TenHaken calls for ‘tough love’ in addressing nuisance issues downtown

The city of Sioux Falls is taking steps to discourage nuisance behavior downtown, and the mayor and police chief are calling on the public to do their part.

In more than six years, Mayor Paul TenHaken said he has never had as much communication around a single issue as he has with concerns about the increase in street-level disturbances and low-level crime, especially this summer.

“We’ve seen an increase in it. It’s impacting small businesses, our hospitality industry, and it’s particularly difficult in our downtown right now, partly because we have a lot of our services for those folks who are struggling centralized in our downtown,” TenHaken told a packed room Thursday at a City Hall news conference.

“I’ve never gotten more correspondence on any issue. It’s a big one and it’s hot, and that’s why we’re bringing everybody together.”

Business owners, social service organizations and media filled a standing-room-only news conference in which TenHaken and Police Chief Jon Thum detailed steps the city is taking to address what the mayor estimates is 15 percent of people spending time on the street who “don’t want help, they don’t want to get better, they want to take advantage of our community, and that’s the 15 percent I want to focus on.”

He also wants “to have some tough love and different conversations with that 15 percent that are causing a lot of challenges in this town right now,” he said.

TenHaken read from messages he has received from the public, including:

“This increase has affected how and when I spend time downtown, which is quite disappointing,” one wrote. “My out-of-town guests have also noticed.”

Another wrote: “Working downtown, Paul, I have been absolutely appalled at the homeless problem in our beautiful community. The other day I watched a family have to step over a passed-out drunk person on the corner of Phillips and Ninth.”

Business owner Tami Brown of The Spice & Tea Exchange spoke at the news conference and said her store at 328 S. Phillips Ave. increasingly has been affected by the homeless and transient population this summer.

“We do have a few bad actors attempting to change that experience and tear down what we and the downtown community worked so hard to build,” she said. “Customers don’t come in, and sales slow dramatically.”

She has watched shoppers cross the street from her store to avoid walking by those asking for money or camped out on the sidewalk, she said.

For the first time, “my employees started telling me they were intimidated by this influx of bad actors,” Brown said.

A ride around downtown one evening recently revealed people openly drinking and congregating on benches, while a police officer “literally had to run into the street to save this guy from falling down in front of cars,” she said. “They were bathing and doing laundry in the fountains and drinking until they wandered into traffic or passed out on the sidewalk.”

In response, the city has removed some benches around downtown, added dye to the fountain at Eighth Street and Phillips Avenue to combat bathing and doing laundry in it and taken electrical outlets out of commission where people were congregating to charge cellphones, TenHaken said.

“Small tweaks like that,” he said, adding that homeless shelters have places to charge phones.

The city also built an enclosure over landscaping near the Eighth Street bridge that was being used as a restroom and has taken away areas being used as makeshift seating.

The increase in behavior issues has created a challenge for the Sioux Falls Police Department in allocating resources, Thum said.

“Really in many ways, this has dominated our summer,” he said.

Homelessness itself “is not a criminal issue, but bad behavior is,” he added, while noting that “we can’t arrest our way out of issues, and we can’t police our way out of issues.”

An influx in homeless individuals from outside Sioux Falls is contributing, he said. While it already was a poorly kept secret that other South Dakota communities send people to Sioux Falls, a shelter found that from May through July, about 35 percent of people staying there came from 28 states.

“Why? We’re a great city, man, and we’re a very philanthropic city and we’re a compassionate city, and we should be proud of that,” TenHaken said. “But we also have to remember that can create challenges and opportunists who will take advantage of that compassion.”

The community’s role

Opportunists are taking advantage of how easy it has become to ask for and receive money from the public in Sioux Falls, Thum and TenHaken said.

“Our compassion is being taken advantage of,” Thum said, noting he has watched what he called professional panhandlers at work receiving cash from multiple drivers at the same intersection.

“I can tell you the money is going directly toward bottom-shelf alcohol in 99 percent of the situations,” he said.

TenHaken also called on businesses to consider stopping selling bargain-priced booze, noting how after alcohol sales were removed from the Mercato block west of downtown, police calls to the area plummeted. Issues had been decentralized and no longer fueled by intoxicated people congregating in the same area, he said.

“I don’t know what margins are in that stuff, but I know what it’s being used for, and it’s not to mix cocktails at Crawford’s,” he said. “It’s bad stuff.”

From a community perspective, “quit giving out cash,” TenHaken said. “We do not have a cash problem in Sioux Falls.”

There is sufficient access for those in need to food, housing and care for addiction and mental health, he said, pointing to The Link just north of City Hall and noting how many nonprofits are standing by to assist people.

Brown also has seen the public readily hand out donations to people.

“If someone is hungry, there is food. We cannot say that enough,” she said. “It might feel good in the moment to hand over cash, but it exacerbates the problem and actually encourages more bad behavior.”

While school resource officers have added increased manpower downtown, they will be replaced with others patrolling once school resumes, TenHaken said.

When problems are observed, Thum urged the public to report them. It’s also an option to call South Dakota Urban Indian Health at 605-809-5636, which uses a street team to help respond to a situation.

A marketing campaign also might be coming to remind the public not to give money to those soliciting it and instead to support the many nonprofits in a position to help.

“We’re really ringing the alarm bell,” TenHaken said. “We’ve all known it. We’ve all seen it. Now we have to work together.”

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