Youngstown cleaning up downtown homeless encampments

June 21, 2016 at 12:05a.m.

YOUNGSTOWN

City police are helping to clean up homeless encampments on the railroad tracks downtown.

Chief Robin Lees said Monday that officers with the Community Police Unit along with members of the parks department are collecting trash and other items to be thrown away at the site of the encampments, some of which are under the Walnut Street and Marshall Street bridges.

Lees said if people try to come back and stay, they will be issued criminal-trespass citations, because that property is owned by railroads that do not want outsiders trespassing. Lees said if someone has a warrant for failing to appear in court for a previous citation, they could be arrested and taken to the jail.

The idea to clean up the tracks came after a fire at one of the encampments a couple of weeks ago, which engulfed the entire encampment. Lees said he toured the area a couple of days later and was disturbed by the mess that was left, including a large amount of empty beer and liquor cans and bottles, burn barrels and the burned-out remains of tents and other items.

He returned a couple of days later to show the area to Mayor John A. McNally, and they found another tent that was destroyed by fire and still smoldering, Lees said.

Lees also said officers have responded to several calls in the area and it is hard for police, fire and ambulance crews to get in and out of the area quickly.

“It’s clearly becoming unsafe on several fronts,” Lees said. “The problem we’re having is this is attracting folks who are either homeless or looking for someplace where they can take drugs or drink alcohol,” Lees said.

Lees said in several encounters his officers have had, they have run into people who are not homeless but who come downtown to socialize with the homeless people and drink and do drugs with them.

Lees said that by allowing the encampments to exist, the residents do not seek out other help that is there to find them places to stay. Some of those people need mental-health treatment but they are not getting it because they are not receiving the help that is available to them. Another issue is the fact that two places that render the most immediate assistance to homeless people – the soup kitchen at the St. Vincent de Paul Society on Front Street and the Rescue Mission on Martin Luther King Boulevard – are close to downtown or in the downtown, and often, people using those places will simply loiter downtown while waiting to use those facilities.

Lees said members of the CPU and the health department will be looking to find resources to help any homeless people they find that have been denied access to the encampments. After a homeless man died in 2014 after he was punched by another homeless man and died in a puddle in a Front Street parking lot, police cracked down and cleared them out of the area, but they have returned. Lees said they will be watching to see if the camps encroach on the downtown again, and if they do, they will take the same action as they did Monday.

“It’s a cycle that we’re going to have to address and in this situation what we’re looking to do is clean up the area and assist these folks any way we can,” Lees said.

Representatives of Help Hotline, who work with the homeless community downtown, did not return a message Monday seeking comment about options for those who were in the encampments.