Clark County’s Community Court ‘way different from regular court’, sees success in helping the homeless

It’s been one year since the launch of Clark County Community Court to connect homeless people with resources rather than punish them for living outside. While Seattle deemed a similar effort a failure and shut it down, Clark County Community Court seems to be making headway. Almost half of all eligible participants graduate, and half of those are going directly into housing, according to the city of Vancouver.

The joint effort between Clark County District Court and the city of Vancouver has received Clark County mental health sales tax funds, as well as state dollars. Vancouver officials consider the program such a success they agreed to let the court move into a city-owned building at 5107 E. Fourth Plain Blvd., which will expand the court’s capacity.

The most common reasons people appear in Community Court are for unlawful camping or storage of personal property in public, but other eligible offenses include trespassing, disorderly conduct, park curfew violations, urinating in public and unlawful bus conduct.

After a pandemic slump, the city ramped up its use of camping-related citations in the past year to help people who won’t help themselves. Community Court can require their participation in such services as health care and housing assistance, officials said.

“The traditional court process really gave them no support,” city prosecutor Kevin McClure said. “We’re attempting to give them help.”

Fixing a ‘vicious cycle’

Community Court sessions occur in a space that looks more like a classroom than a courtroom. The judge, prosecutor, defense attorney and defendant sit together at a paint-stained table in a small room at Recovery Cafe, a nonprofit on Fourth Plain Boulevard that helps people recover from addiction.

“It’s a more informal setting. There’s less distinction between the parties. The judge isn’t sitting up on a pedestal wearing a robe. They’re not wearing a robe at all. You’re sitting at the same table,” said Christie Emrich, who leads Vancouver Defenders, which represents participants in Community Court.

It’s a much better environment for people than a courtroom, Emrich said, especially for those who remember how the city used to handle homelessness-related offenses.

Starting in 2016, the city of Vancouver escalated its use of citations for camping. In 2018, the city issued almost six times as many citations it did in 2015.

“Prepandemic, the city was routinely charging these crimes,” Emrich said. “Defendants were regularly being arrested, serving one or two days in custody and being released, maybe placed on probation. It was a pretty vicious cycle.”

Most people who received citations for camping often failed to show up for their court dates, Emrich said, because they lacked working phones or reliable transportation, and then ended up arrested.

“They would lose their belongings. They would come out of 48 hours of being in jail with nothing and have to start over again. Maybe they lost their ID, their money, their food stamp card, their shelter,” Emrich said. “The damage it did to individuals was extreme.”

Unlike traditional court, people can receive help with transportation to and from Community Court. Instead of serving jail time or paying fines, participants serve on work crews tending gardens to supply the Clark County Food Bank, and have a chance to wash their clothes and take a shower, Emrich said.

If people fail to appear, the court will often give them a chance to come back and have their warrants quashed, given that being homeless can make it harder to show up for appointments, said Beth Robinson, therapeutic specialty courts coordinator.

Citations fall, rise

Once the pandemic hit, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended against removing homeless camps because people needed to isolate in place. The number of camping citations in Vancouver quickly fell off. Officers only issued nine between 2021 and 2022.

That number picked up in 2023 for a couple of reasons. Clark County Community Court opened in April of that year. Then, in November 2023, the Vancouver City Council declared homelessness to be an emergency and empowered all officers — not just those on the city’s homeless assistance and resource team — to issue tickets for camping and related violations. Vancouver police officers issued 109 citations for camping and related violations in 2023, about half the number of citations officers issued in the years before the pandemic.

Officers referred 130 people to Community Court in its first year of operation, April 2023 to April 2024. Excluding those who are currently participating in Community Court, 42 percent of people who entered the court have graduated.

That’s a much higher rate than Seattle’s Community Court, where only 22 percent of people graduated or engaged with services, according to the Seattle City Attorney’s Office. As a result, Seattle shut down the court in 2023 after three years of operation.

People who went through Seattle’s Community Court were also more likely to commit a crime after participating than people in pre-filing diversion.

Clark County’s Community Court does not have data comparing recidivism rates in Community Court and traditional court. However, Emrich and McClure said they believe people will be less likely to reoffend after Community Court because most people leave housed.

As of December (the most recent data collected by the city), 52 percent of graduates went into some sort of housing.

Sonja Rainwater, a woman with a gentle voice and lavender hair, said participating in Community Court is getting her closer to housing after more than three years on the streets, where she often feels lonely and scared.

She was nervous when an officer handed her a camping citation, she said, but now she’s grateful for it.

“I never thought I’d experience homelessness. But as I’m going through this, I’m learning. I’m seeing what my next steps are in life,” she said. “There are so many different resources that are here to help you.”

Rainwater hopes Community Court will get her housing and a job that will let her feel a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day. When that happens, she wants to create a food cart to feed others living on the street.

Anderson said services through Community Court have been helping him find housing — an effort he wasn’t willing to make when he was on the streets. In the future, he hopes to go back to Clark College to pursue his dream of being a therapist and build up art supplies he’s lost over time.

Although he’s not exactly glad he received the citation for camping, he sees the benefit, he said.

“It’s kept me on track,” he said.