Wilson questions Dalton on 311 encampment routing change
Wilson asks why 311 street homelessness reports moved from NYPD to DHS; Dalton says DHS can better determine encampments and use the data to target outreach strategically.
And there was also, I believe in September, there was a bit of a, and something I'm getting a lot of questions about in the community.
a change in terms of when there is street homelessness reported.
The 311s for that are no longer routing to NYPD, going to DSS.
Could you help us understand the reason for that change and what the broader policy goal is by...
Changing who's responding first to the engagement?
Sure.
I think it is, it's a small, but I think important change to have the right people going to the event, right?
And so what you're talking about is that 311 calls to identify whether a reported encampment is a homeless encampment moved from the NYPD to DHS Homeless Services.
So now we're the people who go out there and not only determine whether it in fact meets the legal definition of an encampment, but can do outreach and engagement.
Also, having that data entirely within our domain allows us to use it to, again, sort of target outreach to the places where it's needed most, where people are calling about encampments,
even if it's not a legally defined, it's not an encampment under a legal definition, it's a signal of concern in the community.
So now we can use that information to deploy our outreach in more strategic ways.
So I'm pleased that we were able to, we are able to do that work now and not only
identify and make the legal determination of whether it's an encampment or not, but put to start outreach if we hadn't already been working with those folks already.