SEQUIM – The notion that the larger cities of the south Puget Sound or anywhere else are busing homeless people into Clallam County, straining our services and putting our communities at risk, has been around for a long time. Lately, those claims have become more frequent at City Council meetings in Sequim and Port Angeles.
Sequim City Manager Charlie Bush asked Police Sgt. Sean Madison to do what he does best, detective work, and find out if there’s any truth to those claims.
The result of Madison’s investigation is a report published on the City of Sequim’s website. It’s a synopsis of conversations Madison had with experts from multiple agencies locally who deal with homeless individuals.
We asked Sgt. Madison to give us a breakdown of his findings.
“I took that as an opportunity to get a real thermometer testing from all of the local subject matter experts, the people who are on the ground dealing with the homeless population in Port Angeles and Sequim, believing that, if anything like that was happening, those people would know about it. So I contacted a number of those experts and they all told me the same thing, and that is that it’s…they’re not seeing that. If it was happening they would see that. And then they had their take on what it is that they’re seeing as causes of local homelessness. But the point is that, at the end of that, there is no evidence that any other community is sending homeless people onto the Peninsula for the sake of moving them out of their communities. There’s just no evidence of that.”
You can read Madison’s two-page report by clicking here.
(Wikimedia Commons photo)