Colorado Springs cracks down on homeless camping in hopes of pushing people toward shelter, services

COLORADO SPRINGS — Jeremy Krause has a simple code for making it on the streets of Colorado Springs: “Stay dry and avoid the cops.” 

To keep warm, he burns hand sanitizer and rubbing alcohol. To steer clear of the police, he and his dog move often. 

But avoiding them is not working as well anymore. 

“It wasn’t so bad in the beginning, but the last two years they’ve been really irrational,” said Krause, who has been homeless for about eight years. “They’ve stolen my things like six times. They take your tent, your blankets, your heat, everything you need to survive. That’s to force us into the shelter.”

That’s pretty much the strategy, local officials acknowledge. This is the “tough love” approach in Colorado Springs, where local law enforcement has intensified efforts in the past three years to push people into shelter beds that regularly sit empty. The proof is in the citations issued for illegal camping in public areas or for trespassing on private property, including land owned by the railroad or utility companies. 

In 2023, Colorado Springs police issued 899 tickets to people who were homeless — 600 for trespassing on private property, 117 for illegal camping in public spaces and 182 for camping within 100 feet of a waterway.

Up the highway in Denver, a city not quite twice the size, here’s how many illegal camping citations the Denver Police Department wrote last year: 14. And that was up substantially from 2022, when Denver police wrote just one illegal camping ticket. 

“We are going to enforce the laws, otherwise we will become a very trashy city,” said Colorado Springs Police Sgt. Olav Chaney, who supervises a team of six officers who are cracking down on illegal camping. “We hold people accountable is what it comes down to.” 

Denver has nearly 4 times as many people sleeping outside

What Colorado Springs doesn’t want to look like is Portland or Seattle. Or Denver. And while encampments pop up along creeks, alleys and parks, Colorado’s second-largest city does not have sidewalks lined with tents for weeks or months at a time, as has been the case around downtown Denver, especially since the coronavirus pandemic began in 2020. 

The latest “point-in-time” count of people who were homeless in El Paso County found 928 people in shelters and 374 outside, compared with 3,352 in shelters in Denver County and 1,423 outside. And while Denver has temporarily housed and fed nearly 40,000 migrants from South America over the past year, Colorado Springs counts just 24 families who stayed at a local Salvation Army shelter. 

For Chaney, those numbers are related.

“We enforce our laws here in this city,” the police sergeant said. “That’s a big difference, too.”

The sergeant said he recently ran into four people camping under a road in Colorado Springs who said they had come down from Denver. “Just so you know,” he recalled telling them, “you have one hour to vacate because you are right in the middle of a stream here.” 

“To a T they said, we are going back to Denver. We were OK with that. Just know that if you are going to come into this beautiful city of ours, we will enforce our laws.” 

Colorado Springs is not just handing out tickets, Chaney said, but working to close what he called the “revolving door” — the folks who are ticketed for illegal camping, then don’t show up for court, then have a warrant out for their arrest, then end up in jail for a few days, then get out and set up an illegal campsite. The goal is to push them into shelters, drug and alcohol rehab centers or wherever they need to go to get off the streets. 

“We take a stance because it’s the same people over and over again,” Chaney said. “They are the ones that let drug issues overtake them, which is sad in itself. We have the resources available to these folks who refuse to take the resources. Every time we contact these folks, the minute they say they are ready to go into rehab, or these services, we will drive them there. If somebody says, “I’m ready to go get help,’ I’m not even going to worry about tickets.”

There’s no reason people need to sleep outside — the city has plenty of shelter beds, he said. On average, about 200 shelter beds go unused every night in Colorado Springs, said Chaney, who receives a daily update from the Springs Rescue Mission. According to a 2023 count, 2,162 formerly homeless people were living in permanent housing. 

While Denver posts seven days’ notice before city crews clean up an encampment, Colorado Springs gives 24 hours. And if the tent is on private property or within 100 feet of a waterway, which includes Fountain Creek or any other creek or drainage ditch, the notice is just one hour. Colorado Springs enacted the waterway ordinance about five years ago. 

