MANSFIELD — The ongoing Mansfield/Richland County Homeless Response Team doesn’t have to bat 1.000 to be a success, according to county Commissioner Tony Vero.
“It’s like Joe (Trolian) has said … a good baseball analogy, if you batted .300 in success stories, it’s a successful, Hall-of-Fame career,” Vero said Monday during a team meeting in the commissioners’ office.
“You didn’t need to get 100 percent of the people who didn’t have a home or were unhoused or transient,” Vero said.
“If you could find your success stories while also determining who might be causing problems, which (Mansfield police) did a great job on, I think the program has been a great success.”
The ideas for the program began when Vero said in September 2021 that a visible rise in homeless residents in downtown Mansfield prompted him to see how the county can help.
Vero said commissioners were contacted by multiple business owners and residents “inquiring what we can do.”
Leaders of the effort attended Monday’s session, including Triolian, the Richland County Mental Health and Recovery Services executive director.
It was Trolian who helped design the program that launched in May 2022 — which matched social workers with Mansfield police officers to hit the streets and meet unhoused residents in downtown’s Central Park and other locations.
Trolian’s office helped fund social workers through Catalyst Life Services. The social workers were joined by off-duty Mansfield police officers who signed up to work out details funded by a grant through the Richland County Foundation.
The program’s goals are two-fold: Spend time trying to find out what it is these unhoused residents need. Then work to connect those needs to resources readily available in the community.
Catalyst Life Services Executive Director Erin Schaefer said the program has provided a “unique opportunity” to engage unhoused residents on the streets, some of whom would never have come to seek assistance.
“I think it’s been helpful to be able to go to them and to keep going to them and keep engaging them and then eventually helping to get them connected to services,” Schaefer said.
“I think that’s very helpful, even for those who don’t end up coming to us. At least they know who we are.”
Katelynn Huff is one of the Catalyst social workers who has worked in the program.
“I used to go out on it when it first started, for a long time. I personally have seen three success stories come out of it that we helped link from the (unhoused) community to our services and have gotten stable housing out of it or in long-term residential housing after it. So it’s been pretty successful on that front, too,” Huff said.
Trolian provided statistics derived from the first seven months of the effort. It showed the HRT went out 53 times from May 2 through Nov. 30 with 307 “encounters,” averaging almost six per attempt.
Seven of 10 people encountered were men. Trolian said 82 percent were White and 14.5 percent were Black. More than half (57 percent) were between the ages of 25 and 44.
Workers conducted 21 assessments, 16 crisis interventions and 13 psychotherapy sessions. Trolian said teams made 120 referrals, a third of which went to Catalyst.
Other referrals went to places like Catholic Charities (16), Harmony House (15), Salvation Army (12), Job & Family Services (12) and Social Security (seven).
“You had a third of the people who didn’t want to be homeless and needed some help not to be homeless. We got them help,” Trolian said.
“You had about a third that maybe needed a couple of things, but really, they are long-term unhoused people. They live a transient lifestyle. They are going to continue to do what they do.
“And you had about a third that frankly, they were not homeless. They were preying on the homeless population. They were taking advantage of them. They were hanging out with them. They were ‘homeless adjacent.’
“Those were the ones who need to be told it’s not OK and you need to move on. Those were the ones that may have turned out to be the ones arrested or they got the hint, ‘It isn’t OK to hang out there down at the Gazebo (in Central Park,” Trolian said.
“It’s allowing us to actually get in and interact with people who are unhoused to really kind of get an idea. Everybody likes to say, ‘Oh, everybody’s mentally ill because you have to be mentally ill to be homeless.’
“That’s not really the case. We learned that a long time ago, but this kind of verifies it,” Trolian said.
Mansfield police Chief Keith Porch said Monday it’s important to remember the situation in place when the program began.
“We had had an increased population of homeless downtown. We were having employees of the businesses being harassed. That’s the seed where it then becomes criminal behavior. Then it becomes assault … then it becomes robbery. And those are the things we were not interested in traveling down,” the chief said.
“So it was important for me to have a police presence. Because if you have that in the downtown area, that’s going to curb a lot of things.
“So when we came up with the philosophy of officers are interacting with the homeless folks (with) service providers, who are there to gauge and build relationships, not only with those folks, but with officers and to preempt (crime), to get them help that they need,” Porch said.
“My take on it, from where we were at, from what roads we were going down, it has definitely curbed that,” the chief said.
“We could have just went down and done the enforcement component. I can assure you that’s never popular anytime we do that. We wanted that to be the last resort. In managing that philosophy, I think we did great,” Porch said.
Last year, Mansfield Mayor Tim Theaker’s administration put up signs at Central Park saying “camping or maintaining lodging” in the park is prohibited.
“When those first went up, I remember hearing rumors from officers that people didn’t like seeing the signs and police were going to harass the folks in the parks. It generated some talk, but it served the purpose, as well,” Porch said.
The back half of the carrot-and-stick approach can be crucial, according to the chief.
“Connecting (those in need) to services, those are great stories. But we did have a rush. We did have minor criminal behavior going on that even after taking those proactive steps of trying to get them another avenue.
“At the end of the day, we had to hold those folks accountable by making arrests,” Porch said.
Jennifer Kime, CEO of Downtown Mansfield, Inc., said businesses in the area are pleased with the response.
“As the chief said, when we first started the program, there was a lot happening in downtown and we were just coming out of the pandemic and there was just a lot going on,” Kime said.
“We know that by the numbers, downtown’s a safe place, but there’s the perception that people get concerned and when you see even one or two people, it kind of raises those concerns,” she said.
“So I think having this partnership and having people on the street interacting with businesses and visitors, it provides more safety, but it also provides more comfort. So I think business owners have been pleased about that.
“And we haven’t seen the complaints from visitors and things like that. So I think from that standpoint, it’s been a success for sure,” Kime said.
“We had businesses leave (due to the problem),” she said, a thought quickly echoed by 5th Ward City Councilman Aurelio Diaz, a downtown resident.
“Before this was put in place, there were a lot of safety issues that a lot of people didn’t know,” he said.
Jodie Perry, chief operating officer at Richland Area Chamber & Economic Development, said the effort is making a difference.
“I think even to the average person, the experience downtown December (in 2022) was totally different than the summer before, for sure.
“Whether you spent much time down here or not, I mean, just from a quick drive through, to people that do spend a lot of time down here, those of us that work … it was definitely a success from that perspective,” Perry said.
Members of the group, which meets regularly, admitted it could be a matter of local unhoused residents fleeing the winter cold in Central Park to find warmer locations.
Diaz said he has heard of residents moving into vacant properties throughout the city.
Adrian Ackerman, who heads the city’s newly combined housing/community development/codes & permits department, attended Monday’s session.
“I also had a situation come up in codes where they found a family of seven, in a vacant property on Helen (Avenue) that they’ve now had to condemn because they were living there for quite some time apparently.
“The landlord owner didn’t even know they were there and there’s no utilities in it,” Ackerman said.
She talked about the need to get the city’s vacant property registry implemented and begin inspections of vacant sites.
“We’re probably gonna run into a lot more squatting situations. And I’m sure the police department runs into a lot of those as well. Maybe in the fire department with some of the fires,” Ackerman said.
“I feel like the vacant properties is probably where a lot of our (unhoused) people have gone,” she said.
The team plans to meet again in March.
