This article is part of our 2024 contribution to the D.C. Homeless Crisis Reporting Project in collaboration with other local newsrooms. The collective works will be published throughout the week at bit.ly/DCHCRP.
Around 11 a.m. on Sept. 4, a fight broke out in the basement of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church.
The church is home to the Downtown Day Services Center, a key gathering place for homeless people managed by the neighborhood’s Business Improvement District, and things were getting heated in the center’s cafeteria. According to witness accounts forwarded to Loose Lips, a BID outreach worker punched one of the center’s clients in the face after an argument, prompting a brief wrestling match.
“Eventually the BID worker got the client in a front headlock position and began to yell expletives and insults at the client,” according to a statement from a witness shared with the BID and later provided to LL. “That included, ‘What are you going to do now?’ while still having the client in a headlock.”
Security guards and other outreach workers on the scene quickly broke up the scuffle. But the resulting fallout roiled the BID and its partner organizations working on homelessness services downtown, according to internal emails and two sources familiar with the situation. Supervisors at the center raised concerns that “this is the second incident where [the BID worker] physically engaged a client,” and expressed doubt about his “ability to work safely in this environment,” per one email to the BID’s leaders.
Debra Kilpatrick Byrd, then the BID’s director of homeless services, followed up with an email on Sept. 18, arguing that her employee was “defending himself as he was being physically harmed by the consumer.” She added that she’d reported the incident to the police and filed the appropriate internal reports. “Please rest assured that I acknowledge the seriousness of these incidents and they were addressed immediately,” Byrd wrote.
By the next day, Byrd’s tune changed. She acknowledged that she “made an error” and that no reports had been filed either internally or with the Metropolitan Police Department. After gathering “additional details” and reviewing the witness statements submitted to the BID, she chose to put the BID employee on administrative leave. “I deeply regret that your team had this unfortunate experience,” Byrd wrote to another homeless outreach organization that works at the day services center. (An MPD spokesperson tells LL they have no records of any report filed involving this incident at the center.)
Byrd and the worker involved in the scuffle have both left the BID’s employment in the weeks since this back-and-forth, a BID spokesperson tells LL. They declined to comment further, calling it a “personnel matter involving private information.”
The sources familiar with the dispute say the perception within the BID and its partner organizations is that Byrd sought to bury and quickly move past this incident, but that became untenable after video of the scuffle was shared with BID leaders. LL’s sources suspect this whole drama contributed to her departure, particularly when combined with other complaints. Sources say she has been accused on multiple occasions of throwing away a homeless person’s belongings and rifling through their camps when they’re not around. (Byrd’s LinkedIn page says she took a job at the Hillcrest Children and Family Center sometime this month; LL’s attempts to reach her for comment have so far been unsuccessful.)
Reggie Black, advocacy director for the People for Fairness Coalition, tells LL he is unfamiliar with this particular incident but he is not especially surprised by its details. He’s witnessed similar physical altercations between BID workers and unhoused people at the day services center and in Franklin Park, which the BID also manages.
As a person who was once homeless himself, Black sees these incidents as part of a frustrating pattern in the city. Unhoused people are drawn to downtown areas “because there are a lot of government resources and a lot of nonprofits working there,” he says. But these areas are also highly trafficked by office workers and tourists, so the city and businesses also have plenty of motivation to shuffle homeless people out of sight once they get there. Naturally, this results in conflict.
“Residents are already trying to recover from the throes of the trauma brought on by homelessness and poverty,” Black says. “If [these workers] don’t have the necessary training to bring resolutions to these situations, that just creates more trauma.”
Just as these conflicts have escalated, the D.C. Public Library has launched a new push to more aggressively prevent people from sleeping in and around the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library. This has overwhelmingly impacted the many homeless people who gather at the newly renovated downtown space, as library police officers are freshly charged with chasing off anyone resting, lying down, or camping in the building or on the sidewalk under its large overhang. Not coincidentally, LL hears the BID has worked closely with library officials on this effort, launched in mid-August, which has led to several homeless service organizations losing contact with their clients as those folks are pushed elsewhere. Service workers and advocates have complained to LL about the policy’s abrupt rollout.
Amber Harding, executive director of the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, sees the situation unfolding downtown as part of a broader debate in D.C. around a simple question: “Who is the city for?”