From outreach to enforcement

Homeless residents even get tickets for camping within 100 feet of dry creek beds, said Jansen Howard, manager of the outreach program for Homeward Pikes Peak, which provides housing, mental health care and substance use treatment. The fine is $1,500, which “obviously they can’t pay,” she said. “It’s just an endless cycle.” 

Howard and her team spend their days visiting encampments, trying to get people on lists for housing and enrolled in substance abuse and mental health programs. Outreach workers from the nonprofit go out with police officers each week, standing by to offer services when camps are swept. 

As Springs police have ramped up the number of illegal camping tickets, the city’s long-standing encampments are gone, she said. The tents that once lined the “wetlands,” along a creek on the back side of the Rescue Mission shelter, are gone. 

“They used to be a lot more outreach-minded,” she said. “Now they’re more enforcement-minded.” 

Even though the city has enough shelter beds, it doesn’t have enough of the right kind of beds, Howard said. Colorado Springs has one youth shelter, one family shelter at the Salvation Army, and one shelter for single adults at the Rescue Mission. The adult shelter accepts almost everyone, including people with severe mental health and substance abuse issues, which means it’s a rough environment that makes some homeless people prefer to sleep outside in a tent. Until a few years ago, the city had a “higher barrier” shelter with stricter rules, but it closed and the Springs Rescue Mission shelter was expanded.

There aren’t adequate options for people who have health issues, for one. “The saddest ones that we see out there are the ones in camps who are elderly people with severe health issues, in wheelchairs or incontinent or who need oxygen,” she said. “They can’t stay at the shelter. The Rescue Mission has not been a good place for everyone.” 

Howard called the city’s enforcement policies frustrating, saying she’s met people living outside with more than 10 warrants for illegal camping. The piling on only makes it harder for them to change their lives. With that many warrants, a person might spend a couple of months in jail, she said. 

“When they get out, if they are not connected with us or other resources in town, this process starts over,” she said. “This is why we try to work with people intensely and early on to get them moved from the streets into shelter or housing to either end this cycle or not let it snowball in the first place.”

Krause prefers to sleep outside with his dog, Spiderman, even if he has to move nearly every day.

“I wait till dark before I set up somewhere, and then I got to be packed up before daylight and be on the move,” he said. “It gets kinda tiresome sometimes, you know? It’s the only way I can stay out of jail and not lose my dog. He is everything that I’ve got.” 

Krause counts at least six times that he’s lost most of his belongings because of a camp cleanup. “They’ve taken my ID, Social Security card, my birth certificate,” he said. Once, authorities took the ashes of his previous dog, which died after being hit by a car. “They come every morning. If they find you, they give you a ticket and then they take your stuff. It’s a real hairy thing.

“I’ve had a couple of friends end up freezing to death out here after they’ve had all their stuff taken.” 

Denver banned camping on public or private property in 2012, but homeless advocates have pushed back on the policy. People cleared out in encampment sweeps filed a class-action lawsuit against Denver in 2016, and as a result, the city agreed to give seven days’ notice before cleaning up a camp, unless there were public health and safety reasons for acting faster. 

Denver’s unarmed Street Enforcement Team almost always gives out verbal warnings rather than citations. The city, meanwhile, has moved more than 1,200 people indoors, mainly to hotels and micro communities, within the past few months as part of Mayor Mike Johnston’s homeless initiative. Most were offered shelter space as their encampments were swept by city crews. 

Municipal court program is connecting hundreds with services

As enforcement has ratcheted up, sending more homeless residents to municipal court, Colorado Springs leaders have gotten creative about how to push them toward services. 

“Do we have a lot of repeat customers? We do,” said Judge HayDen William Kane II, who as court administrator presides over 10 municipal court judges. “Do we know some of them by name? We do.” 

That’s why for the past two years there has been a booth in the hallway outside municipal court, staffed by the Colorado Springs Fire Department. People who are homeless are not court-ordered to stop there, but many do as they leave their court hearings after they’re encouraged by not only the judge but attorneys on both sides. 

