Every day in cities large and small across the United States, police officers are dispatched to respond to a problem that is not, technically, a crime: homelessness. The circumstances may vary; for example, an officer may be called when someone is sleeping in a park, sheltering in a building lobby, or found unresponsive in a tent. Often a responding officer knows the person by name, they know their history, and they try to help. But too often they are “social workers of last resort,” addressing a problem beyond the scope of policing.
This complex problem is at the heart of research by Natalie Hipple, Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington. A groundbreaking study by Professor Hipple developed the first comprehensive typology of how American police departments respond to homelessness. That research formed the empirical backbone of two major practitioner resources released this year: the “Homelessness Response Guide,” co-authored by Hipple and published by the National Policing Institute, and “Planning, Implementing, and Assessing Law Enforcement Responses to Homelessness,” issued by the Council of State Governments Justice Center.
These resources provide law enforcement agencies a practical framework for approaching a problem that has grown steadily more visible, and more politically charged, for years.
“In a lot of jurisdictions, police are first responders to situations involving individuals who are experiencing homelessness, and many members of the public and even policy makers are looking to them to solve the problem, which is not their job,” Hipple said. “So, one of the key questions we’re looking at is, how do we address this problem without police leading the charge?”
Her path to that question was not a straight one. Hipple came to homelessness research through her work on gun violence and police problem-solving. She spent several years embedded with the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department as a crime analyst while completing her doctorate. It was there, working with an Indianapolis unit dedicated to homeless outreach and response, that she first confronted the issue.
Officers in the unit were losing people they knew, not to violence, but to preventable deaths on the street. “They noticed this pattern with great concern, wondering, what are we missing? Why did this person die in their tent?” Hipple recalled.
The unit invited Hipple in to conduct homeless death reviews, which are a systematic, multi-agency process modeled after analyses of airplane crashes, a rigorous breakdown of what went wrong and where intervention might have helped. Service providers, outreach workers, shelters, and police gathered around the same table to ask a simple but critical question: could this death have been prevented?
The experience yielded dividends. In 2021, the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, issued a request for proposals on policing responses to homelessness. The NIJ saw a fundamental gap in knowledge in that no one had systematically documented how police departments respond to homelessness. She and a former graduate student, Kayla Allisonnow an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas, won a $1.4 million grant to find out.
Their methodology drew on open-source social media data from police departments nationwide, as well as in-depth site visits to cities with police agencies operating specialized homeless outreach teams. What emerged was something she characterized as a “menu” of responses, versus a rigid protocol.
“With a menu of responses, officers can choose one option or approach, or utilize a few and leave the rest, depending on the unique and dynamic situation in front of them,” Hipple said.
The menu ranges from proactive outreach and relationship-building, to de-escalation, diversion to social services, and, when necessary, law enforcement action. Crucially, Hipple and her co-author found no single approach that works everywhere, and further, that no national standards exist to guide departments that want to do better.
That absence of standards is striking, Hipple noted. Law enforcement agencies have detailed best-practice protocols for responding to homicide scenes, domestic violence calls, and child abuse, but virtually nothing for homelessness, despite the fact that it now consumes enormous amounts of officer time in communities of all sizes.
Central to understanding why the problem is so intractable is that police most often deal with individuals experiencing chronic homelessness, and which is a very different and complex problem than those temporarily displaced.
“Chronic homelessness usually exists or occurs alongside some sort of substance use or abuse, and mental illness, and many chronically homeless individuals are service-resistant,” Hipple said. “This is why enforcement-only responses fail repeatedly. Arresting someone for sleeping in a park does not treat an underlying mental illness or addiction, and the person will return.”
Hipple’s research, along with the broader evidence base cited in the new Homelessness Response Guide, shows that enforcement-heavy approaches are also expensive, involving cycling people through jails, emergency rooms, and courts at costs that can run to tens of thousands of dollars per person annually, far exceeding what coordinated housing and social services would cost.
The legal landscape has also been shifting. In 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson effectively overturned a prior ruling that had constrained police from enforcing camping bans when shelter space was unavailable, giving cities more latitude to clear encampments. Hipple observed, however, it does not resolve the fundamental question her research keeps circling back to: who, instead of the police, is actually in charge of the response?
According to Hipple, this involves a strategically collaborative approach, one that works within the unique contexts of communities nationwide. For example, in addressing the issue, public health agencies, housing providers, mental health professionals, outreach workers, and people with lived experience of homelessness all need seats at the table, along with law enforcement agencies.
Her research and the new National Policing Institute guide, she hopes, will give departments everywhere, from major cities to small Midwestern towns, a helpful resource to address a problem that will likely only grow in complexity and scope.
Source: news.iu.edu
