team of more than 60. “We just want to build it and make it better,” Morrow said.
A story of hope
Rasmussen said his agency is planning to go further than a mobile crisis responder. They’re also going to have a licensed clinical social worker housed in the department. He then discussed situations where they’ve been successful in making a difference.
One of those instances involved a young woman who was homeless, addicted to methamphetamine and having a lot of interactions with police.
Rasmussen said his officers and Adams worked hard to help her, and their efforts resulted in her getting off the street and into a drug treatment facility. The week before the town hall, she made it through the 90-day program and graduated.
The young woman, who they identified as “Misty,” spoke to the group, describing her issues with psychosis and methamphetamine. She was in a program whose funding fell through as a result of Proposition 47 in 2016.
The mobile crisis team reached out to her in Lakeport and introduced her to the warming shelter. She went to a mental hospital in February and she was later released when she found housing.
But she was still using meth, sleeping where she could and eating where she could — including out of garbage cans. She ended up homeless and at one point was arrested.
“One day an officer brought Alicia Adams to where I was,” she said.
Misty was on parole at the time and could have gone to prison, but instead they got her into a treatment program at Tule House. “I was terrified.”
She credited Adams for going “above and beyond” in helping her, getting her into housing and offering her the support she needed.
Misty said she didn’t know how to say thank you, adding that she is getting her GED and driver’s license.
She received a standing ovation, and she and Rasmussen shared a hug. He thanked her for telling her story and the crowd for listening, adding that continuing to arrest her wasn’t going to solve the problem.
Plans ahead
Public Health Officer Dr. Noemi Doohan thanked the organizers for their work to put on the event. “This has been an incredible presentation.”
She asked about encampments, noting that Gov. Newsom seems to be indicating a push toward “encampment resolution,” with funds for that work.
Rasmussen said his department has been taking down encampments for the last several years and now has very few left. He said they have gone into the encampments and offered services in an effort to get the individuals out of those situations.
Ingram said he hoped the takeaway message for people would be, “This is a really complex situation. There is no one answer.”
He said they are taking a “community based approach,” but it’s hard to act quickly in a rural community with few resources.
“A navigation center is an opportunity to bridge that gap,” he said.
That is one of the city’s future plans, with a request for proposals out now to study that project. Ingram said the city needs the community’s support in making sure it’s a facility that addresses the problems the city is facing.
Stoebe said law enforcement has a strong lobby but increasingly legislators and judiciaries are not listening to what they have to say. As a result, changes in legislation are changing how police can address issues.
He encouraged people to contact legislators and judges and share their concerns, because they need to hear them.
“Our frustrations are your frustrations,” he said.
While the main presentation was over shortly before 8:15 p.m., Rasmussen and other panel members continued to answer questions for another 45 minutes. Some of the questions were less about specific homeless issues than crime-related problems in their neighborhoods. Rasmussen asked his staff to talk to those community members afterward to find out about ways to address their concerns.
Rasmussen said they envision holding more community meetings in the future.
Ingram also noted that the city received a lot of good information from the meeting that they will take back to city leadership.
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