Young Kwak photo
Spokane police generally make one-and-a-half times their usual pay while stationed outside Camp Hope.
Earlier this month, Spokane Police Chief Craig Meidl said the City of Spokane had spent more than half a million dollars on police overtime patrol at Camp Hope, a large homeless encampment in Spokane's East Central neighborhood.
The comment came in an Oct. 5 "Chronic Nuisance Notice" Meidl sent to the Washington State Department of Transportation, which owns the land Camp Hope is on, and Jewels Helping Hands, the nonprofit running the camp. The notice outlined Meidl's frustration with the camp's impact on the neighborhood and called for its removal by mid-November.
"The continuous and ongoing drug activity, criminal activity, and nuisance activity in and around the property is creating an inordinate expense for the City of Spokane, who has spent more than $500,000 on overtime patrol at the Property to date," Meidl wrote.
After the letter went out, the chief's comments about the half-million figure appeared in numerous news reports, including a Spokesman-Review headline.
The number isn't accurate.
In reality, the city has spent $217,000 on police overtime at Camp Hope between March and the end of August, according to city spokesperson Brian Coddington. (He doesn't have the September numbers yet.)
Spokane Police spokesperson Julie Humphreys says that when you account for September, the total number is roughly $250,000.
Still, that's nowhere near the half-million dollars reported in the chief's letter to WSDOT.
Humpherys says the chief "misstated" the figure in his letter.
The city has spent $500,000 on Camp Hope, but only when you also account for trash removal and money paid to Crowd Management Services (CMS), a private security company the city is contracting with to patrol the camp's perimeter. Coddington says the contract with CMS has cost the city $185,000 so far. He didn't have access to the total trash-removal figures when we spoke last week, but said total spending on sanitation, police overtime and private security adds up to roughly half-a-million dollars.
Police are stationed outside Camp Hope everyday from 7 am to 7 pm. It's in addition to the regular patrols in the East Central neighborhood, so officers who sign up to pick up shifts at Camp Hope get paid overtime, which is typically one-and-a-half times their usual pay.
Humphreys says police have been inside the camp on several occasions, but tend to stay out because they are concerned about sanitation, fire hazards and hostility from campers. They're mainly there to address concerns about property crime from local businesses and housed neighbors.
Camp residents say the police mostly just stay in their cars.
"Why are we paying them to sit there?" says Chris Senn, a Camp Hope resident who is also a part of the security team employed by Jewels Helping Hands.
Even though the number he gave was incorrect, Humphreys stresses that the chief's original point about Camp Hope draining taxpayer money remains.
The chief's letter also contained a proposed agreement that would see the all camp residents cleared from the site by Oct. 31 and personal belongings and trash removed by Nov. 15.
In a scathing response last week, WSDOT rejected the chief's timeline and accused the city of shifting blame for a problem created by local officials' failure to adequately provide services for unhoused people in Spokane.
For more on how the police spend their time at Camp Hope, read this article in this week's print edition:
