In the last eight months, officers have raided dozens of encampments and detained hundreds of people. Service providers are concerned about how it will affect their ability to help.
Dallas officials say there are 142 active encampments throughout the city. The police department has started a new team to address the issue through enforcement. Credit: Jeffrey McWhorter
The January storm was on its way, but the cops came first. Police approached a clearing filled with tents less than a mile south of Deep Ellum that winter morning, confronting nearly four dozen people who had settled onto the cracked pavement beneath Interstate 45. Those in the encampment awoke to a fleet of police vehicles parked along the 2500 block of Dawson Street, off Good Latimer Expressway, their belongings being cordoned off behind yellow crime scene tape.
“You are under arrest for prohibited camping; you will be going to jail,” the officers said, again and again. Forty-five people were lined up, hands zip-tied behind their backs, as police jotted down their names. A city skid-steer loader rumbled onto the concrete, clawing up chairs, tents, boxes, carts, food, documents. Those who’d sheltered here watched the process for hours while temperatures dropped and the plastic ties sunk into their wrists. Once the camp was bulldozed, many of their items trashed, they were led into white city vans and carted away a day before wind chill fell into the teens.
The Jan. 22 operation at the Dallas homeless camp made headlines, prompting alarm from service providers and a city statement that acknowledged “coordination gaps.” But it wasn’t the officers’ final time here.
Two months later, on March 17, police zip-tied 38 people—including 10 who’d been detained in the January round-up, according to records obtained by The Lab Report. All were ticketed for prohibited camping and face hundreds of dollars in fines. Most were taken to a city detention center, a short-term holding facility for people who will soon be released or transferred. At least three were booked into the county jail for charges related to possession of drugs or paraphernalia.
And the site is not an outlier.
The Dallas Police Department’s Homeless Outreach Team, or HOT, has detained unsheltered people in at least 61 locations since the team’s creation eight months ago, according to police documents obtained through public record requests. The team, which recently doubled to 12 officers, has placed at least 281 people under arrest in locations across the city, from a wooded patch in Far North Dallas and tawny grass fields in Pleasant Grove to the sidewalks next to Parkland Health on Harry Hines Boulevard.
Leaders of local homeless service organizations call the uptick in enforcement a sea change that they worry impedes efforts to find vulnerable people and permanently get them off Dallas streets. “We are working against ourselves when we do things like this because we actually prolong people’s homelessness,” says Elisabeth Jordan, CEO of the nonprofit The Human Impact, which provides support to people experiencing homelessness. “You can’t just disappear people.”
Dallas police Chief Daniel Comeaux says he launched HOT in response to complaints about street homelessness he heard in community meetings. This is the first dedicated homeless team that department officials can recall, and its supervisors say HOT’s methods are still evolving. “You have a lot of homeless people living on other people’s property,” the chief said during an interview last fall. “We can’t allow that.”
Most people were detained for prohibited camping, a Class C misdemeanor, issued a citation, taken to a city detention center, and now face more than $500 in fines and additional court fees. HOT has ticketed at least 15 people twice, most of whom were found in the same location weeks apart. Many citations have since been upgraded to warrants after people didn’t show up to community court, a branch of the city municipal system that is tailored to adjudicating quality-of-life offenses.
Police officials say the officers assigned to HOT most often visit camps determined to be public safety threats. Records show the homeless team has also carried out enforcement against smaller gatherings, detaining only 1 to 3 people in at least 30 locations. These responses do not always involve service providers.
City and police officials say they first visit the targeted sites to offer resources and shelter, but insist enforcement is an important tool. They say they have a responsibility to keep public spaces orderly while disrupting crime and behavior that keeps people on the streets. HOT has arrested at least 27 people for drug-related offenses, most of which involved possessing a controlled substance or drug paraphernalia, according to the records. Several people had outstanding warrants or warrant holds out of Dallas or nearby cities.
“The city and nonprofits have always done outreach and it’s somewhat successful, but at a point you’ve got to take some enforcement action,” says Dallas police Lt. Wade Dews, who oversees HOT. “With us, it’s outreach through enforcement. Hopefully we disrupt their normal way of living enough to where they start accepting that outreach.”
