The Housekeys Action Network Denver, an advocacy group for the city's homeless, published city records on Tuesday, June 4, following a rally in front of the City and County Building the day before. The data collected by HAND shows that the Denver Police Department has increased enforcement of five city laws that the group claims target homeless residents: trespassing, violating park curfews, solicitation near roadways, marijuana use and camping ban violations.
Terese Howard, the lead organizer for HAND, explained that these "are laws that target people who are visible in public space, and for things that you have to do when you're houseless because you don't have a public space" during the rally on Monday.
According to HAND, the number of trespassing tickets handed out by DPD in the first three months of 2024 went up by almost 300 from the same period in 2023, and by over 500 from 2022. Citations for other offenses, such as streetside solicitation or urban camping, have quadrupled or more in 2024 than in previous years. Howard said that many of these low-level tickets turn into arrest warrants for failure to appear in court.
The Department of Public Safety's SET unit, an unarmed civilian unit, was created before Johnston took office. According to the department, the SET unit has never given a citation and "enforcement is not this team's priority," but the department "is empowered to enforce a small number of ordinances through citation. The unit conducts outreach, facilitates service connection, and offers quality-of-life resources to Denver's unhoused population."
Former mayoral candidate Lisa Calderón recalled during the rally that she had endorsed Johnston during the runoff election last year "in part because he would take a more humane approach to our unhoused crisis," she said. Now, she alleges, the mayor has allowed the SET unit to break that promise, adding that the unit isn't connecting people to resources and is being used by Johnston's administration to move homelessness out of downtown instead of getting people into housing.
"A group not brought by the community, not evidence-based, it was something that was created by the executive director of Public Safety, Armando Saldate, and it's not working," Calderón says. "In fact, what we know now thanks to the data from HAND is that homelessness isn't going down. It's being scattered across the city."
Calderón says that homelessness is "being pushed into the suburbs of Denver," such as the Montbello neighborhood, she says. At the rally on Monday, June 4, she said she wants Johnston to "drop SET, change course and invest those resources with the on-the-ground community that are already doing the work."
Broken Promises?
After the rally, Calderón told Westword she opposed the SET unit "since its inception," arguing that "it should be dissolved because, unlike police, you can't file a complaint with the independent monitor. It's totally in the purview of Saldate's office, so there's no independent oversight for these civilian cops."The SET unit was first called the Street Enforcement Team upon its inception in 2021, and now works with the Assessment, Intake and Division (AID) Center on 14th and Elati streets, which opened in February 2023. According to the Department of Public Safety, the AID Center focuses on providing resources to individuals who have active warrants for low-level, nonviolent crimes and continue to face challenges accessing services and stable housing. Calderón doesn't see it that way.
"The idea was they sweep [homeless residents] off the street and then have them go to the AID Center," she says. Calderón calls the AID Center "another government bureaucracy," and would prefer the city use its resources to support "the folks that are out here," like HAND.
In response to the HAND report and allegations at the rally, the Department of Public Safety provided a statement from Saldate.
"The city receives complaints about encampments and dangerous activity around encampments daily. The Street Engagement Team (SET) is an unarmed civilian team that helps address these complaints rather than sending law enforcement, which frees up officers to respond to emergency calls for service. SET has not issued any citations to date and does not have the authority to arrest. DPD issues citations if they determine it is appropriate," the statement reads.
"The members of the Street Engagement Team are highly trained, empathetic individuals who work with those they encounter to gain compliance with city ordinances while connecting them to vital resources," it continues. "This includes saving lives — the team carries Narcan and has reversed multiple overdoses. The Department of Public Safety is proud of the Street Engagement Team and the work that they do each day."
Robert Davis, project manager for the Denver Task Force to Reimagine Policing and Public Safety, criticized Saldate for creating the SET unit and promising that it wouldn't harass homeless residents. Davis explained that the SET Unit was created as an alternative to police interacting with homeless residents.
"We trusted [Saldate] when he said that to us. We said, 'Okay, this sounds like a wonderful idea,'" Davis said on Monday. "We began to realize this was just another means of again harassing and criminalizing our unhoused brothers and sisters."
Davis says the Denver Task Force is "disappointed" with Saldate and Mayor Johnston, "who is continuing this pattern of harassment, this pattern of abuse, this violation of our citizens' constitutional rights." Calderón and Davis say they have brought their concerns directly to Saldate and Johnston during the past year.
Andy McNulty, the lawyer who helped HAND acquire the SET logs, says that Denver "is enforcing laws that violate the constitution every day" by arresting people after they fail to appear in court for low-level offenses.
"What the data shows is Denver is violating the constitution," McNulty said. "When you're enforcing laws against people who have nowhere else to go, that violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment."
McNulty demanded that the mayor "drum down enforcement" and stop ticketing and then arresting people for low-level offenses that homeless people often violate.
The mayor's office responded to criticisms of his homeless policies in a statement, saying “Mayor Johnston and his administration took bold and decisive action on homelessness on his first full day in office and has since helped more than 1,500 Denverites get off the streets and into housing while permanently closing fourteen encampments.
"This administration has also drastically reduced the number of encampment sweeps, instead working to permanently resolve encampments and connect individuals to the housing and services they need to be successful," the statement reads. "Our first priority is always to connect people with resources and housing first — which is why we’ve strongly prioritized encampment resolutions that bring people directly into individual units."
Calderón has been a vocal critic of Johnston in 2024. She criticized his veto of Denver City Council's "No Freezing Sweeps" bill in February, saying that he had promised on the campaign trail to favor a bill that would have banned sweeps in sub-32-degree weather; she's also said that the mayor "co-opted" the idea of the Office of Neighborhood Safety — a new $11 million office with 65 employees — from the Denver Task Force to Reimagine Policing and Public Safety, an organization that she in part leads.
"It's piling on, and I don't understand why he's missed an opportunity to build a coalition with people who helped get him into office," Calderón tells Westword. "Instead, he's basically channeling [former mayor Michael] Hancock through the same policies, the same appointees who are implementing the same policies. We're tired of it, and it's a year later, so the honeymoon is way over."
