Sacramento police want to outsource homeless property storage. Here’s why
When someone living on the street in Sacramento is forcibly moved or arrested for a violation related to their homelessness, many of them will forever part with their belongings — from survival items like camping supplies and personal identification to sentimental items like a loved one’s ashes.
Items that are not deemed trash by officers are processed and placed in the Sacramento Police Department’s evidence and property division, where they remain until they are picked up by their owners or are disposed of after months or years.
The system doesn’t seem to be working for either the city or Sacramento’s homeless population. According to a new report by the Sacramento City Auditor, the city spends around $590,000 per year in staffing costs to manage homeless people’s property. The audit noted that many never recover their belongings, and that incoming items often exceed outgoing items in a given year, placing strain on staff and facilities.
To address the issue, the city of Sacramento is seeking to outsource this labor to a contractor, following in the footsteps of places that include Anaheim and Sonoma County, both of which have reported boosted efficiency and more time for law enforcement officers to devote to other responsibilities. Each jurisdiction hired a vendor to pick up, store and deliver property to homeless individuals after they are released from jail.
The city has already begun to request proposals from potential vendors, asking for contract proposals not to exceed $500,000.
The highest bid was submitted by Lyons Security Service, a Sacramento-based company that has contracted with Anaheim for similar services in the past two years.
How the Sacramento homeless property process works now
At least two police officers (or for larger and more complex calls, as many as 12) alongside outreach staff respond to camping-related code violations. When police arrest someone experiencing homelessness, they are required to collect their belongings, transport them to a warehouse on Sequoia Pacific Boulevard in the River District.
When collecting their belongings, officers are directed to book life necessities and “other personal property with objective value,” according to a police training bulletin on camping enforcement. Officers are instructed to ask the person arrested to distinguish between trash and personal property. Items deemed trash are not booked and thrown in the garbage.
Police and property room personnel staff spend a collective 8,000 hours per year managing this property, costing the city an estimated $587,000 per year, on top of other challenges. Auditors said that managing homeless property requires significant storage space and resources and often has a negative effect on employee morale, particularly when items are in poor condition.
The process is fraught in other ways — the city has been sued in the past for trashing items like tents, laptops and medications.
Homeless individuals and their advocates said that retrieving their property (that wasn’t immediately thrown away) from the city has long been difficult. Angela Hassell, executive director of Sacramento’s largest homeless service nonprofit Loaves & Fishes, said that in the hundreds of claims her organization has helped process, she has never seen any clients retrieve their items.
“There’s no mechanism to get (their belongings) back,” she said. “If there is, we don’t know about it.”
For Hassell, the move to a private vendor isn’t enough.
“If it’s going to actually create a process where all these folks’ stuff is logged and stored and there’s a place where they can retrieve it, then that’s a little bit of a step forward,” she said. “But it doesn’t really address that this whole practice is harmful from the get-go.”
