Oahu Homeless upate

7/11/21 - Mayor Rick Blangiardi’s signature approach to addressing homelessness across Oahu — by eliminating the use of Honolulu police officers and instead relying on social service and health care workers around the clock — has been modified to now include the use of police officers, reduced in scope to the urban core and scaled back in its hours of operation.

Anton Krucky, the city’s director of Office of Housing and Homelessness, for months has been saying the city’s new Crisis Outreach Response and Engagement program would free up Honolulu Police Department officers’ time by not having them respond to nonviolent, homeless-related calls.

Instead, a new team of social workers and health care workers, who are in the process of being hired, are now expected to respond to homeless-related calls, backed up by HPD officers.

Even before he took office in January, Blangiardi pledged to eliminate the previous administration’s “compassionate disruption” approach to homelessness that used a combination of homeless sweeps and social service outreach to clear city streets and sidewalks of homeless encampments and offer housing and other serv­ices to Oahu’s homeless.

The city is no longer removing homeless people via sweeps of camps but is continuing to remove their possessions, Krucky said.

The new Crisis Outreach Response and Engagement approach represented Blangiardi’s first homeless-­related idea of his own, albeit modeled after a similar program borrowed from Denver.

But Oahu’s version already has been restricted to cover an area just from Kalihi to Waikiki. And instead of running 24 hours a day, the new concept has been scaled back to only two shifts per day, staffed by 12 to 20 workers with certifications in mental health, homeless outreach and medical practices who have yet to be hired.

CORE is expected to cost $3 million, using federal, COVID-19 American Rescue Plan Act funds once they become available.

CORE is modeled after Denver’s Support Team Assistance Response program that deploys paramedics and mental health professionals to respond to nonviolent, homeless-related calls such as trespassing and indecent exposure.

In its first six months of operation in 2020, Denver’s STAR program responded to 748 calls and none required the assistance of the Denver Police Department, according to a STAR Program Evaluation.