Last year, 294 people went to the table to ask for services including housing and substance abuse treatment, up from 112 the previous year. Of those, 172 took a survey — the “vulnerability index” tool that screens people for priority on housing lists — for the first time. That was more than triple the previous year. 

This is great news for Kane because he would like to stop seeing the same faces over and over in his courtroom. He’s been encouraged by the uptick in people seeking services, but knows the court is reaching only a fraction of the homeless population that has been cited for illegal camping. 

Only about 40% of people ticketed for “homeless crimes,” including trespassing, illegal camping or shoplifting, show up for court. The other 60% are at risk of being picked up on a warrant, which means they’re headed to jail, and after they attend an arraignment through a video court link and are released, go straight back to the streets.

That means they never see the service booth outside the municipal court. 

To attempt to get those folks into services, Kane pushed the city to fund a second booth outside the jail. It will open as soon as the Colorado Springs Fire Department fills the staff position needed to run it, the judge said. 

Both booths soon will start helping people get an ID if they don’t have one, similar to how they provide bus tickets to help them get to court. “They can’t do anything without an ID,” the judge said. “You can’t get a job, a hotel room, a six pack of beer.” 

A recent $10,000 grant from the mayor’s office will help fund the effort, which will require staff to help people hunt down their birth certificates, often in other states. 

Kane, who has been a judge since 2001, said the municipal court has been working to get homeless residents into services instead of jail for the past decade. At first, they tried “warrant amnesty” day, promising not to arrest people with outstanding warrants if they would come forward and enroll in services. It wasn’t very successful, Kane said. 

Then they tried video court at the Springs Rescue Mission, so people staying in the shelter could clear their warrants by making virtual court appearances. The service booths outside of municipal court have been the most successful of all the iterations, the judge said.

“I think we may really be onto something with what we are doing,” Kane said. “My goal is to not have those people showing up in criminal arraignments. If they are not having to camp or trespass and shoplift, then recidivism will decline.” 

The police department’s homeless outreach team cleared 304 felony arrest warrants last year and 2,259 misdemeanor warrants, Sgt. Chaney said. That’s up from 66 felony arrests and 1,015 misdemeanor arrests on warrants in 2020. 

The municipal court handles about 5,000 criminal cases each year. Most of them are illegal camping and shoplifting, but some are unrelated to homelessness, such as assaults and having dangerous animals. The rest of the court docket is made up of traffic violations, including about 23,000 traffic tickets and 40,000 parking tickets. 

“Who doesn’t love the fire department?”

The Colorado Springs Fire Department’s “transitional assistance program” to help people in the criminal justice system began about two years ago with a goal of linking them to mental health, substance abuse, health checkups and housing, said Amanda Smith, who oversees the program. 

The fire department doesn’t yet have data on how many people who ask for help at the services booth end up getting off the streets, but the outreach staff is seeing it happen, Smith said. “We’ve housed people we met through the court system,” she said. “They are not getting camping tickets and we’re not seeing them back in municipal court.” 

The program makes sense as an extension of the fire department’s other homeless outreach efforts, which include sending pairs of employees into encampments to help people with everything from applying for Medicaid to getting into an assisted living facility. The team, which includes a medical professional who can write prescriptions on the spot, gets referrals about whom to check on from firefighters, hospital workers and others. 

It helps that people who are homeless are more apt to want to talk to the fire department than the police. 

“Who doesn’t love the fire department?” Smith asked. “People trust us.” We see a lot of hard stuff in this job but we also get to walk along in people’s journey.” 

The homeless community recognizes the team’s red polo shirts with the fire department emblem, either along the trails and creeks or at the municipal courthouse. “We have our finger on the pulse of the community — we can speak the language,” Smith said. “We also harp that we are a voluntary program. We aren’t going to force anyone to work with us.”

Some people accept help right away, while others need a lot more time. Smith recalled talking to one person living outside for a year before they would engage. “Finally it was like, ‘I trust you,’” she said. “We were able to get them stable through psychiatric medication, Medicaid and food stamps. Finally, they are willing to give us a chance.”

Dateline:

Colorado Springs

Type of Story: News

Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.