Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 28, 1993 TAG: 9311280093
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
On cold nights in downtown Roanoke, the drunks sometimes flag down passing police cars like New York pedestrians hailing taxis.
"They come up to me and say: `Mr. Ollie, I'm ready to go to jail,' " Roanoke Police Officer L.C. Ollie says.
For the vagrants who live from bottle to bottle as they roam the sidewalks and alleys, jail is just a respite - a warm bed and maybe a meal before their next drunk-in-public arrest.
Authorities say a group of nomadic alcoholics who loiter downtown is the main reason Roanoke has the highest drunk-in-public arrest rate in Virginia.
Last year, city police made 5,365 drunk-in-public arrests. That's twice as many as in Richmond, Norfolk or Virginia Beach. It's more than in Fairfax County, which has eight times the population of Roanoke.
Why does Roanoke hold such a dubious distinction?
"It's not that there is more public intoxication in Roanoke," said Philip Trompeter, a Roanoke judge and chairman of the valley's Drug and Alcohol Abuse Council.
Instead, Trompeter and others say, the city's large number of arrests is due to tougher enforcement by police - especially among the downtown drunks - than in other cities.
Court records show that a relatively small group of chronic alcoholics accounts for a staggering percentage of the total arrests. In 1992, 50 of the most frequently charged men made up about 2,000 arrests.
Some men are arrested more than 100 times a year, gripped by an addiction that spins them in a continuous cycle from the liquor store on Jefferson Street to the jail on Campbell Avenue.
Many of the drunks are also beggars - a population the downtown business community has been trying to evict for years.
Because of concerns from merchants in Roanoke's relatively small and compact downtown area, drunks are more likely to be arrested here than in larger cities.
"A lot of it speaks to the values and tolerance of the community. What is tolerated in certain places is not tolerated in others," said Kim Kimbrough, executive director of Downtown Roanoke Inc., which is leading a public awareness campaign aimed at discouraging handouts to beggars.
"If they're not panhandling, they're drinking or grabbing somebody or cursing like a sailor," Kimbrough said. "They're a public nuisance."
One City Market regular, who asked not to be identified, admitted that drinking put him on the streets. "I'm an alcoholic; that's why I'm out here," he said.
"We hang out here because there's nowhere to go," he said. "I'm just waiting for payday" - the day his disabilities check arrives in a post office box that is his only fixed address.
The World War II veteran accused police and merchants of harassing the street alcoholics.
"I fought for this country. I've got shrapnel in my leg," he said. "I feel like I should be able to go where I want to go."
Although tough enforcement is one reason Roanoke's public drunkenness arrest rate is so high, others say the city has a disproportionate share of the down and out.
As the metropolitan hub of Southwest Virginia, Roanoke draws drunks. Many are attracted by the city's homeless shelters and other charitable services, as well as medical care at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Salem.
And because many drunks subsist on panhandling when their government checks are spent, the City Market's shoppers offer an easy source of income.
"Roanoke has everything they want," said Ollie, who knows many of the men by first name from his 12 years on the City Market beat. "A lot of free services, a lot of good-hearted people, and it's all downtown."
`Then we turn them loose'
Although there are more arrests for public intoxication than any other crime in Roanoke, the people charged hardly ever go to court.
Most of the time, public inebriates are held in the city jail for four to 10 hours, until a magistrate decides they are sober.
"What it amounts to is we bring them in and sober them up, give them a place to sleep, feed them if it's meal time, and then we turn them loose," said Maj. George McMillan of the Roanoke Sheriff's Department, which runs the jail.
Their obligation to the system already fulfilled, the drunks walk free without so much as a court summons.
Some go right back to drinking and get arrested a second time before the night is over, Ollie said.
No one really keeps count of the arrests, though, because in Roanoke, someone's 100th drunk-in-public arrest is treated just like the first.
Public intoxication is a class 4 misdemeanor, carrying a $250 fine as the maximum punishment - not worth the time and trouble of taking the suspects to court.
"Fining them is not a solution because they drink up what little money they have," Roanoke Commonwealth's Attorney Donald Caldwell said.
Virginia has an interdiction statute that allows habitual drunkards to be barred from possessing alcohol. Violators face up to 12 months in jail.
Caldwell and other prosecutors say the law is cumbersome and not time-efficient. Besides, they say, limited jail space is better used for more serious offenders.
After a drunk pulls a stint in a holding cell, the drunk-in-public charge is listed as "dismissed" in records kept in General District Court. The few drunk-in-public charges that actually go to court often accompany a more serious charge - such as assault or trespassing - and usually draw a $15 fine. A vast majority of the downtown drunks are men.
Officials acknowledge that locking up the drunks doesn't solve the long-term problem.
"I don't think anybody is fooling themselves by saying putting them in jail is going to deter them," Caldwell said. "This is just an immediate response to an immediate problem.
"Right now, there don't seem to be any better solutions."
But there should be, says Del. Bernard Cohen, D-Alexandria. Cohen was the patron of a House of Delegates resolution calling for a study of alternative ways to treat the state's public inebriates.