The Dallas Police Department’s Homeless Outreach Team has detained at least 281 people citywide since its formation in August. Credit: CPAL
The number of people living on the street skyrocketed in Dallas from 2015 to 2020, says Sarah Kahn, president and CEO of the nonprofit Housing Forward, the lead agency responsible for coordinating homelessness response in Dallas and Collin counties. At the problem’s height, as the cost of housing outpaced wage growth, an average of 700 wound up on the street each month, according to Peter Brodsky, the agency’s founding board chair. Emergency shelters ran out of beds; encampments continued cropping up. Housing Forward, Brodsky says, developed “a strategy to provide each individual with the appropriate next step,” like housing or treatment. It broke down silos, coalescing funding, behavioral health specialists, and outreach workers across more than 150 organizations in the two counties.
“There’s a group of people who our system cannot engage,” Kahn says, noting they have significant mental health and substance use issues. “Jail is not the solution for these individuals who needed treatment and also had severe physical conditions that needed to be addressed, so that really forced us to launch this group and say, ‘We can no longer just wait for another system of care to support these individuals. We need to bring everybody together.’”
The years following Housing Forward’s new approach saw annual reductions. The 2025 point in time count—a federally mandated annual census of unsheltered homelessness performed one night each January—found 3,451 people were experiencing homelessness in Dallas and Collin counties, down from 4,570 in 2021. Nearly 16,000 people were provided housing in the region during that span, according to the agency’s data.
In the last five years, Housing Forward has partnered with more than 510 landlords across its service area, Kahn says, and tries to move people into their own home near relatives or their place of employment. Some are offered housing with a person with whom they’ve fostered a relationship on the street.
Without a pathway out of homelessness, Kahn says, enforcement only dispersed the unsheltered instead of reducing the number of camps. In 2024, as rows of tents shot up behind City Hall and near the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library downtown, public safety concerns propelled Housing Forward and Dallas officials to try another new approach. They split downtown into three zones, or “several massive encampments,” Kahn says. A coalition of public and private providers brought healthcare and homeless services directly to each camp, built trust with people, and helped place them in a home, shelter, or treatment facility specific to their needs. Police officers and civilian crews cleared the sites after the unsheltered people were relocated.
The Dallas Police Department’s Homeless Outreach Team is the first dedicated unit created to address encampments in recent history. Credit: Jeffrey McWhorter
In May 2025, service providers declared an “effective end” to street homelessness downtown, which meant no one was living or sleeping in the corridor and response teams would immediately engage any new unhoused people there. Housing Forward, which Dallas County Commissioners and the City Council recently awarded $20 million, hopes to replicate its success downtown in other large encampments across the city. Its first test, an encampment of about 60 people that extends a few hundred yards beneath a highway overpass, is scheduled to close on May 14. (Housing Forward does not publicize the location of these “hot spots” prior to their closure because of concern that it will attract more campers who it cannot accommodate.)
This approach is aligned with national research. Since about 2010, cities across the country have transformed street outreach to prioritize housing and treatment, says Chris Herring, an assistant sociology professor at UCLA and a leading expert on homelessness. But just as social services are expanding, so is the trend of state and federal governments encouraging policing as a primary response to these camps, he says. In 2021, for instance, the Texas Legislature passed a law banning unauthorized camping, putting the pressure on cities to quickly find these people another place to reside.
Herring pointed to the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness’s best practices for addressing encampments, which recommend police not lead the process, but instead “serve as one of many collaborative partners.” People experiencing homelessness encounter more roadblocks to housing if incarcerated, he says. Many landlords don’t accept people with criminal records, and the charges can disqualify them from federal programs and employment opportunities. (Housing Forward says it maintains a list of landlords who accept tenants who have criminal convictions.)
Ultimately, enforcement causes displacement that pushes people “to the urban margins,” Herring says, compounded because they can’t pay their fines and struggle to make their court dates, which can lead to arrest warrants and incarceration. Unsheltered people try to stick together for protection but might opt for locations that are less policed and farther from water, toilets, and sanitation. Outreach workers can lose sight of them. “This is just making their work much, much harder,” Herring says. “There has never been evidence on a citywide population level that any of this policing reduces homelessness or increases shelter uptake.”
