Homeward Banned

Some of The Bridge's nightly inhabitants do not show up of their own accord. Some of them get picked up by the cops and dropped off.

"We are used sometimes in lieu of the jail, which we want to be," Faenza told me. "We're used in lieu of the psychiatric hospitals, which we want to be, because we do not want people going to jail or to psychiatric hospitals when they don't have to.

"We don't want people to be coerced anywhere if at all possible, because being coerced, being handcuffed, is a great predictor of a lack of success with people. People already feel humiliated, knocked down, kicked around."

Not everybody agrees with Faenza's approach. On June 18, Path Partners of Los Angeles, which had been providing social workers at The Bridge, pulled out. Joel John Roberts, CEO of Path, sent a letter to Faenza complaining about chaotic conditions and terminating Path's agreement.

A flurry of bad publicity followed. On July 18, The Dallas Morning News published a story about trouble at The Bridge under the headline, "Homeless Shelter Bridge a 'victim of its own success.'" There were some bad stories on TV also.

Since then, according to members of the city's Crisis Intervention Team, the use of criminal trespass warnings to banish people from the center has increased. The Crisis Intervention Team is composed of city employees who talk suicides down from bridges and handle similar situations. They deal with the homeless often.

Their problem with the use of criminal trespass warnings at The Bridge is that the technique offers no appeal: Once a person has been warned, it is a criminal offense for that person to enter the premises for a set period of time, for as long as three months in some cases. If they do enter they are subject to arrest for a misdemeanor and may be carted off to jail.

The team members told me of incidents in which they brought people to The Bridge to keep appointments with social workers, receive needed medication or other services and were told the person could not enter.

"It puts us in a position where we cannot provide anything for this person," Ron Cowart, a team supervisor, told me.

John F. Crawford, president and CEO of the business group for whom the security guards work, told me his organization had come to an agreement with the police department at the end of June. He said since then about 21 people have been barred from entering The Bridge with criminal trespass warnings—the same number Faenza had given me.

"It takes a while," Crawford said. "Somebody has to really be bad to get banned from The Bridge. In all types of situations like this, you're going to have some bad apples in the barrel, and if certain things occur there has got to be a process to handle that."

Crawford and Faenza insist there are mental health clinics and other facilities around the city where a person banned from The Bridge could still receive help.

But Cowart and his team tell another story. It takes a lot of effort, they say, to get crazy people focused on The Bridge in the first place. If you ban them, often they are too crazy or too sick to do more than stagger 10 yards down the street to the gap in the freeway fence, wander out onto the embankment and slump to the ground on cardboard pallets.

That's where I found them by accident one day. I spoke with several who had been told they were banned—who believed they were banned—but may not have received tickets. I didn't find any lawyers out there, advising them of their rights. I think if you tell these guys they're banned, they believe you.

Listen, I started out by saying that everybody has good intentions here. At least they have what they believe are good intentions. But there's one intention in all this that will always be bad. I would even say evil.

The intention to make downtown sterile is evil. The filth and misery, fear and chaos that the banished people live with on the other side of the fence are part of our condition too. Pushing the banned ones through the gap in the fence so that the rest of us can't see them is not a cure for anything. It's murder.

That's why I say don't sell that van. City Hall tells us the homeless problem is all cleaned up now. They want to scrub away the dirt and the hurt. But it's all still there.

Hey, I know why you brought that food downtown in the first place. Because you believed there were people downtown who would die if you didn't feed them. Guess what. There still are. And there may be more soon.

Keep those tires aired up.