When the City of Seattle last year began an effort to remove destitute people and their tents, sleeping bags, blankets, backpacks, and other gear from city-owned property, they not only created a new problem for those with nowhere else to lay their heads. They also charted out a bureaucratic maze that, months later, has a high-tech roadmap: a web-based computer database called the Seattle Encampment Response and Information System.
SERIS has been running since mid-October, but it got a viewing Monday before members of the Seattle City Council.
Office of Policy Management public safety staffer Bob Scales says the new database groups complaints geographically, to avoid duplication; it automatically enters deadlines for posting warning signs, notifying campers, and doing cleanup; and it serves as a repository for pictures of conditions at the camp. Its contents are accessible with a password from any computer. Scales says approximately 100 employees of various city agencies have access to the database, which doesn't maintain personal information about those told to move along.
The city's Customer Service Bureau was the designated backbone of the expanded encampment protocols when they came out last winter. That, Scales told Real Change after the Council meeting, was unnecessarily labor intensive.
"We would have to have weekly meetings for which we would have to make a spreadsheet" saddled with numerous duplications, he says. Now, with mapping capabilities, "everything is geocoded so we can see which [areas] are active" and in need of response.
Councilmembers Monday were also briefed on the sweeps' effects in 2008. In sending social service workers to 36 sites over the year, 106 out of 320 homeless people who were contacted, says Human Services Department staffer Judy Summerfield, accepted an invitation to come to a shelter.
And those who didn't accept the offer, where did they go? The others "have moved to other locations in the city or beyond the city," Summerfield told the council.