Homeless Issues

The SDPD Mid-City Division, which includes Rolando Park, holds a monthly Homeless Coalition meeting chaired by Officer Josh Cummings on the last Tuesday of every month at 8 am. Any Mid-City Division resident interested in homeless issues is welcome to attend.

The coalition includes SDPD Mid-City officers, Neighborhood Policing Division, including the Homeless Outreach Team officers, City Park Rangers, Environmental Services Department representatives, and City Council Districts 9 and 4 representatives, County and nonprofit homeless service organizations, and residents of Mid-City communities including Rolando Park.

Anyone interested can participate in these meetings, held the last Tuesday of every month, 8am-9am at the Mid-City Division, 4310 Landis, 92105.

Information on Get It Done reports for homeless encampments

•  To report homeless encampments for intervention by SDPD, ESD (Environmental Services Department to remove encampment trash), or San Diego City Park Rangers (for City parks property), use a Get It Done report via the app or website.
• Only one GID report per encampment is necessary for these three agencies. More than one report per encampment does not give the location a higher priority. Generally, the reports are addressed in the order of receipt. Multiple reports about the same location get only one response from the three agencies, but result in more administrative time to process a response to each GIT report online.

It is helpful to give individual reports on separate encampments in the same neighborhood.

• Because Neighborhood Policing (the Division charged with responding to reports about homeless encampments) is short-staffed, they are grouping reports by geographic proximity so all available NP officers can respond to encampments within a specific area.

For example, there are usually encampments in Rolando Park on Rolando south of University, on Aragon across from the Kroc Center, and on the east side of Bonilla. Each of these separate locations need a separate report, but only one report per location. This allows NP to group their response to these locations.

• When you receive a “closed” response to a GID report, it will usually say NP made contact and closed the report. Closing a GID report does not mean that the encampment is gone. It means that the officers made contact and addressed the inhabitants with one of the four steps in the Progressive Enforcement process (from warning to citation to arrest). If the encampment remains, it is necessary to do another GID report to initiate NP making another contact with a higher level of enforcement. NP can only “enforce” a higher level of enforcement if there is an emergency shelter bed available and the homeless individual is refusing to accept that bed.

•  NP and ESD try to coordinate their response at the same time so ESD can immediately clean the location as soon as the police complete their intervention. Sometimes ESD cleanup crews cannot be available at the same location at the same time. They will then come in at a later day.
• It’s important to give as much detail as possible when completing a GID report: specific location, risk of fire, observation of cooking or campfires, proximity to schools, number of individuals, amount of trash and belongings, observation of activity/behavior, if known.