The study found that, of the 60,317 drunk-in-public arrests statewide in 1989, 99 percent of the suspects were released from jail within 24 hours of their arrest. Only 42 were sent to hospitals or other facilities for treatment.
"I think it's one of the worse ways to deal with the problem," Cohen said of locking up public inebriates. "It's very expensive and it doesn't address the rehabilitation of these people."
In 1991, the cost for dealing with public inebriates through Virginia's criminal justice system was $5.5 million, according to the study.
And the cost is going up. From 1986 to 1989, the study found, statewide arrests for public drunkenness increased by 12 percent. Arrests have since dipped because of budget cuts, however.
With most drunks posing little danger to the public, Cohen said, it makes no sense to have them occupying jail space desperately needed for violent offenders.
"We're dealing with it in the criminal justice system, when we should be dealing with it in the public health system," he said.
In fact, the greatest risk the street alcoholics seem to pose is to themselves. Repeated arrests for being drunk in public are often a sign of something worse to come:
In March, James Peters' frozen body was found in the lobby of the Poff federal building during the blizzard. In the eight years before he died of exposure, Peters had been arrested 125 times for being drunk in Roanoke.
In October 1992, Timothy O'Brien hanged himself from a cell door in the Roanoke City Jail after being arrested for public drunkenness. In the week before he died, O'Brien had been arrested four other times on the same charge.
In March 1992, Ervin Henry Lawrence was found dead in a shack at Hobo Jungle, a thickly wooded area named for its inhabitants. Another homeless man confessed to strangling Lawrence because he didn't like the taste of his whiskey. Lawrence had been arrested 44 times for being drunk in public; his killer, 10 times.
If nothing else, putting drunks in jail usually puts them out of harm's way, if only for a few hours.
"It's real easy to say that if we didn't respond to public drunkenness, we would have so much more time to do other things," said Maj. Don Shields of the Roanoke Police Department.
"But this is a problem that we shouldn't ignore. These people need help, and if we leave them out on the street, they're going to get hurt."
When help isn't wanted
Everyone agrees that the downtown alcoholics need long-term treatment for their addictions.
But until they agree to seek help, not much can be done to force them.
Virginia law does not allow courts to order treatment for chronic alcoholics, unless their drinking was responsible for a more serious crime.
If alcoholics decide to seek help on their own, the only public facility in Roanoke is the Alcohol and Drug Rehabilitation Center on Shenandoah Avenue, better known as "Detox."
Eddie Blair, services director for the facility, sees some of the street alcoholics go through a four-day detoxification program. But they usually do it just to dry out after a binge, with no intentions of making long-term recoveries.
In fact, the facility has had to limit admissions of some people. "We felt like we were getting people sober just so they could go out and get drunk again," Blair said.
The City Market alcoholic who asked not to be identified said he has sought treatment numerous times, but has always gone back to drinking.
"You give me a bottle of whiskey, I'll blow my money and drink, drink, drink," he said.
"I don't want to be this way. I fight it every day . . . It's hell."
Other localities have found different ways to deal with public drunkenness.
In Winchester, authorities have seen a reduction in drunk-in-public arrests since the opening of the Starting Point, a public inebriate center where drunks are taken instead of being arrested.
The center cannot hold the inebriates any longer than they would stay in jail. But Joe Walker, director of the Frederick County Division of Court Services, said professionals at the center are better equipped than jailers to start alcoholics on the road to recovery.
"You'd be surprised at the number of what you might call `town drunks' that we have been able to get off alcohol," Walker said.
Similar facilities are located in Charlottesville, Newport News and Virginia Beach.
In Roanoke, it used to be that drunks were required to go to an Honor Court run by now-retired Judge Beverly Fitzpatrick.
That was back when public intoxication carried a potential jail sentence. Fitzpatrick would hang jail time over the men's heads to get them to attend Honor Court every Thursday night - "I didn't care if it was Christmas, Christmas Eve, my birthday or their birthday," he said.
The judge would invite members of Alcoholics Anonymous to give talks, in hopes the men would recognize their own ruined lives in the words of the speaker.
"I've had any number of people tell me that made them sober," Fitzpatrick said. "I still run into people on the street who thank me."
Yet, he said, "I go downtown now and I pass the same men on the street that I saw in Honor Court 13 years ago. They're still walking the streets, and they're still drunk."
The last session of Honor Court was held in 1980, when Fitzpatrick retired.
These days, with violent criminals and crack cocaine overloading the criminal justice system, treating public inebriates is not a top priority.
"With limited resources, we all have to draw the line somewhere," Judge Trompeter said.
"I think it's a little bit grandiose when people have an expectation that somehow, someway, if somebody did something, we will restore this man and he will go back to being an executive at IBM."
By putting drunks in jail, Trompeter said, "At least, from a humanitarian standpoint, this population is offered some degree of monitoring, shelter, compassion and dignity."
Whether alcoholics go to jail or to a treatment program, Ollie says, they usually end up back on his beat at the City Market.
"You could put them in the Hotel Roanoke, the Hilton, anywhere," he said. "But they are going to come back downtown."
by CNB