With the PHX C.A.R.E.S. program four months old, community leaders are looking for ways to increase its effectiveness and deal with a greater-than-anticipated demand for outreach. Budget meeting will be held in April where the city council is set to decide how much funding the program will receive in the next fiscal year.
The program, which operates as a way for residents to inform engagement services of homeless encampments, has received 1,073 reports sine November 2017. They have just four outreach teams consisting of two people each to manage complaints, according to Deputy City Manager Deanna Jonovich.
“It’s a capacity issue to be quite frank,” Jonovich told the public safety committee. “There are too many people we are trying to touch and follow-up with all at the same time.”
With the high number of reports, response times can be up to three business days, by which point many of the homeless individuals may have moved on.
Moreover, some residents have voiced concerns over the backgrounds of these homeless individuals and the public safety committee is exploring options for streamlined background checks. The police department was called to assist in around 10 percent of those 1,073 reports.
Subcommittee Chair Michael Nowakowski hopes to implement a way for the C.A.R.E.S. staff to implement background checks into their standard procedure.
“Can a layperson do that?” Nowakowski asked in the subcommittee meeting. “I’m not sure, so I think we need to start thinking outside the box so we’re not taking officers away from their daily duties.”
Vice Mayor Laura Pastor agreed with the public safety concerns.
“I think that’s where the bigger conversation is going to be going,” Vice Mayor Laura Pastor added “I think that’s where the type of system eventually we want to see.”
When asked, Deputy City Manager Janovich said that most resources are needed to help with outreach and the follow-up in handling the large number of reports coming in.
“When we rolled out PHX C.A.R.E.S., the first month the calls came in pretty excessive,” Janovich said. “We’re now seeing a stabilization so we’re getting a better handle of how many calls we’re seeing on average every month, so we can get a sense of how many people we’re trying to outreach to within a month while navigate the current people in the system.”
Nowakowski highlighted that the program was a new endeavor; “We have a lot of kinks and we’re fine tuning it and these are some of thing that have been brought to our attention and it’s really a conversation that we’re all having and hopefully we can fix it and create an example that people can take throughout the whole country and use it.”