“We are working against ourselves when we do things like this because we actually prolong people’s homelessness.”
Elisabeth Jordan, CEO of The Human Impact
Under President Donald Trump, who decried “endemic vagrancy” as a public safety threat, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has targeted funding for cities that prioritize housing-first initiatives instead of clearing encampments and enforcing bans on urban camping, squatting, and loitering. (HUD has faced legal disputes over the overhaul, and judges have blocked some of the funding cuts. Housing Forward received $50 million in federal funding in 2025, up from $19 million in 2021, which Kahn says signals that the agency is following federal rules and goals.)
But records show that police officers have carried out regular enforcement at camps and don’t always alert private service providers beforehand, instead working only with city crews like code enforcement. “They would be inundated by all of our requests,” says Silver Valencia, a police sergeant over one of the team’s squads. “The more we tell people, the more that when we walk into the camp, ‘Well, we knew you were coming.’ Operationally, that can be very deadly.”
Kevin Oden, the city of Dallas’ director of emergency management and crisis response, says most locations involving HOT are known as “exigent,” sites that qualify for a quick response based on public safety criteria: if the city and police determine violence occurred there, if it’s near a school, or if there are hazards that could cause damage to people or property. People at exigent camps get about 24 hours notice before the closure, he says. “In no way, shape, or form do I want to see lots of exigent encampment clearings happen because it’s going to be displacement,” Oden says. Asked why those can’t be treated with Housing Forward’s weekslong service model, he says: “I don’t know that there’s enough resources or housing.”
Oden says there are 142 confirmed encampments in Dallas and related 311 service requests have declined by 35 percent since March 2025.
Valencia believes HOT is here to stay, and Oden says the upcoming FIFA World Cup is not why so many resources are being allocated to address homelessness. Valencia contends the goal is to get people off the street for good; not for jail or displacement. “Our entire mission,” he says, “truly is to help. But we’re still police officers, and we still are expected to take enforcement, and that’s what we’re doing.”
Elisabeth Jordan, CEO of the nonprofit The Human Impact, is concerned about service providers reaching unsheltered people after enforcement efforts. Credit: Jeffrey McWhorter
While police say HOT has worked with service providers since its August formation, nonprofit leaders say they didn’t learn about the new team until dozens of people were zip-tied near Deep Ellum during the Jan. 22 incident.
Jordan, the Human Impact CEO, describes it as the most unsettling event she’s seen in 13 years in street outreach. She arrived at her office building near the camp and saw people with their hands tied behind their backs, their items trashed. One man lost a birth certificate and told her “it felt like starting from ground zero of homelessness.” Others, Jordan says, lost belongings connected to someone who cared for them, such as a bike gifted by a relative.
For Julie Hand, it was a Bible she’d carried since she was baptized two years earlier.
Hand, 49, has been living in and out of shelters and on the street for about six years. The day of the operation was the first time police “had come down so hard,” she recalls. She was given a citation and taken to Austin Street Center, she says, but the shelter was full. She made her way back, as did others—but this time, they set up at a spot that seemed more secretive, nestled among rows of concrete pillars under I-45. Over the following weeks, she alternated between there and a shelter bed. “Now that I have a ticket, ever since then, all we’ve been doing is running around so that we’re not arrested,” she says.
But on March 17, HOT returned, again waking people and zip-tying their hands. Hand says she was visiting someone at the camp that day but had a bed at Austin Street and a badge to prove it. Police weren’t interested in seeing it, she says. “You’re a hot body and that’s all it is,” Hand says of the way she was treated. This time, there was no offer of shelter, she adds, only citations, the city detention center, and the county jail.
She was arrested and taken to the county jail on a charge of possession of less than a gram of methamphetamine, which she says she’d carried for someone at the camp. “It’s my fault,” she says. “I had something on me I shouldn’t have.” She spent about two weeks incarcerated until being bonded out.
