Do-gooders deploy drones in hunt for homeless hideouts
By Mark Ballard
10 August 2018
In what looks at first like a case of a sledgehammer being used to crack a nut, homeless charity workers in Lincoln have started using a drone to hunt homeless people in wilderness parts of Lincolnshire. Many rough sleepers seek quiet corners of respite from painful lives in faraway places. The last thing they want to learn when they get there, from the drone of rotor blades seeping over their makeshift refuge in the sand dunes, is that you can run but you can’t hide.
This is a dilemma that has concerned social engineers in recent years: how do you help reintegrate people in society when often they are trying to get as far away from it as they can? But the case of the hobo-hunting drone is just an example of the way innovation works; people using their initiative and the tools they have to hand to solve immediate problems.
Mark Simms, chief executive of homeless charity P3, bought a £600 drone with his own cash to stop outreach workers spending so much time scouring the countryside for people who were known to have disappeared into it. You can’t stop a good do-gooder with a good way to do good.
Nor would you necessarily want to. Yet attempts at engineering large-scale solutions to this long-standing problem appear to be failing. The do-gooding aim is ultimately to reintegrate lost people into society. The process starts when an outreach worker plucks someone off the streets or out of the woods.
That work, according to a 2015 study by the homeless charity Crisis, is often undermined by weak and inconsistent systems to support people well enough so they do actually become reconciled with society once they are picked up.
A casual reading of the report suggests that homeless charities would often bung people in bedsits and leave them to it. Their reintegration would fail. Because theirs was not a housing problem. Rough sleeping was a symptom.
A survey at the time found half of rough sleepers had a mental illness. Almost half again suffered from the specific illness of alcoholism. A third had ‘drug problems’. Many slept rough because they had been so desperate to escape abuse and violence that they fled town even though they would have no means of supporting themselves when they got elsewhere. Helping people out of homelessness by bunging them in a bedsit can be like putting people with cardiovascular disease in a hospital bed and telling them to heal themselves. Local authorities don’t have the means, the resources, nor, perhaps, the nous to heal them.
Some places become popular destinations for rough sleepers. Local authorities governing those places don’t want to pick up everyone else’s pieces. They try to get the authorities where they came from to take them back. Those authorities don’t want them, or haven’t designed systems adequate to help them. Authorities, nevertheless, reached a consensus that people should be refused official help in all places but from where they came.
Outreach workers must, meanwhile, try to persuade people who don’t want to be reintegrated, to concede to be reintegrated. They often find themselves in a Mexican stand-off with rough sleepers, Crisis reported, trying to persuade them to go back where they came from. Yet when outreach becomes coercive, it doubles the resolve of some homeless people that they must ‘fight the system’.
Homelessness has meanwhile rocketed. Local authorities recorded a 42 per cent rise in rough sleepers between 2014 and 2016, according to the Institute for Public Policy Research think tank.
It has become not uncommon to see homeless people living in tents in corners and pockets of green spaces in small towns; more evidence of modest innovation. IPPR says homeless people in rural communities pitch tents too, and bed down in barns, outhouses and cars.
It can be hard to help them, reckons the IPPR, because they are dispersed in isolated places over large distances in places with limited transport. Outreach workers are not usually the best resourced. All those dealing with the issue are under-resourced. That is why the recovery programmes are so partial. The easy work is largely covered. Now more so.
< Originally published in Engineering & Technology >