Homeless camp sweeps don’t cut crime, says study of 300 Denver cleanups
Colorado Sun
When neighborhoods ask city and police officials to clean up homeless encampments, they often complain about crime — drug activity, theft and assaults.
But a new study from public health researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora found that crime doesn’t generally decrease after encampment sweeps.
The researchers, in a study published Wednesday in the Journal of Urban Health, pored over Denver police reports before and after 300 encampment cleanups in Denver from November 2019 to July 2023.
They looked at crime reports in the seven, 14 and 21 days before and after city crews forced people living in the encampments to move, disposing of tents, blankets, food and any other items left behind. The researchers broke it down to crimes reported within a quarter-mile radius of the encampment, a half-mile and a three-quarters of a mile.
They found a “statistically significant but modest decrease” in crime of 9%, or about one less crime report, after the encampment cleanup — but only within one-quarter of a mile, or about two blocks, and within seven days. By three weeks after the sweep, the crime rate was 3.9% lower than before the sweep. The rate was unchanged, on average, when looking at a half-mile or three-quarter-mile radius.
The number of crimes reported weekly within a quarter-mile radius of an encampment was about 10-15. The crimes that tended to decline in the first several days and within the “hyperlocal” quarter-mile of the encampment were public disorder and auto theft, though the study looked at 265,000 crime reports on everything from public urination to murder.
Sexual assault was not included in the study because police reports do not reveal the location in order to protect victims’ identities.
The study follows a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June that makes it easier for communities to conduct encampment sweeps. The opinion, called City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, allows cities or counties to fine, ticket or arrest people for living outside even when there are not enough shelter beds. The case originated in 2018 in Grants Pass, Oregon, when the city was sued for ticketing people sleeping in public.
Study author Pranav Padmanabhan, a graduate student in public health at the CU medical school, said he began looking at crime after Denver encampment sweeps in 2023 as local governments and homeless advocacy groups awaited the Supreme Court decision.
The crime study also follows previous research, some involving CU, that found that encampment cleanups have a negative impact on the health of people living in them, are linked to shorter lifespans and increased overdoses. People whose tents are removed by officials often lose their medications, identification cards for health insurance, hearing aids, eyeglasses and other belongings, said Dr. Joshua Barocas, the study’s senior researcher, a CU medical school professor and an infectious disease doctor at Denver Health.
When Barocas worked in Boston years ago, he saw city crews dump truckloads of wheelchairs, crutches and canes after encampment cleanups, he said. Patients still report losing medications and sterile needles, which leads to them reusing needles for intravenous drug use.
The latest study adds to a myriad of others showing encampment sweeps aren’t good for people who live there, he said.
“It was really to assess that popular narrative that homelessness is associated with crime and therefore, if we displace the homelessness, crime might end up going away,” Barocas said.
Barocas said he’s drawn to studying social justice issues, such as homelessness, drug use and racism, because those are the issues affecting his hospitalized patients. He wants the research, not “stigma or anecdotes,” to drive public policy.
“Look, if the data came out that sweeps were good for crime and sweeps were good for people experiencing homelessness, then I would advocate for that,” he said. “It’s just that the evidence isn’t pointing in that direction. Our community doesn’t do better when we displace people. It may look better, but it is not making us safer and it’s not making public health better.”
The study did not include information on whether people who reported the crimes were housed or unhoused, or whether the alleged perpetrators were housed or unhoused. Other studies have shown that people who are homeless are more likely to be victims of crimes than people who are not homeless, and that people who are homeless are more likely to be victims of crimes than they are to be perpetrators.
“Previous work has shown that forcing unhoused people to move without access to services is harmful to health,” Padmanabhan said. “Until we get to the root causes of homelessness, these methods are actually not making us safer.”
A Colorado Sun analysis in 2022 of Denver police data found that crime reports decreased in the neighborhoods where city-sponsored Safe Outdoor Space sites have operated, even as reported crime increased across Denver.
The city’s overall crime went up by 14.3% in 2021, the first full year of the city’s Safe Outdoor Space program, which assigned red tents to people who were sleeping without shelter. But the six Denver neighborhoods hosting the camps saw a decline of 2.8% in the number of reported crimes.