OPINION | Unhoused people are overexposed to trauma. The effects accumulate.
He said it a total of four times.
“I think he’s dead. I think he’s dead. I think he’s dead. I think he’s dead.”
And then: “I think they fucking killed him.”
As I watched the video that David Hernandez recorded of the police shooting of Robert Delgado at Lents Park on April 17 — most of its footage focused on the police officers with their guns behind trees, rather than on Delgado himself — I realized I was also witnessing the traumatic experience of Hernadez and his friends, who narrated what they saw. Hernandez told Willamette Week that he lives in his Chevy Suburban.
DIRECTOR’S DESK: ‘Why are they shooting people?’
Our nation saw, over the past months, the deep grief of witnesses to Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd as they took the stand. The bystanders suffer.
While I watched Hernandez’s video, which looked like it was recorded through a car window as sirens blared, memories flooded back of the aftermath of the fatal police shooting of John Elifritz in the CityTeam Shelter. It was also April, but three years earlier.
Several Street Roots vendors had been trapped as witnesses in that crowded shelter when police fatally shot Elifritz. In the fear and rush to escape, one Street Roots vendor had his glasses trampled.
The days and weeks after that shooting three years ago, they came to Street Roots just to talk because they felt alone in what they saw. One of the men said, “Nobody cared about the homeless victims. Here’s one more thing for your crappy life. You are so used to being in the rain, you can deal with this.”
We called the Trauma Intervention Program (TIP), volunteers who support people immediately after a tragedy. They organized talking circles with pizza for the vendors who had been there. I’ll note that the TIP support of Street Roots vendors was — and continues to be in subsequent needs — outstanding. We’re grateful.
DIRECTOR’S DESK: Trauma of shelter shooting reverberates through homeless community
It’s been three years since that shooting, but we still talk about that experience. Two men, who were trapped very close to the shooting, subsequently surveyed unhoused people to find out what kinds of non-police first responder systems they wanted when we developed a report, “Believe Our Stories and Listen,” with Portland State University’s Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative.
These men both made ties between their efforts to change the public safety system and that tragic night at the CityTeam shelter, expressing a fear that, given a rough day of mental health, they, too, could be shot.
Unhoused people are overexposed to trauma. The effects accumulate.
Over the past week, several Street Roots ambassadors have talked about meeting Robert Delgado during their outreach in Lents. They are out in Lents for two projects. That is one of the neighborhoods where they survey unhoused people about the COVID-19 vaccines in our work with the Joint Office of Homeless Services and Multnomah County Public Health.
Ambassadors are also working in Lents in a long-term effort to build rapport with people in the neighborhood, where the Portland Street Response pilot is based.
Their work there now is a follow-up to that initial survey. It’s an effort to evaluate the Portland Street Response pilot in collaboration, once again, with PSU’s Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative.
DIRECTOR’S DESK: A democracy that reaches the unhoused
I asked Street Roots Ambassador Program Manager Raven Drake about their encounters with Delgado and also the accumulation of trauma that occurs to unhoused people because they are exposed to violence in outdoor living, including police violence.
Raven remembers Delgado as “super sweet and really funny.” But what surprised me when we talked is that Raven remembers meeting Delgado earlier, in September, in Laurelhurst Park, before city contractors swept that park in the winter. Many people moved to Sunnyside Park, but others dispersed elsewhere, including, Raven said, Lents Park.
As she said this, I thought about how each city-ordered camp sweep that sends a person further into turmoil is another sharp edge breaking off a piece of serenity. As one Street Roots vendor told me after witnessing that CityTeam shooting, “This took a piece of our serenity.”
After a while of living on the streets, some people can become almost numb to the violence, explained Raven. “But the problem with it becoming almost normalized to us is that it affects people a lot deeper in mental health,” Raven told me. And then, “the tragic thing we just witnessed hits us 10 times harder because it’s been given time to fester and churn into something more.”
When Street Roots holds memorials for those among us who die, sometimes people sit and cry, recounting their many losses. It’s all strung together.
This is why we need deep investments in the constructive outcomes. Housing, always, is that constructive investment. Portland Street Response. And, in terms of the areas our city too often approaches with piecemeal destruction, we absolutely need large-scale municipal infrastructure — the garbage services and public bathhouses and everything that elevates public health.
When our public money is spent on approaches that, in their design, add trauma, those traumas accumulate. Robert Delgado was reported to panic at the sight of the police.
“The experience of being near tragic events,” explained Raven, is that “it almost makes us a part of it.”
Kaia Sand is the executive director of Street Roots. You can reach her at kaia@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @mkaiasand
Street Roots is an award-winning weekly publication focusing on economic, environmental and social justice issues. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots. Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today.
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