Monday, April 23, 2007

Downtown's Dump

Yesterday I was downtown with some clients and saw something disturbing. A Jefferon County sherrif's deputy was dropping someone off at the New Life Evangelistic Center along with their belongings.

Whenever I have heard St. Louis City officials address the topic of homelessness, they always mention that we should encourage other areas to establish services to assist the homeless so that they all don't have to come to downtown St. Louis.

I would encourage all readers of this post (both of you) to drop the following people a line. In reading the Jefferson County web page a bit, they discuss the same crap that any other county website does, providing services to residents and the like. In this case, the service is a ride in a police car across 2 different county lines so that the service becomes our problem.

All this aside, Downtown is still the place to be.

Jeferson County Sheriff

Oliver "Glen" Boyer

Jefferson County Commissioner

Chuck Banks

6 comments:

Amy said...

I live within walking distance of NLEC and I think this is disgusting. It's not fair to the residents of downtown St. Louis, and it's certainly not fair to the homeless persons they're dropping off down here. I'm sending an email to both officers, not that I expect anything to come of it. But it may help if they realize that they're not going unnoticed.

Anonymous said...

Mayor Slay would be interested in hearing about what you saw - send him an e-mail at mayorslay@mayorslay.com

This should NOT be happening!

cbanks said...

Sorry, I don't buy it. We have several missions and shelters in Jeffco that are vacant or near vacant. Sheriff Boyer would not let a Deputy drive all the way to the lou when we have space here. We care about our homeless and have very few!

Chris Grus said...

Ah, the need for photographs has already been pointed out to me. As a real estate broker though, how professional would it have been to stop working to get photos. Hmm. Regardless of whether CBanks buys it or not, I saw it. I'm not one to speculate on motive, I just know what I saw.

Anonymous said...

I'll be sending emails to the folks in Jefferson County tomorrow. Is this even legal for law enforcement to do?
On YouTube I saw an alderman candidate harshly say (paraprase) I will go after Larry Rice for any code violation... helping people as he perports (sp?) to do.
I can assure that candidate that yes, he has helped plenty - he just needs a different location now. As a donator I think he would be open to that.

Anonymous said...

Sorry, for the additional comment but I am in my forties. Years ago, the gossip was always that people were dumped there.

Other areas don't want the homeless even if they have shelters. You can't mandate they stay there out of sight in the daytime.