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On any given day this summer, Raven Greene, a board member of the Elder Homestead neighborhood association, said she saw upward of a dozen encampments – occasionally set up using playground equipment – at Wilson Park.
Needles used to do drugs and other paraphernalia, she said, are often left lying in the grass – just a couple of hundred feet from Wilson Middle School on San Pedro near Gibson.
“The entire summer, that park was unusable for families and children,” Greene told the Journal. “There’s a school right there. And while you can’t shield children from everything, we should not be busing or walking kids past this every day.”
“I don’t feel safe,” she added, noting that many in the neighborhood refrain from walking their dogs or taking their grandchildren to the park because they’re “just too afraid.”
Wilson Park has had its issues for years, but Greene noticed them ramping up following the completion of a renovation project at the park last summer. But now, Albuquerque Public Schools and the city say they’re teaming up to work on the problem.
“Soon, that will be a safe area, without encampments and so forth,” Mayor Tim Keller said during an APS board meeting in mid-August. “But it’s going to take a plan to do that.”
The Albuquerque Police Department will be partnering with APS police to keep tabs on the park, both the city and the district said, with the goal of keeping it clear of encampments. APS will oversee the park during the day and APD will monitor it overnight.
Keller said the city is working to keep parks where there is children’s programming clear of encampments and had tested the process earlier this year at Wells Park. It required about six weeks of 24/7 security, he said, because without sustained monitoring, campers who were forced out would simply return.
“Unfortunately, it was a Herculean effort to get Wells Park free of all of this, but we did it, so we know how to do it,” the mayor said in a meeting with Journal editors and reporters last week.
He said Wilson Park is next on the city’s list. Not only is it next to a school, but it is also home to a city swimming pool.
But keeping a park clear of campers is resource-intensive and Keller said the city needs help with manpower.
The police department currently being understaffed is part of the reason the city requested that the district make an agreement to establish consistent monitoring of the park, APS Chief Operations Officer Gabriella Blakey said in a written statement.
The agreement will also give APS exclusive use of the park during school hours, she said.
“We’re just saying, ‘Look, we can’t do everything by ourselves,’ and wonderfully APS agrees and (says) ‘OK, we’ll pitch in and help. We want this park too,'” Keller said. “So what you’re really seeing behind the scenes is a schedule of cleanup at the park.”
The city has a standing policy for disbanding encampments. Generally, staff give people in the camps at least 72 hours’ notice of the cleanup before coming in and throwing their items away. But the policy allows quicker movement in certain instances. It enables immediate clearing in cases where people are obstructing roads and sidewalks or when they are camping at parks that host organized children’s programming.
Unhoused people are simply escorted off APS property, Blakey said.
But Keller said establishing a policy was only an initial step – “that gets us to like first or second base” – and that implementing it all at once is impossible given the intense staffing needs. He said the city will have to carry it out place by place.
“You can’t unfortunately do it at every park all over the city, not even close,” he said of the around-the-clock monitoring the city did at Wells Park.
Across APS, there are 48 joint use parks and facilities, Blakey said. But as far as encampments, there are “none as bad as Wilson Middle (School).”
Still, there is an issue in some places, including at Washington Middle School Park, Zia Elementary School and the district maintenance and operations complex, which is near Roosevelt Park. The city has stepped up its monitoring at Roosevelt because of that proximity, Blakey said.
In some cases, APS has also turned to fencing to help keep people experiencing homelessness from venturing onto campuses, Superintendent Scott Elder has said – like at Hawthorne Elementary School, which he said has been internally fenced off from a nearby park for that purpose.
Overall, the district spent over $5.4 million on fencing and gates between May 2020 and June of this year.
Such fencing projects have had their challenges though, including funding, supply chain issues for materials, and coming up with the staff to install them. Community members, including district school board members, have also expressed concerns about the projects.
Greene acknowledged that the situation at the park has improved in recent days, but said she still has reservations about the planned solutions.
“I’m going to believe it when I see it, because we have been yelling and yelling and yelling for any kind of help that we can get down here,” she said. “It’s not solved all the way, and it’s definitely going to take some time for the community to trust being able to go back there again.”
