Spokane’s Proposition 1 is now being enforced
Spokane Police have begun enforcing the city’s ban on camping near schools, parks and day care centers.
About 75% of Spokane voters approved what’s called Proposition 1 last November. It effectively outlawed homeless people from setting up camp in most of the city, with a few exceptions on the outskirts.
Though overwhelmingly popular with voters, the law was ensnared in legal challenges and sparked a bitter political debate over the city’s management of homelessness.
Police didn’t begin citing or arresting people violating the law until this summer when the legal issues were largely settled by a U.S. Supreme Court decision. The hesitance to enforce the ban had drawn the ire of some in the business community.
“The Progressive Council and Mayor are determined to undermine the voters in Spokane,” wrote influential developer Sheldon Jackson in July to an informal email newsletter received by dozens of other politically active business owners. “You will never see Prop 1 enforced with the Progressive Trifecta.”
Mayor Lisa Brown’s administration maintained for months that enforcing the law was complicated by the 2018 Martin v. Boise federal court decision, which ruled that cities could not criminalize a homeless person sleeping on public property unless shelter space was available. The exact limits of that restriction were a source of regular legal debate – Spokane has for years outlawed camping under or near a viaduct, for example, considered legally defensible because it covered a small area – but many believed that Proposition 1’s wide-ranging boundaries that included no camping within 1,000 feet of schools, parks and day cares, could drag the city into the courts.
The city’s legal department advised holding off on enforcing the new law pending a U.S. Supreme Court case this summer which effectively reviewed the Martin decision. On June 28, that decision came down, ruling that protections afforded in the Martin case were not constitutionally sound. That opened the door for cities like Spokane to enforce wide-ranging laws to ticket and arrest people sleeping outside.
In the last six weeks, the Spokane Police Department has been training its officers to properly enforce the new law and updating its system so that citations can be added to the department’s record system, said department spokeswoman Julie Humphreys.
The first arrests began last week, said, though she was not able to provide how many citations have been issued or when exactly enforcement began.
Spokane’s mayoral administration has regularly maintained that a lack of enforcement until now was out of legal caution and due diligence.
But many conservative business and property owners, as well as the city council’s two conservatives, Jonathan Bingle and Michael Cathcart, have alleged that the law wasn’t being enforced because Brown and the council’s progressive majority didn’t want it to be. They note that, on the campaign trail last year, Brown and newly elected progressive councilmembers opposed Proposition 1, arguing it would be ineffective and, until the Supreme Court’s recent decision, legally unenforceable.
Cathcart calls this latter reasoning an excuse, arguing that the city should have begun enforcing until a suit was filed and a judge ordered Spokane to stop.
“Then at least we would have had a judge’s ruling to point to,” he said this week. “Until a judge says that, we have no business interfering.”
This perception of liberal elected politicians intervening to delay enforcement was aggravated in July, after a nonbinding resolution brought by Bingle to urge the administration to begin enforcement was shot down by the council majority. Bingle and Cathcart had argued that the resolution would have helped assuage concerns that the city was not taking this issue seriously, while Councilwoman Kitty Klitzke accused the pair of bringing a pointless resolution in an attempt to message that other city leaders were ignoring the will of the voters just weeks before enforcement began.
Suspicion about the motives of Spokane’s liberal lawmakers, particularly pervasive in some business circles, spilled over Monday night as the city council considered a homeless anti-discrimination law introduced by Councilwoman Lili Navarrete. That ordinance would have prevented employers or landlords from rejecting a homeless applicant because they are homeless, though Navarrete has insisted it would not prevent people from being rejected for other qualities associated with homelessness, such as drug addiction or other criminal behavior.
Ahead of Monday’s vote, Jackson wrote in his email newsletter that the “Homeless Bill of Rights or whatever you want to call this warped, idiotic, entitlement for the 1%, drug addicted, criminals” was a clear attempt to stop the city from enforcing laws preventing the homeless from camping in certain areas, including the recently voter-approved Proposition 1, which applies to most of the city.
Navarrete responded directly to Jackson’s email server, emphasizing that the ordinance had “absolutely no effect” on the city’s ability to enforce criminal behavior, including under the provisions of Prop 1.
“If it did, it wouldn’t have gotten past our city’s legal department,” Navarrete wrote.
Many remained unconvinced, and Navarrete’s ordinance was tabled for two weeks in an apparent effort to better inform the public and find consensus.
And while Jackson said in a brief interview Wednesday that he was happy to hear that Proposition 1 is now being enforced, he said he hasn’t seen much of a difference yet.
“It’s kinda hard to say after one week,” he said. “Honestly, I think it’s going to take conditioning from the police and consistency (in enforcement). What people want to see is results driven – they want to see it on the streets.”
The Spokane Police Department officials made it clear, even before Proposition 1 was approved in November, that police do not have the resources to respond to every person illegally sleeping on public property within the new law’s greatly expanded boundaries.
However, police say they can attempt to change behaviors even without the manpower to contact everyone.
Even before the recent rollout of Proposition 1 enforcement, Spokane police have been issuing citations for unlawful camping, trespass, sit-and-lie and pedestrian interference, Humphreys said.
