It's a Tuesday morning and I'm traveling south on Dale Mabry Hwy after my last appointment when my cell-phone rings with a telephone number I don't recognize.
I answer to hear a voice with the leather-tanned street cadence that I have become so familiar with --
"Officer Donaldson?"
It's the voice of Johnnie Gleaton on the other end, one of my homeless clients who recently jumped on board with the Homeless Initiative.
"Hey Johnnie, How's it going," I responded.
"Officer Donaldson, I just called to thank you for all your help," was his first statement.
I met Johnnie early on at a Town N' Country Burger King where I approached him and asked if he wanted help to get off the streets. Johnnie is what I call, in street parlance, a ham and egger -- a wall flower, and certainly a late adopter. He didn't have too much ambition, it seemed at the time, to accept the help it would take to get off the street. And Johnnie proved my instincts to be correct when he became a no-show for our appointment we had scheduled the following morning.
In these cases, I don't get mad, I don't get even, I just put them on our back burner in the meantime and wear them down over time -- and this is what happened with Johnnie Gleaton. Over the months of watching other people accept help, become successful and get off the streets, eventually this paradigm shift catches up with them and my phone rings one day with a legitimate plead for help.
We also enlist a little known street strategy we call "Divide-Conquer-Separate" and it works something like this: Johnnie had a good friend and confidant named Steven that we helped get off the street many months ago which led to his relocation to Sparta, Illinois. After Steven leaving the area Johnnie was left without his support structure -- his comfort level with life as a homeless man had dropped a notch or two and being homeless and without your closest supporting confidant reveals the true grit of life out on the streets. This is what disruption is all about; and from there it's just a slow simmer and a waiting game until your phone rings one day -- because, I have all the time in the world and I'm not going anywhere.
And, this is how it worked with Johnnie and many others who first resist the tenets of the Homeless Initiative.
In Johnnies case, years of difficult manual labor, older age, and the ashen consequence of street life led him to qualifying for disability income which we helped him apply for. We drove him to the social security office, sit-in on preliminary interviews, help him get to doctors appointments, and so on. In Johnnies case, this was the last alternative to solving his problem if we wanted to maintain a roof over his head -- which he now has.
So today, on this early Tuesday morning, I unexpectedly received the phone call that allows me to enjoy the fruits of my labor from the artful strategy of simply wearing him down.
Deputy Steven Donaldson
Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office
District III
Office: (813) 247-0330
Email: sdonalds@hcso.tamp.fl.us
Facebook.com/HelpCopsHelpUs
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