Denton police propose more funding, staff for homeless outreach teams

The Denton Police Department’s Crisis Intervention Response Team and Homeless Outreach Team find themselves visiting encampments 10 to 15 times per week due to calls for service and requests from Engage Denton and city department leaders and council members.

It’s just one of several issues Lt. Elisa Howell, who’s in charge of the city’s Homeless Outreach Team as well as overseeing the department’s Mental Health Division, outlined in a presentation on homeless solutions response to the council Tuesday.

“Because of that, they are spread thin and currently are reactive instead of proactive due to the number of requests,” Howell said.

Denton police have two teams that address and provide services to Denton’s rising homeless population. According to the Feb. 21 presentation, the city provides $832,647 in homeless response funding to the city’s outreach goal, which includes the Crisis Intervention Response Team, also known as CIRT, and the Homeless Outreach Team, also known as the HOT team.

The funding is part of $4.1 million in emergency federal funding that ends in 2024, according to the Feb. 21 presentation.

Started in May 2021, the Crisis Intervention Response Team has four pairs of team members. Each pair consists of a police officer and a licensed mental health clinician to respond directly to a mental health incident or receive a request for service to an incident.

The Homeless Outreach Team was created to address a gap that was seen when people were placed on services: No one was keeping in contact with them to make sure they were meeting the requirements to continue receiving those services, Howell said.

Howell said the outreach team has two police officers to cover the entire city, a stability caseworker and a paramedic who came on board last March.

The stability caseworker, Howell said, should be focusing on a “healthy caseload” of 20 clients in need of services. Instead, she’s juggling a caseload of 83 clients while providing 262 services, such as transportation and helping with Social Security paperwork and finding or obtaining identification.

As for the paramedic, Howell said that he logs every contact and visit with the homeless community and has conducted 862 site visits since joined the team. In a lot of cases, he is administering basic medical care like providing bandages and medicine for headaches, Howell said.

“So we have surpassed what is manageable at this point,” Howell said.

On Tuesday, city staff highlighted an opportunity to help address the problems: Increase the capacity to support the mental health responses by providing new patrol CIRT officers and a couple of more police officers to the HOT team, as well as another caseworker. Howell noted, though, that to reach the healthy caseload of 20 clients, two caseworkers would be required in addition to the one proposed.

Of course, the problem is finding the funding to continue these services when the $4.1 million in federal emergency funding dries up in 2024.

“The need has grown,” said Dani Shaw, the city’s director of community services. “So when this federal funding goes away, we will be behind the eight ball at this point.”

Shaw said they have rental assistance funding to help keep people housed, but that money also goes away once these funds expire.

“So that means there are more families at risk, more people experiencing homelessness, especially unsheltered homelessness,” Shaw said. “That’s the conditions that we’re in, which are higher than they were pre-pandemic.

“And when those funds go away, we will have less dollars to help support them throughout the community and not just the city.”

Shaw said the city is working to identify strategic ways to bring in funding.