Domestic violence, elder abuse, and housing insecurity in Los Alamos
Domestic violence, elder abuse, and housing insecurity in Los Alamos
Part 3: “They Have Nowhere to Go”: The law-enforcement angle
Published 1/25/2024
Story by Stephanie Nakhleh
Photographs by Minesh Bacrania
This is the third in a series on homelessness and housing insecurity in Los Alamos County. The first two articles can be found here.
When I asked Los Alamos Police Department Chief Dino Sgambellone to sit with me to discuss the intersection of homelessness and police, I knew we weren’t going to talk about encampment clearing: homelessness in Los Alamos doesn’t look like encampments, it looks more like couch surfing, doubling up, and living quietly in cars, hoping to escape notice. I expected us to talk about parking lot owners calling the police to clear the lots of overnight sleepers. What I did not expect was to see the probation officer and domestic-violence victim assistant sit at the table with us.
“Usually, my clients are the ones that can't go back home, so either they're couch surfing, not having anywhere to go, or staying with relatives if possible,” said the Los Alamos County Victim Assistant, who works with the Los Alamos Police Department. “I get some here and there who don't even have family. They have nowhere to go, they are living in the mountains.”
At the request of Chief Sgambellone, the victim assistant will only be referred to by her title (VA), for her protection. I sat with her, Chief Sgambellone, and probation officer Monica Schwiner to discuss how they look at Los Alamos housing insecurity through the lens of their respective jobs. The issue of domestic violence dominated the conversation.
Abused and facing homelessness
In Los Alamos, housing insecurity comes with the territory of domestic violence, explained the VA. In other cities, a partner escaping abuse may be able to find alternate housing, but Los Alamos has such a critical lack of housing that there’s nowhere to go. Unsurprisingly, this hits low-income-earners hardest.
“We only have two apartment complexes in our community that take Section 8,” said the VA, referring to the Housing Choice Voucher Program, a form of rental assistance. “A lot of our local apartment agencies did away with it. So that was a big hit to the individuals who used Section 8. If you can’t even afford Section 8, then you end up with the couch surfers or the individuals who are trying to roommate together with other families, doubling up. The clients I work with, that’s one of the big things they face, because they’re going from two incomes to one, and they just can’t afford it.”
She described a typical situation: a couple living together, each contributing to the rent. An argument turns violent, one is arrested, and a court order forbids the abuser from returning to the home. The abuse survivor, who can’t make the rent without the abuser’s paycheck, ends up unhoused.
Asked if this means people are sometimes forced to stay in dangerous situations, the VA said, “One hundred percent, yes. In Los Alamos, yes. I do see a lot of my caseloads where a victim has to stay in the home just because of the financial means of it, until they can either get a secondary job or enough income to move somewhere.”
Elderly and at Risk
Readers may picture a young couple, flexible in their prospects, but that’s not the typical Los Alamos scenario, she said. “What I see a lot is the elderly who don't even have family,” she said. Without family, often socially isolated, nobody is looking out for them. She described one older couple she began working with after one partner was booked on a domestic-violence charge. “I started getting to know their background: Is this a pattern? Is this a one-time occurrence? This was a couple who separated for a little bit. I was able to provide the tools, if they went back in the home, of safety planning.” Because so many victims in Los Alamos have nowhere to go, such “safety planning” is an important tool for helping couples at risk for violence.
“Eventually they began a relationship again,” she said of the couple, and they stayed together until the wife passed away. After her death, the husband “started excessively spiraling downhill. We started getting calls of erratic behavior.” The VA began working with Los Alamos County’s Social Services program to help the husband. One of the agencies they reached out to for assistance was Adult Protective Services in the state’s Aging and Long Term Services Department. I contacted APS to understand the scope of their services and their spokesperson responded with the following statement:
Adult Protective Services (APS) investigates allegations of abuse, neglect, and exploitation of vulnerable adults in the state of New Mexico. As part of an investigation, case workers will assist in providing referrals for services, and housing may be one of the options.
APS works to refer adults to the local resources for housing insecurity, when applicable. If the local options are limited or at capacity, APS will assist with short-term housing, such as when an adult needs to go into a higher level of care such as a nursing home or assisted living facility.
Each case APS investigates has its own set of unique circumstances and we work to engage, empower, and educate clients while fostering their self-determination and personal choice.