On the one hand, you have the city’s residents, many of whom have been forced into housing insecurity or outright homelessness by persistently high rent prices and a shredded social safety net. On the other, you have the city’s government and business institutions, which may have good intentions of helping these residents but are cross-pressured by the imperative to keep downtown attractive to out-of-town visitors. Add in the area’s pandemic-induced struggles, and the fixation of political leaders on reviving downtown, and it’s not hard to see why tensions are rising.
“Ever since the Grants Pass decision [by the U.S. Supreme Court in June], it just seems like that gave police and people at the library the green light to harass the homeless,” says Wesley Thomas, referring to the ruling that allows cities to make it illegal to sleep outside. Thomas lived on the streets in D.C. for nearly three decades before taking a job with the homelessness services group Miriam’s Kitchen. “People slept at MLK longer than any other library, even during the remodeling. Now it just feels, all of a sudden, that people want to harass the homeless population.”
Library officials have framed their work in this area as merely the stepped-up enforcement of long-existing “rules of behavior” for patrons. George Williams, a DCPL spokesperson, would not describe “specific details” of what prompted this change, but he writes in an email that a mixture of “violence, medical emergencies, unsanitary conditions and drug use” at the downtown library raised concerns among its workers. But many involved see the influence of residents of a condo building across the street from the library, who have made frequent complaints about homeless people outside MLK. Additionally, they expect that pressure from the downtown comeback-obsessed Mayor Muriel Bowser, who does not officially control DCPL but does appoint many of its board members, may have played a role. (Bowser’s spokespeople did not respond to a request for comment.)
“The library is not equipped to provide a healthy and safe environment for sleeping and long-term sheltering on library grounds,” Williams writes in the email. “We strive to make the library a welcoming, safe, and clean space for everyone.”
Williams adds that the library is working with D.C. human service agencies, outreach organizations, and the BID to “connect people with resources” as it removes them from the library grounds, but none of the formerly unhoused people, advocates or homeless service workers to speak with LL believe that’s actually happening. One outreach worker, who requested anonymity to protect relationships with city officials, remembers being particularly galled at watching DCPL public safety officers force people gathered under the library’s overhang to move even though it was close to midnight and pouring rain. The irony that this is all happening just across the street from the Catholic Charities’ statue depicting Jesus as a homeless man sleeping on a bench is not lost on anyone involved.
“I don’t know why they view that space under the awning as a public safety hazard,” Black says, noting it has long been a popular place for people to escape the elements. “Our shelters are pretty much at capacity right now. We haven’t had a freeze yet to activate more shelter [from the city]. We’re constantly asking ourselves: ‘Well, where can people go?’”
A presentation prepared for library staff describing the new policy, which was provided to LL, notes that “funding permitting, [DCPL] will have overnight patrols” for the near future to “ensure the area around the building remains clear for healthy and safety reasons.” The presentation, titled “Welcoming Everyone at MLK,” lists the goal of this new focus as “a change in behavior around MLK.” Anyone who refuses to leave could be issued a notice barring them from the library. They could also be arrested if they repeatedly violate notices to stay away, the presentation says.
“The fear is that this is going to lead to people being criminalized and having people intersect more with the criminal legal system,” says Kate Coventry, a member of the city’s Interagency Council on Homelessness and deputy director of the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute. “And that does nothing to end homelessness. It can actually make whatever situation you’re in worse.”
Advocates are sensitive to the library’s need to protect its own staff, many of whom don’t have backgrounds in social services, but this latest enforcement push strikes them as overly punitive. For instance, the library is also putting new limits on what personal belongings people can bring into MLK, and officers are moving to throw away items that are left unattended. For a person who carries everything they own with them at all times, this policy is hugely problematic. Additionally, many people without stable housing rely on MLK’s Wi-Fi network to get online even when the library’s closed. Now they’re being pushed away from that access amid this enforcement blitz.
Perhaps the biggest fear, however, is that DCPL could expand these policies across the entire system. Williams, the library spokesperson, calls the current enforcement actions merely the result of “interim guidance” ahead of a full update of DCPL’s rules of behavior that is currently ongoing. After a “months-long process,” DCPL will update those rules to match “our purpose, core values and trauma-informed practices,” he says. But those who have watched this situation unfold downtown have to wonder whether the process won’t simply codify attempts to push away homeless people.
“Libraries have long been this safe space for folks in the homeless community,” says Andy Wassenich, policy director at Miriam’s Kitchen. “It’s a government building, it’s well-lit, 24/7. Even if it’s not the safest place, it’s certainly safer than anywhere else. And for that not to be the case anymore, that would be really sad.”