Glens Falls Chronicle Serving the Glens Falls/Lake George region; Warren, Washington and northern Saratoga counties since 1980
By Cathy DeDe & Ben Westcott, Chronicle Managing Editor & Staff Writer
Groups of people hanging out all day in City Park, sleeping on benches, congregating, often loudly, around the bricked half-circle sidewalk on Maple Street that is a main pathway to Crandall Public Library was noticeable all summer and has continued into the fall.
“I’d say there’s about two dozen people that make up this group. It changes. You’ll see about a dozen there” at any time, Mayor Bill Collins told The Chronicle.
“It’s not that they’re homeless,” he says. “Many of them have a place to sleep, and they know what all the services are that are available, but they are failing, for lack of a better word, they are failing at life.”
“They’ve been thrown out of one or all service agencies” — “sanctioned,” he says, typically for breaking the rules.
“They’re not transients. These are people that are born and bred here in Warren, Washington, northern Saratoga counties.”
“We’re certainly getting calls saying, ‘I don’t like seeing these people,’” Mayor Collins says, and such comments as “They’re loud, they’re swearing, they’re doing illegal things. I can’t get to the library with my 12-yearold daughter without exposing her to these people.”
The mayor said that from May to September, the police recorded more than 200 blotter calls and police walkthroughs of City Park, including “one incidence of violence” — a knife stabbing between two women acquaintances, both under 18, “over a boyfriend,” he said. He did not have details on where that stands now.
Police Chief Jared Smith reported for those five months four arrests for disorderly conduct, two arrests for harassment, six warnings for remaining in the park after dusk, four for open container, three for smoking, and eight arrests on warrants “discovered on routine ID checks.”
“But it’s not illegal to hang out in that public park all day long,” Mayor Collins adds. “It’s not illegal to be vulgar. It’s not illegal to yell even obscenities at people.
For it to be actionable disorderly conduct, “there has to be a victim. We need to have a person report it,” or for an officer to witness the offense first-hand.
He adds, “You can’t arrest your way out of this.”
The mayor says it’s a phenomenon regionally — in Saratoga and Burlington, Vt. — and “in society in general.”
Mayor Collins says he interacts with the groups “every day, in the morning and at night,” on his way to and from City Hall. He said he calls them out on behavior such as smoking or foul language, moves them along himself if they are in the gazebo and calls in the police to follow up, offers life advice on occasion.
Urges community: Call it in He cites the May-September police report, a total of “213 actions in 153 days, not counting what our social worker or I, the Mayor, are doing” — formally in the case of Police Social Worker Darlene Hafner’s daily efforts, and informally in the Mayor’s own interactions with the group.
“That is saying that we are addressing it,” the Mayor says. But I do appreciate that you, community member, are frustrated.”
He says, “If you’re uncomfortable and you’re feeling threatened in any way, call right away. I don’t care if it’s a legal offense or not. It gets us over there one more time, and we want to be over there, and we want to help you to feel as comfortable as we can.
“Can I arrest them for swearing in front of you, or even if it’s swearing at you? I can’t. And, if they have done something that is arrestable, I need you to help me, fill out a report, and I need you to help me follow up with that.”
We don’t want to be a sanctuary city where we’re providing services to make this the favorite hangout of all the 600 people that we just identified might be struggling here in Glens Falls, but I also don’t want to be that guy who’s pushing people, just either putting them in jail or pushing them out of my park to go and just scatter throughout the community, either.”
The Mayor hopes to engage social services providers, non-profits, church groups and others “to engage these folks on an ongoing basis,” to be ready, “if they’ve reached a bottom that day, they want help, and they’re willing to look in the mirror, that somebody’s around that could provide those services.
“I also am hoping maybe it makes them a little uncomfortable.
“I don’t want that to be the most comfortable place for them to hang out, but I also don’t want to be the person who’s rushing them out.
“These folks do exist. They’re having a bad day, and they come to hang out with their friends. They just lost their job, they lost the brakes on the car, and this is the place that they’re hanging out.
“So I want to do both. I want to engage them, and I wouldn’t mind it if it was a little less comfortable place.” “I think I’m trying to do a great job as mayor. I don’t have any delusions that I can solve this societal problem. It is growing, and we need to do everything we can to help and get those services to those people as best we can.
“We also need our park to not be the most popular hangout place while we wait for them to hit a bottom.”
In August, the Glens Falls Common Council changed the “dusk to dawn” rule for hours that parks are open in the City to include City Park, which was previously explicitly excluded from the code.
The City and Crandall Library have locked or shut off power to outlets around the City Park bandstand, on streetlights and on the exterior of the Library. These were being used to charge phones “and even operate a coffee pod machine.”
Crandall Library reduced the reach of its free WiFi into the park.
Security cameras were added, adjusted and increased, per a report from the City.
The mayor said a “very rough” estimate is there are about 200 homeless or unhoused individuals around Glens Falls. That’s not hard data, but anecdotal, he urges, based on individuals who used Open Door’s Code Blue emergency shelter over the prior two winters.
He estimates twice as many — again, unscientifically — “in and out of homelessness, or on the rocks.”
GF Police Chief: What we can and can’t do
Glens Falls Police Chief Jared Smith told The Chronicle, via email, that his goal regarding so-called “dayspenders” in Glens Falls City Park “is to protect public safety.
“We are doing this in two ways: We attempt to find services for those who need them and are ready to accept them.” Meanwhile, “the record shows that the department is prepared to take law enforcement action when that is appropriate.”
Chief Smith said, “A confusing part about disorderly conduct that most don’t understand is that there needs to be a victim, a member of the public willing to call, then willing to follow up and go to court to testify to what they witnessed.
“Most of the complaints we receive that are not enforceable are what most people refer to mistakenly as “loitering.”
Citing state penal law, he said, “Loitering is not ‘hanging out.’…Simply being in the park during the hours that it is open is not illegal.”
Copyright © 2024 Lone Oak Publishing Co., Inc. All Rights Reserved
