Colorado Springs police homeless outreach team starts welfare checks on homeless

Wednesday morning’s cold temperatures came with concerns for the Colorado Springs Police Department.

Starting early, the CSPD Homeless Outreach Team (HOT) started their normal camping ban enforcement, but Wednesday they also had to make sure people didn’t freeze overnight.

One of the first questions from officers is usually, “do you know there’s a shelter nearby?”

The enforcement of the camping hinged on the number of shelter beds available for the homeless. On Tuesday night, 323 people stayed in the Springs Rescue Mission.

Starting Thursday, November 1st, they will be able to accommodate 80 to 100 more people. They might not necessarily have a bed, but they’ll have a dry, warm place inside from the cold.

The officers with HOT gave mostly warning to people they found camping this morning. What they didn’t expect were to find people who they had never met.

Officer Mike Palmer said, “I usually recognize or know by name these people from previous contacts, but they were new and this is unusual.”

Palmer says the goal is to get people off the streets and into somewhere warm, so even though someone might be due for a ticket, they might give them an hour to clear their camp.

Palmer says if they are cited right away, “often time they lose the motivation to get packing and get going if we site them right away.”

Officers usually come back around to spots where they gave those warnings and it’s then that they give tickets to the people who haven’t moved.

Their patrol for people who might have been hurt, or worse, died overnight because of the cold, won’t slow down this winter, but it will be getting riskier as the cold temperatures stick around.