SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
President Trump's federal takeover of Washington D.C.'s police and his deployment of National Guard soldiers and federal law enforcement into the city is allegedly meant to target violent criminals, but it is also focused on other more vulnerable groups, including people experiencing homelessness. Here's White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
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KAROLINE LEAVITT: Homeless individuals will be given the option to leave their encampment, to be taken to a homeless shelter, to be offered addiction or mental health services. And if they refuse, they will be susceptible to fines or to jail time.
DETROW: Of course, there are few good options for people living on the street. To get a better sense of the challenges facing this population in D.C., we reached out to Dr. Catherine Crosland. She specializes in street medicine and also serves on the board of directors for the National Health Care for the Homeless Council. When she came into NPR headquarters today, she had just spent the morning doing outreach, and so I asked her if her patients had been talking about this federal crackdown.
CATHERINE CROSLAND: So it's interesting. There are a number of people who are quite concerned. There are people who have endured multiple encampment sweeps - is what they are called - where their belongings are forcibly removed, oftentimes taking their lifesaving medications and vital documents, forcing them to have to restart and prove who they are all over again.
DETROW: Yeah.
CROSLAND: And it's interesting, just this morning I was talking to somebody who said, oh, thank goodness, the police are coming. Now I'll be safe and people won't rob me. Because people experiencing homelessness, especially those who are unsheltered - they are not criminals. They are survivors. My patients are more likely to be the victim of a violent crime than to be a perpetrator. To conflate homelessness and crime is a tragedy, in my opinion.
DETROW: In the last few years, have you seen the number of people who are experiencing homelessness go up, and have you seen the resources available to them? Which direction has that moved in the city?
CROSLAND: So the numbers fluctuate, but I will say in Washington, D.C., we have seen more and more people getting housed in the past eight years than in the previous 30 because resources were put into street outreach - both the medical as well as the housing case managers going out onto the street and engaging folks. So even though the numbers, especially on the singles - adult singles side, might look like they are staying steady, or sometimes even going up or maybe slightly down, we really have moved a lot of people into housing and especially during the pandemic. We moved over 2,000 people into housing in just a couple of years.
DETROW: You mentioned before encampments, and we have seen in other cities, we have seen in D.C. in the past, that when you see a focus on this, that's often one of the things that comes - that encampments are cleared out. In the neighborhood that NPR is based, you know, you see the cycles. Things are cleared out, they start to build up again, they're cleared out again. Can you just tell us, from your experience, like, what does that do to a person who's already in the situation?
CROSLAND: Encampment sweeps can happen in different ways. Speaking of your neighborhood, the encampment sweep that happened there was very well planned out. Many people were housed, but other people were placed in safe, decent, noncongregate shelters that were really based in hotels. And it - they were appealing. People who choose to stay outside feel safer outside or sometimes in community, which becomes an encampment, than they do when they're in a shelter, which is often a huge, open room with as many as 150 people in one room. But they also have to move, where their service providers don't know where they are. So somebody might be two blocks away, and I, as a medical doctor, can't find them. And so it really is very dangerous to have sudden sweeps like this.
DETROW: Lastly, as somebody who works in this field, as somebody who's deeply invested in this area, what do you think the thing that people misunderstand the most is about homelessness - about the individual causes of it, about the ways to fix the problem?
CROSLAND: People often misunderstand or forget that these are human beings. These are human beings who have suffered trauma. They are human beings who have significant medical issues. More and more, I am seeing an older population - people who are coming into homelessness for the first time as older adults. I have a patient who worked his entire life and had to stop working because of a medical injury - his back. And he could no longer afford the rent. I can tell you so many stories about the way in which housing is health care, and housing has saved my patients' lives.
DETROW: That is Dr. Catherine Crosland, who serves on the board of directors for the National Health Care for the Homeless Council. Thanks so much for coming on.
CROSLAND: Thanks for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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