Despite accusations that the city has been sitting on its hands, enforcement of these laws has sharply increased since last year. From April to July of this year, law enforcement has handed out 321 citations for blocking sidewalks where people walk, she said, a more than eightfold increase from 2023.
Police are also responding to a much higher percentage of calls about illegal camping, with a 75% response rate up from 45% last year, according to city spokeswoman Erin Hut.
“We have been enforcing those laws with what tools we have,” said Humphreys. “And we have been enforcing it at a much higher rate than last year.”
One driver of that increase has been a greater presence downtown, especially in the months leading up to the Expo ’74 50th anniversary celebration.
Spokane police Lt. Dan Waters said that the department has become so call-driven that most of the time when they are contacting someone for camping it’s because of a call for service. The department, in partnership with city code enforcement, does have a homeless outreach team – but that team is solely driven by complaints, he said.
The downtown police precinct also averages 130 calls for service a day, and on some days police can only make it to half, he said. It depends on what calls are warranted, the ability of the team during the time of the call and other pending “priority” calls.
“Some of those calls can take 20 officers. It depends on what is going on,” Waters said. “We will do the best we can.”
Asked about local business owners who believe police aren’t responding to crimes involving the homeless, Waters said he “disagrees 100%.” Every call depends on what is happening in the area at the time and how safe it is for one or two officers to respond.
“Sometimes we just won’t respond to a call without multiple officers,” Waters said. “We don’t want to get into a use-of-force incident with less officers when we could have had five.”
With the volume of calls that the department has to respond to on a daily basis, and a need to send multiple officers to many of those calls, there is insufficient staffing to handle every call every time.
Another problem lies in people calling the non-emergency Crime Check line for camping or loitering rather than calling 311 or code enforcement, as those situations don’t always need several officers to respond, Waters said. When someone calls 311, the complaint goes to the queue of the homeless outreach team which can sometimes respond to instead.
When contacting people who are homeless, the outreach team generally tries to start a conversation about what the person needs and what resources the department can help with, Waters said. If police have to respond to the same spot as part of a warranted call, arrests could begin. In these circumstances, police can arrest someone, but won’t take them to jail, he said.
They might just move to a different spot to avoid police.
“But just because we have these laws on the books doesn’t mean we are going to change behavior,” he added.
Amber, 32, is among the homeless population that has seen police increasingly enforcing camping bans and loitering laws.
As she sat in the parking lot outside Lewis and Clark High School on Tuesday, coloring in her coloring book and drinking Mr. Pibb, she rubbed her legs. It’s increasingly uncommon, she says, that she has an opportunity to rest in a spot without worrying about getting a ticket.
“We literally don’t get to sit down like this,” Amber said. “We are moving constantly. … So many people have cracked feet and heels.”
She pointed to her feet.
“It’s hard for us.”
Amber has seen more police officers approach homeless people in the last year than she has in the five years she’s been homeless, with an even bigger uptick in the last week, she said. There are also police officers contacting homeless in the viaduct in Browne’s Addition and behind the 7-Eleven gas station on Second Avenue Division Street, where she used to stay.
As police started focusing on ticketing homeless people between Pacific Avenue and State Street earlier this month, that group became the most recent to relocate elsewhere.
Amber moved from both those areas because she was seeing more police than usual, she said, and she just wanted a place to rest without being bothered.
In one instance, a group of officers began yelling at people camping outside that they were “all being detained,” Amber said. She had to leave some of her stuff behind because she didn’t have enough time to pack it up and leave for another area.
Amber was also confused, she said, because she wasn’t given any warning about the new law when police approached her group.
And neither was Ricky, 34, who moved to Spokane last month. He lived in a homeless camp in Colville, he said, and police would come around maybe two to 12 times a day. Here in Spokane, police come around much more often.
“Anywhere from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., lights are on and we get tickets for sitting down,” Ricky said. “I watched a dude get a ticket because he was sitting down for 20 minutes.”
Ricky said a police officer told him fairly recently in the same area that if he continues to loiter and sleep there, he will get a ticket. If that didn’t deter him, he would be arrested, he said.
The homeless are nervous to be around the area of 7-Eleven now because police are roaming near there so frequently, he added. Ricky moved away from the gas station and towards Lewis and Clark High School because it’s more peaceful – there are too many people stealing things near Division Street and far too many people doing drugs, he said.
Ricky pointed to his friend, who was sleeping on a dirt-covered blanket with his head propped against a concrete barrier.
“He moved because he doesn’t like it over there, too,” he said.
As for Amber, no matter where she sleeps or stays, people don’t treat her right, and neither do police, she said.
“They don’t talk to us like humans,” she said. “They bully us.”
Because police have just begun enforcing Proposition 1, said Wednesday she was not able to provide the number of tickets issued thus far. The enforcement started with a training bulletin that was dispersed to officers, then discussed by superiors, she said.
“Right now, we are in the early stages of enforcement, which includes education and offering services,” she said. “We are making citations when warranted.”
“Prop 1 isn’t going to change everything – it just gives us another tool to address the homeless crisis we have in Spokane. … When its applicable, someone will use it.”