Anchorage testifier says camping-ban service acceptance has fallen to 2.6%

Four people accepted services out of 155 who voluntarily complied with Anchorage's camping ordinance in the month ending July 31, public commenter Jamie Lopez told the Anchorage Assembly's Housing and Homelessness Committee on Wednesday. That is a 2.6% acceptance rate, Lopez said. "It's not getting better, it's getting worse," he said.

The administration's annual report to the Assembly covers 1,085 documented field contacts between August 2025 and June 2026, of which 88.7 percent ended in voluntary compliance, 7.5 percent of compliant people accepted a services referral, and 123 contacts, or 11.3 percent, resulted in arrest. That is 2.6 percent against 7.5 percent. Lopez did not say where his monthly numbers came from.

The Assembly adopted the camping ordinance, AO 2025-74(S-2), on July 15, 2025, making camping on protected premises, a list of sites named in the code, a class B misdemeanor, though police could not charge under the new offenses until Sept. 12, 2025. Refusing to comply with a warning makes it a class A misdemeanor.

Lopez, who identified himself as an East Anchorage resident formerly with the Coalition for the Homeless, said the officer is the obstacle. "But being a police officer is a barrier to helping people. And so when you attach services to police officers, it's going to fail," he said. He called the approach trauma-induced rather than trauma-informed, saying it was "no real surprise why your numbers are going down when you drive people like cattle endlessly and then you expect them to accept services from somebody in uniform."

The Anchorage Police Department takes the opposite view on its dashboard, the Camping and Fire Ordinance Community Progress Report. Asked whether low arrest numbers mean the ordinance is not working, it answers no and says: "The early data shows most people are complying voluntarily or accepting services, which is the best outcome for everyone." It says both ordinances are "still in the early stages" and that APD's "priority has been education and outreach."

Steve Williams, director of diversion programming at APD, told the committee the department is building on police contact rather than stepping back. "This is going to be starting next week, the 23rd. It'll be launched in a phased approach," Williams said of a pre-arrest deflection program, which offers treatment at the point of contact instead of arrest, beginning with mobile intervention teams before going patrol-wide. The model, he said, uses "the leverage of the criminal justice system."

The committee took no action on the ordinance.