Petaluma police assign dedicated officer for homeless outreach

The Petaluma Police Department plans to assign an existing officer to focus full-time on the city’s homeless population, a new role meant to help turn the tide in a decades-long effort to connect more homeless people with services and stave off related crimes.

Ryan DeBaeke, an 11-year officer with eight years in the Petaluma Police Department, will transition to the role of homeless liaison officer in July. It is the first assignment of its kind in the department’s history, and one that has shown results in other police departments and municipalities in California, police said.

The approach is meant to give remaining officers more freedom to focus on other crimes and incidents in the city, while streamlining the 62-officer department’s relationship with both service providers and homeless residents themselves.

“It’s a full time job on its own without being on patrol,” said DeBaeke, who lobbied for the creation of the new role last year. “This is the number-one single biggest problem Petaluma faces right now. It encompasses everything.”

A Petaluma native, DeBaeke returned to the city to join the Petaluma Police Department in 2007. He had spent three prior years as an officer in the Monterey County town of Seaside.

Like other officers, DeBaeke said he would regularly interact with homeless residents during patrol. Yet it was at a stoplight in 2014, while observing an unfamiliar person panhandling at every corner, that something clicked.

“I made a point to contact and talk to every person I saw at every on-ramp, at every shopping center, and start to get to know them,” he said.

DeBaeke said he soon submitted a letter to the department suggesting a role regarding homelessness, which dovetailed with an existing interest in exploring an approach that would lessen the demand on patrols. He was among three officers sent to observe how other departments deployed specific resources to the issue.

A survey of Petaluma’s homeless population two years ago found 909 individuals - nearly twice the number from the prior survey in 2011.

A full-time assignment will help police gain a greater understanding of the local population, said Lt. Ken Savano.

“You have to get to know that population, and just like anybody else in the community, there are relationships to be built,” Savano said.

Mike Johnson, CEO of Petaluma’s Committee on the Shelterless, or COTS, commended Petaluma police for balancing enforcement with referrals to service providers.

“I think this is a brilliant move. It gives the ability to work with a single individual at the police department who really understands homelessness,” he said.

The role will also better position Petaluma to potentially join the multi-disciplinary Homeless Outreach Services Team program, or HOST, that the county launched last year, he said.

There are many serious law enforcement issues that often pervade homeless populations, including drug use, theft and violent crime, police said. Yet smaller issues like improper disposal of human waste can still snowball into major cleanups, while others, like untreated injuries and medical conditions, can escalate with sometimes deadly consequences.

Petaluma police found no indication of foul play in the investigation of eight deaths of homeless people in 2014 alone. The causes varied, but pointed to the often morbid repercussions of living on the street.

Yet there is cause for hope that the new role might help nudge more people toward essential services. DeBaeke recalled how a homeless veteran from the war in Afghanistan, who had long resisted recommendations to treat a broken arm, recently accepted his referral to seek help from a social worker at the Mary Isaak Center, which COTS operates.

“I told him, ‘You’re going to die out here,’” DeBaeke said. “I told him, ‘Let’s do something.’”

Citing examples from some of the police departments visited last year, DeBaeke said he’d like to see more staff to support efforts around homelessness. The city could also consider creating a local legal process that could make it easier for homeless residents to appear for hearings that are otherwise scheduled in Santa Rosa.

“We’re trying to take what we saw and create a system that works here,” he said.