Downtown Olympia through the eyes of OPD’s walking patrol

The busiest time of day for Olympia Police Department’s downtown walking patrol is typically the morning, when businesses are opening and people who sleep on downtown streets are being told it is time to go.

In a city-owned parking lot on Franklin Street Northeast shortly after 8 a.m. on a recent Thursday, officer Sean O’Brien shakes the side of a tent, trying to stir whoever is inside. Beside him, Sgt. Amy King, the walking patrol’s supervisor, speaks into another tent.

“Princess, good morning, it’s Sgt. King. Can you give me a ‘Hey’?” she says through the nylon wall.

The woman inside responds, and they chat for a minute about the weather and how hot it has been.

On the ground nearby is a wrapper for naloxone, the opioid-overdose antidote, the same brand OPD carries. As they leave the parking lot a guy asks King about his friend who collapsed overnight. He wants to know what happened to him, if he’s OK.

King makes a phone call, but all she can get is which hospital he was taken to. The guy thanks her anyway.

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Olympia’s walking patrol was created in 1985, cut after the recession and returned only on a limited basis in 2012. But thanks to the public safety levy passed in November, officers have been walking the streets seven days a week and four nights a week since June.

The levy will raise $2.85 million this year, of which about $628,000 goes to the walking patrol. The levy will also fund a new crisis response team, neighborhood liaison officers and training for police.

King says it might look like walking patrol officers are primarily there to deal with issues related to homelessness, but her goals are to be a resource for all kinds of people — business owners, visitors, people who live on the streets — while also addressing criminal activity.

“It’s a lot of balancing,” she says.

An 18-year veteran of OPD, King worked the graveyard shift before this. She says she likes the relationships that you form with people just walking around all day. (That doesn’t happen at 2 a.m., she says. “Unless you’re building a relationship with the front door.”)

That morning, in another city-owned parking lot next to the Providence Community Care Center, the police run into private security guards hired by the city to patrol parking lots. The same company, Pacific Coast Security, was also hired by Olympia Downtown Alliance to check on certain businesses overnight.

“People are afraid to park here right now,” a Pacific Coast manager tells a new guard.

As the police pass the Community Care Center, King tries to wake someone sleeping in its doorway.

“We’re allowed to be here,” says a woman sitting nearby to the officers.

The sleeping person’s whole body is covered by a blanket, and when King gets no response, another man lying in the doorway gets up to help.

“Hey, rise and shine, OPD says it’s time to go,” he says.

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They come to another parking lot on Olympia Avenue Northeast, where items are piled up along the far end of the lot. A woman named Christina says she is collecting things for other people — blankets and sleeping bags and shopping carts, tarps and shoes and socks, a bike and various pieces of luggage. Around the corner in an alley is a stuffed armchair.

The police tell her to move it, that the alley needs to be clear for cars to get through, and she says it will be gone tomorrow.

“They get pretty good at telling us what we want to hear,” O’Brien says. “And we’ll do it again tomorrow.”

The next the day, the chair is still there.

O’Brien has been with OPD for four years. Before joining the walking patrol, he says he’d respond to calls from people in need, and leave when the next call came in. Now, he sees the same people over and over, on their good days and bad days.

He knows businesses want people sleeping outside their doors moved along, but he also knows there is nowhere for those people to go during the day. The city’s ordinance says they have to be off the sidewalks by 7 a.m.

“We’re just moving (them) from corner to corner,” he says.

City officials this week heard plans to open two sanctioned homeless camps for about 80 people that would be open during the day. Meanwhile, counts by the city show about 130 people regularly sleep on downtown streets.

Deputy Police Chief Aaron Jelcick says the walking patrol and forthcoming crisis response team can help homeless people and those with mental illness and substance abuse problem. But there also has to be what Jelcick calls “back-end services” like behavioral health programs and supportive housing to make a real difference.

“They’re there, but they’re limited,” he says.

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A week later, officers Jacob Theis and Jordan Reisher are halfway through a Friday night shift. Later, when the bars close and people empty onto the streets, their attention will narrow to a few blocks on Fourth Avenue.

For now, though, it is still light out, and they walk a meandering route looking for something to happen.

Theis says most officers’ work is measured by the number of calls they respond to. But walking patrol officers might not respond to any calls, which is hard for some of their fellow officers to understand. Instead, they stop and talk and try to get to know people. He jokes that if they called into dispatch each time they had a conversation, they’d never get off the radio.

On this night, they talk with a church group handing out sandwiches, to a girl looking for her friend who was arrested and might still be in jail, to a man whose laptop was stolen. He didn’t report it to the police — says he doesn’t want a reputation as someone who calls the cops — but Theis thinks he saw someone with it the other day.

“I don’t like calling the cops. And it was stolen off a plastic bag. What are you going to do, lift fingerprints off a plastic bag?” the man tells him.

The officers check on the same parking garage at Seventh Avenue Southeast and Washington Street Southeast twice in an hour. It is empty both times, but there is trash and used needles and heaters that blast warm air.

“I think people are certainly on (to the fact) that we check that area,” Theis says. “We have to find the new area.”

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They come across a young man passed out on the sidewalk of Washington Street Northeast. As Theis and Reisher try to wake him up, a performer in clown makeup comes out the backdoor of the State Theater.

“Hey man, can you hear us?” Theis says to the passed out man.

The man is breathing, and the officers think he is drunk. A guy on a bike rolls by slowly to see what’s happening, then stops.

“What I’m thinking is he’s been high on meth for a long time. When they pass out, they pass out. He’s just getting a long sleep,” says the guy, who introduces himself as Mike.

More performers come out of the theater and watch in a half-interested clump. The man moans a bit just as the fire department arrives.

“Good, they’re going to hose him off first,” the clown says.

As medics check his blood pressure, blood sugar and oxygen levels in his blood, Theis is briefly distracted by the sight of another guy down the block he arrested the day before on a felony drug offense.

“He’s acting just like Nathan did when he OD’ed at the bus station,” Mike says about the young man.

By now medics have him semiconscious and he is mumbling answers to their questions about what he took. As he is loaded onto a stretcher, Theis gives Mike a fist bump and the officers walk away.

This story was originally published July 28, 2018 at 12:15 PM with the headline "Downtown Olympia through the eyes of OPD’s walking patrol."