San Jose mayor redefines ‘Responsibility to Shelter’ policy

San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan is changing his tune when it comes to arresting homeless people who refuse shelter.

Mahan held a news conference Wednesday to talk about how he is redefining his “Responsibility to Shelter” initiative. When it first rolled out in March, Mahan said those who refuse shelter three times within an 18-month period would be subject to a trespassing violation and an arrest, with the goal of connecting individuals to treatment. Mahan has since revised his position, saying each person’s situation should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. But homeless people could be charged for other reasons when refusing shelter.

“At some point, we have to acknowledge that a small subset of folks on our streets simply are unable or unwilling to accept and benefit from what the city can do, in which case we have to get them into a behavioral health court (or) a county run treatment center,” Mahan said at the news conference.

To implement the policy, the city could create a new in-house outreach team to build a case file of every homeless person they encounter. At the outreach worker’s discretion and after repeated attempts to offer shelter, the worker may then refer the case to the police.

This specialized outreach team would be created under the Housing Department’s Enhanced Engagement Program (EEP). It would have a total of seven staff members, including three people from the housing department and four workers from Beautify SJ, which is under the Parks, Recreation and Neighborhood Services Department that oversees encampment sweeps. This team will be responsible for tracking engagement, gathering data and for sharing information with the new police unit designed to enforce the Responsibility to Shelter policy. The outreach team would be deployed to large homeless encampments and waterways.

Mahan said that while three refusals of shelter could still be a good threshold, he wants outreach workers to use discretion on when to escalate the situation to an arrest.

Mahan wants to connect arrested people with the Santa Clara County Behavioral Health court system– despite county officials and a former judge stating Mahan’s policy will not work as he intends. Those who are arrested on trespassing charges will be released immediately, and won’t be able to go through the adjudication process to receive a referral to the behavioral health court.

“This proposal is misguided. It will not achieve its stated objective,” retired Judge Richard Loftus, who used to sit on the Behavioral Health Court, wrote in a letter to the San Jose City Council. “The justice system does not work the way this proposal contemplates.”

Mahan said homeless people could be charged for things like drug or firearm possession under his Responsibility to Shelter initiative.

“There will be an expectation that you have a responsibility to shelter, but we have to leave a bit of discretion for outreach and first responders to determine what that particular situation entails,” Mahan said. “And it may not be a trespassing charge. It could be a drug charge that gets somebody into a drug court.”

Instead of putting people in jail, another option could be to have the homeless person brought to the Mission Street Recovery Center, the mayor said. The Mission Street Recovery Center provides people with short stays of less than 24 hours to detox from alcohol. 

Tamiko Rast, president of the Japantown Business Association, said she and her family have been assaulted by homeless people multiple times and have made dozens of calls to the police over the past decade.

“These near weekly experiences have deeply affected us emotionally and financially. We are exhausted and we are afraid for our safety,” Rast said at the press conference. “Accountability is not the same as criminalization, but without a requirement to accept help some individuals never will.”

Contact Joyce Chu at [email protected] or @joyce_speaks on X.