On March 24, University student Alohilani Wright was preparing to leave her Ferry Alley duplex, but she didn’t feel safe going out through the front door.
A handful of transients were loitering on the porch.
Wright didn’t want to wait for them to go away, so she climbed out the window and called the police.
“It’s happened multiple times, not just to me but to my roommates too,” Wright said. “They just sit on our porch and talk and drink and smoke. We never go past them, so we always have to climb out our window and call the cops.”
Randy Ellis, a police officer with the Eugene Police Department, responded to the call. “I ended up getting in a fight with a guy who has a knife and charging him with resisting arrest and carrying a weapon,” he said.
A string of similar complaints from University students has led Ellis to believe that the unemployed vagrants who wander on or near campus might seem simply amusing and eccentric, but some have presented a danger to students in the area.
Charles Macy, the man Ellis arrested on Ferry Alley March 24, already had charges of burglary, assault, resisting arrest, public indecency, harassment, offensive physical contact, menacing, robbery and violation of a restraining order on his record.
According to EPD Lt. Jennifer Bills, the harmless unemployed man on the street does exist in large numbers in other parts of the city, but the criminal category is more prolific in the West University area, probably in part because there is never a shortage of beer cans in the neighborhood.
“They turn the cans in for money,” Bills said.
Lynn Antis, assistant director at the homeless shelter Eugene Mission in West Eugene, said the “wealth of cans and bottles” and the many pieces of furniture students throw in trash bins are “attractive” objects to wanderers.
For the homeless who are looking only for food and a place to sleep, visiting shelters like Eugene Mission is the easiest option. But for those who are also addicted to drugs or alcohol, finding a place to stay isn’t so simple.
“If they’re drunk, if they’re under the influence of drugs, they’re not admitted,” Antis said. “Anybody who’s in an addictive kind of state that we wouldn’t allow in here have a greater propensity to become violent because of withdrawal issues.”
More violent homeless people may in turn end up in the University’s surrounding neighborhoods, searching for money or a place to stay.
On March 18, almost a week before Wright called the police to complain about the raucous transients outside her house, her roommate Amanda Halford, a Lane Community College student, saw the group lounging on the porch. She locked the door and called the police, afraid to leave the house. But she was already late for her history final at LCC, so she opened the back window and snuck out to her car.
“I was just like, ‘I don’t want to deal with them right now,’” Halford said.
Bills said many homeless people also have co-occurring disorders: They may suffer from both a mental disorder and a dependency on alcohol or drugs.
“These people are not cool, not a novelty. They are mentally ill,” she said. “You don’t treat people with cancer like they’re a cool novelty.”
Antis doesn’t visit the University area much, but in any circumstance, “it’s not fair to categorize any people. Homeless people aren’t all alike. Some of them have those issues, some of them get violent, but violence is something that we almost never see at the Mission.”
Richie Weinman, a Eugene city official and co-chair of Project Homeless Connect for Lane County, also said to keep in mind that the violent homeless people in Eugene are a very small minority.
“Fifteen percent of homeless people here are chronically homeless, and of those, a significant majority of them are trying to fly under the radar and are not harming anybody else,” Weinman said. “There are those who are indeed suffering from some demons and they do significantly cost our community in a variety of ways, and that’s who the cops see. But it doesn’t take a lot of people to cause a lot of trouble.”
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