"Little John" Homeless Jam

It wasn't long ago I discovered this homeless camp in a remote area off of Hillsborough Ave. "John" and "Scotty" are two of three homeless men that have lived in the camp for well over a year. Admittedly, it is one of the most well put together homeless camps that I have seen in the hills of the county. Not too long ago, "John" asked for help to get off the streets and I have recently started working with him to get his homeless recovery moving along. Shortly after my most recent visit to the camp the strumming duo broke into a jam session and the rest was caught on tape.

Andy Rios: The 3 Hour Fix

It was the best of cases, it was the worst of cases. It's also an unflattering social parallel where my latest homeless sidekick, Andy Rios, plays the real-life nonfictional protagonist with a virtuous and congenial nature.

In this lateral and contemporary Dickens satire, Rios fell into an abyss -- an 8 month homeless odyssey of life on the street, pushing a shopping cart.

Rios, by all accounts, has a regulated but challenging mental health obstacle. After his mother passed some time ago, he was left to fend for himself in a one bedroom subsidized apartment and he seemed to get by on his own with little help. That was until his one bedroom apartment became disqualified for the rent subsidy which landed him on the street with little notice. For Rios, this predicament is more than just a brain teaser of the crossword solving variety -- it's a debilitating arch villain.

Fortunately for Rios, when you're homeless and on the streets of Tampa a deputy will eventually find you and get you help if you need it -- and, in Rios' case he needed it. After hearing about him in the first email detailing where and how to find him, it was still a few months before I would be able to hunt him down. That's because of his kindred, under the radar demeanor -- he doesn't make waves and isn't the typical source of complaints.

After a co-op of patrol deputies finally unearthed him and alerted me to his location, a quick assessment led to the startling familiarity that he should never have been homeless. He was equipped with his ID card, a monthly disability check, and food stamps -- now he just needed help finding shelter from the anemic fallout of the streets.

As a matter of newly acquired protocol, we don't refer or direct the homeless on where or how to get help -- they get in our back seat and we drive them there. With the homeless initiative in full-swing we know in advance which resources are the most likely to offer the right type of assistance based on their individual circumstances.

When Rios was ultimately snared and evaluated, it wasn't much more than a 3-hour investment in time and resources before we found him a place to stay and shelter from the boulevards and byways of his aimless odyssey of life on the streets.

A special Thanks to Deputy Owen, Deputy Delre, and Deputy Thomas who helped make it happen.

See Andy Rios' story covered by Jeff Butera in the ABC Action News segment posted at the lower end of this blog.

Steve

Homeless Trends: An Applied Social Science Experiment

Consider the last few visits to the grocery store on food shopping day. Of the last five times you went food shopping did you most likely return to the same exact store? For most people the answer is typically: yes! Not a lot of profound theory mixed in with that question but criminologist would explain that all people -- law abiding, those with criminal minds and even the homeless follow daily and weekly traveling rituals called activity patterns.

If you should take three locations to include where you work, where you live, and where you recreate -- they form a geographical pattern, or triangle, called an activity space. Crime analyst use the concept of crime pattern theory to piece together offenders with their offending patterns to distinguish between how offenders search for crime and when they find it by accident.

Those both curious and confused often ask how I manage to track the entire homeless population for north west Hillsborugh county.

The answer is deceptively simple.

If the chronically homeless population don't work, don't have a home they travel to after work and don't generally recreate -- do they have an identifiable activity pattern?

The answer is: yes

But, instead of a triangular activity pattern, the bulk of the population, have a most definite linear geographical traveling ritual up and down the same heavily traveled thoroughfare of Hillsborough Ave.

Human behaviorism explains that when you travel on vacation and look for the ketchup aisle in the unfamiliar layout of your first visit to a different grocery store, you may grow frustrated trying to find the desired condiment shelf in a super mega-store. The homeless are no different as they return to the same watering holes where they know a Lutheran church will feed them at a specific time, location and manner, at the sounding of a 3 o'clock church bell.

An activity pattern would govern a rule of behavior that we have grown accustom to and are most comfortable with, knowing that the owner of the Latin Mini-Mart is more lenient with the homeless loitering behind their store than a neighboring 7-11 might be.

The homeless maintain a pattern they are familiar with as a tenet of street survival which most closely accords with quiet enjoyment as strange as that may sound. They are familiar with the rules of the land, both written and unwritten -- when dealing with the police and those that may be unsympathetic to the plight of the homeless.

A more identifiable component of a social science theory would explain the categorized homeless are merely a subculture, of a much larger, more mainstream demographic group. Because within this subset you have your clicks, your charlatans -- even your outliers and outcasts.

And much like their more mainstream brethren they are undeniably social animals that support each other as part of a shared communal reliance that supports an existing homeless continuum. This communal effect, not unique within the homeless population, is the same supportive structure that comforts the needs and desires of every social animal that is part of an identified community -- subcultural or otherwise.

The hot spot map illustration (upper left-hand corner) is an actual density map which tracked 6 months of my engagement with the homeless on the street. The red or darker the color indicates a higher density of homeless when compared to yellow or lower density of homeless. You can see that their activity pattern is, in fact, linear and follows the main corridor of Hillsborough Ave from Benjamin Rd to the east and Sheldon Rd to the west.

This is where I spend eighty percent of my engagement time and illustrates how I manage an entire homeless population with very little effort.

Steve

District III Homeless Initiative on ABC Action News