Anchorage Tries To Deal With Alcohol, Drugs, Homelessness

NY Times

ANCHORAGE — A man was down, immobile at the edge of one of this city’s busiest intersections. No sirens sounded, no ambulance rushed to the scene. Dealing with the scourge that has consumed Alaska’s biggest city is often delegated to two men in a white van, the Community Service Patrol.

“We have about 50 to 100 regulars that we pick up on a daily basis,” said Josh Wilson, one of the patrol workers.

The man down was homeless and had passed out, drunk, like he often does. Mr. Wilson knew him by name. The Community Service Patrol would soon take him to the city sleep-off center, where by the next morning, if he was sober enough, he would be free to go.

Mr. Wilson said odds were good that he would once again drink and pass out, putting himself and possibly others at risk and demanding intervention from this city’s frayed social safety net.

“Worse,” Mr. Wilson said when asked how things had changed in his two years with the patrol. “Absolutely tenfold worse.”

The police and social service providers say Anchorage has as many as 400 people they call “chronic public inebriates,” with up to 25 percent of them regarded as the most difficult cases. This year, after the deaths of at least 13 homeless people since the spring, there has been a widespread sense that the city’s response has been inadequate and must change.

you simply have a complex issue for which the only solution is let’s lock up the people who are disturbing us. That’s not an effective solution, and in the end it won’t work.”

The new mayor, Dan Sullivan, a Republican, has created a staff position and a task force devoted to addressing homelessness. The police recently gained the authority to dismantle homeless encampments with just 12 hours’ notice. Citizen groups are patrolling parks where homeless camps have been the site of rapes and other violence. But in perhaps the biggest and most controversial break from how the city has handled the problem in the past, a Salvation Army drug detoxification and alcohol abuse treatment center has begun accepting chronic inebriates who have been taken there essentially by force.

With $1.2 million in new state financing pushed through by one of Alaska’s more liberal Democrats, State Senator Johnny Ellis of Anchorage, the facility, the Clitheroe Center, is accepting people committed under a state law, Title 47. Under the law, a judge can order people into secure treatment for 30 days, and potentially for months, if the police, a doctor or family members convince the judge that the person’s abuse of alcohol has made them a threat to themselves and others. The person does not need to have committed a crime.

“Ten years ago, there would have been a community outcry that Johnny Ellis is locking up people with the disease of addiction,” Mr. Ellis said. “ ‘How can he do that and say he’s still a progressive?’ ”



Now, Mr. Ellis said, the problem has increased so much “that for various motivations people are saying let’s try something new.” He added, “The people dropping dead during the summertime really got this community paying attention.”

One homeless person drowned. Another was hit by a car. One died from hypothermia. Most had been drinking, and several had four or even five times the blood-alcohol level above which a person is considered too drunk to drive. Experts say the problem of public drunkenness is part of a larger homeless problem that disproportionately affects Native Alaskans, particularly men who have moved in from rural parts of Alaska and lost their way in the city. The recession has also played a role.

Involuntary commitment of homeless alcoholics has been used elsewhere in the country. Some homeless advocates say it infringes on civil rights, and they question its effectiveness. Here in Anchorage, several longtime advocates said the severity of the situation had made them open to giving it a chance.

“If the access to services and treatment and supportive resources are there, perhaps this Title 47 will be a good thing for people,” said Michael Burke, an Episcopal priest who has worked with homeless alcoholics for two decades. “But if those latter pieces are not present, then you simply have a complex issue for which the only solution is let’s lock up the people who are disturbing us. That’s not an effective solution, and in the end it won’t work.”

Mr. Burke was among several people who said that cuts to longer-term treatment programs in the past had made detoxification efforts ineffective and could render the Clitheroe program irrelevant if they happen again. Mr. Ellis blamed “the Republican budget-cutting era” that took hold in the state capital, Juneau, in the 1990s. “We lost a lot of our treatment capacity,” he said.

He said the new program was deliberately small, paying for just 10 beds at the center.

Several homeless advocates say that new Republican interest in the issue, as well as the comfort level liberals have with Mr. Ellis, is helping to build a coalition of business owners who want to keep streets clean and safe and homeless advocates who are willing to experiment with more assertive tactics. Jeff Jessee, the chief executive of the Alaska Mental Health Trust Authority, which provides a wide variety of social services and financing for them, said that while Mayor Sullivan often says, “We can’t continue to allow these people to take over our public spaces,” he also says, “These chronic inebriates are also citizens, and we owe them better.”

Robert Heffle, the director of the Clitheroe Center, said that political motives were irrelevant to him, and that he was simply glad to get the resources to try something new.

“If we keep doing what we been doing,” Mr. Heffle said, “we’re going to keep getting what we’ve been getting.”