Now, she’s tethered to the criminal justice system. She doesn’t have a phone, a home, or an easy way to talk to her lawyer. She also doesn’t know how to get to bond meetings. “That’s a hurricane in itself,” she says. “I have to be there, trying to walk there—I don’t know how to get there.” Her meetings happen at the Lew Sterrett Justice Center, a little over three miles away from Austin Street, on the opposite side of downtown. She was recently accepted for a permanent supportive housing unit after more than a year of waiting; the incarceration, she says, exacerbated anxiety she could lose her housing and SNAP benefits. (A spokesman for Housing Forward says Hand’s “recent arrest should not impact her eventual placement.”)
People on the street are scared, she says, and have scattered to areas of the city that aren’t as heavily policed. “The fear that they’re coming is not zip ties, it’s not the process. It’s the judgment,” Hand says. “There’s no, ‘Oh, you live in shelter?’ There’s no understanding, none.”
On April 23, Hand was cited a third time near Dawson Street. She’s accused of possession of drug paraphernalia and faces an added $346 in fines and court costs, records show. That’s in addition to the $912 she owes for the public camping violations in January and March, both of which were upgraded to warrants after she didn’t appear in community court, according to court records.
When The Lab Report shared Hand’s story and housing concern to police, Valencia, the sergeant, cut in. “How is that our problem?” he asked, emphasizing she committed a crime by possessing meth.
“The city and nonprofits have always done outreach and it’s somewhat successful, but at a point you’ve got to take some enforcement action.”
Dallas police Lt. Wade Dews, who oversees HOT
Dews, the lieutenant, and Valencia say the city offers shelter to people at camps and that police visit sites leading up to enforcement. Officers aim to approach camps during the morning hours, when people are sleeping. Zip ties are necessary, he says, because “if you’re under arrest, you’re under arrest.”
Dews says churches and homeless outreach groups can be lied to, noting they don’t have access to the crime data police do. He contends many organizations “enable these people to live this life.”
The officers point to enforcement efforts that have aided in a murder investigation as well as arrests for individuals wanted for violating parole. In December, officers targeted an encampment under a bridge at 14455 Preston Road in Far North Dallas, which was “infiltrated with gangs.” Police recovered 50 grams of meth, Valencia says. At least 13 people were detained. He says police first built rapport with people there who later brought officers a knife used to kill a 39-year-old woman at the camp a month earlier. HOT has helped with four homicide investigations and two sexual assaults, Dews says.
In March, Dews adds, HOT detained a man at a camp near Parkland who had a parole violation for a murder charge a decade earlier.
Elisabeth Jordan catches up with Julie Hand, a woman who was detained by the new police team for public camping and drug-related charges. Credit: Jeffrey McWhorter
Research has shown people who are unhoused are significantly more likely to be victims of crimes such as theft and assault than the general public. Those who are jailed usually face non-violent charges, such as drug-related offenses, disorder, and petty theft—many of which are considered “survival crimes,” according to the research nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative.
In Dallas, police records indicate HOT cited about 155 people with prohibited camping and no additional charge on first contact. “Most people who are there are truly poor and they need help, they need care, they need assistance,” says Jordan. “They don’t need to be zip-tied, detained, arrested. And I understand that technically it’s legal, but it’s not effective.”
Pastor Wayne Walker, CEO of the homeless resource nonprofit OurCalling since 2009, calls it “infuriating” to work for days, weeks, or months to find someone a home or a bus ticket to reunite with family, only to lose sight of them after a burst of enforcement. “It’s not been as collaborative as we wanted,” he says, adding that if police wish to discuss ways for his organization to help with encampment outreach, “we will meet with them tomorrow.”
“It just sucks,” Walker says, “that we live in a city where there’s not enough beds, people have to sleep outside, and we can’t love our neighbors better than zip ties and harassment.”
Valencia agrees some people are truly in need and could be working with service providers, but says “it doesn’t negate their violation.” Sometimes, police will visit a camp overnight and the next day there’s a new tent, a new face. Still, everyone is detained. “Ignorance is no defense to prosecution,” he says.
Service providers have tried to realign city and police strategies in recent weeks in light of concerns about ramped up enforcement. Housing Forward, the city, and HOT now meet weekly to choose camps for the weekslong service treatment. But Valencia distinguishes locations chosen during those discussions from his team’s daily operations. The Housing Forward model is “one small aspect in the overall process in dealings with encampments,” he says. “They have no bearing on anything else that we do.”