Long-term housing options are an issue throughout the state of New Mexico and APS also advocates at the local and legislative level for affordable housing and social safety net options.
The APS website describes itself as “the last resort for victims of elder abuse and younger adults with severe disabilities, serving as the ‘safety net for the safety net.’”
As with so many safety nets in New Mexico, this one seems to have jagged holes: “We called APS numerous times and they never took the case. They never took the case,” the VA said. Without that intervention, “It took almost a year to get this person the proper treatment. It took so long to get him where he needed to be.”
Chief Sgambellone echoed her frustration. “I don't want to rip on any particular agency, but there's people we deal with where clearly something's going on there, but as long as they're feeding themselves and not living in squalor, [APS] doesn't get involved,” he said.
Financial abuse of elders is a problem in Los Alamos. A person can go from housed to unhoused quickly if their assets are drained. “It’s a vulnerable population for us,” the Chief said. “We have a lot of elderly people who have a lot of money, so we’re dealing with folks that try to take advantage of that.”
Schwiner, the probation officer, sees this frequently. Family members report that a relative with dementia is being swindled, but when APS evaluates, their definition of “competent to make decisions” differs from the family’s. If the elder “can tell you their name, age, phone number, address, and that they were wanting to give this caregiver whatever they gave them,” then APS will not intervene, Schwiner said, which is frustrating because APS is designed to protect vulnerable adults from financial abuse.
Seniors with concerned family probably at least have a place to land in the event they lose housing. But elderly residents without family, such as the man whose wife died, are more vulnerable to homelessness. During the year that the VA and Social Services were working with him, his bills were often going unpaid, said the Chief. Because the man was facing utilities shutoff, the Chief talked to the Los Alamos Department of Public Utilities to learn more. “I was curious about how that works. How do we do that when it's winter time, or they're on oxygen? How do we as a government make those types of decisions?” DPU explained that there are several utility-assistance programs to help customers avoid shutoff, and also that there is a winter moratorium: DPU will not turn off utilities in the cold months. The bills pile up, however. To avoid a utility shutoff, they must be paid when the weather turns warm.
Eventually the social-service agencies and DPU had run through all the bill-paying options for the man. “There were no other entities willing to pick that up,” said the Chief.
As the three narrated this man’s story, they emphasized that he could be anyone. His struggles are not unique. “I think there was a point where he worked,” said the VA. “And then he became disabled and wasn't able to work, and also had some mental-health issues.” The death of his wife meant not only a worsening of his mental state, and an end to the secondary income, but also an end to the bill-paying. He had never managed personal finances. “That's where it became really hard for him, you know?” said the VA. “What I see a lot up here is when it becomes hard, people use other coping mechanisms, drinking, or using, or whatever that looks like. And then you get notices on your door, ‘your electricity is going to be turned off.’ The County will allow a certain amount of time to help bills get paid, and sometimes they're very generous. But those are short-term fixes. People think they're just going to go on for years, and that's just not the case. Because there's multiple people, it’s not just this person. There's multiple people that need help.”
“Clearances cannot be held over someone’s head”
Every city has residents who need help, but not every city has a national laboratory. A job at Los Alamos National Laboratory does not immunize people from problems, said the Chief. In fact, it can bring a unique set of problems.
“It was shortly after I got here, I've been here about 10 years, that one of the officers came to me and said, ‘I just dealt with a spouse of a person who works at the Lab. English was a second language, she has no family here, they moved from another country, she's in a violent situation. What does she do? Who does she reach out to? And then how does she communicate with them, because she doesn't even speak English?’”
As someone new to Los Alamos, “That really hit home to me,” said the Chief. “I don't want to dump all that on the Lab but the reality is, we do bring in a lot of folks from other areas, they have no support system, they don't speak English. It's hard enough to get out of those situations when you have resources, and many women choose not to even when they're financially independent. Take all that out of it and then this person has nothing, no family, doesn't speak English, doesn't have an income: What do they do? And that’s where the VA comes in.”
It’s not just immigrants who are at risk, said the VA. Security clearances, held by a large number of Los Alamos residents, can be used as cudgels. “I’ll lose my clearance” can become a threat or a plea to manipulate others, she said. In some cases, a Lab employee may find their teen has brought drugs into the house, and rather than risk losing their clearance, they’ll turn the child out. But most of the time, it’s abuse victims who bear the brunt of the manipulation, said the VA. “In my case, if I've had people call and say that they're getting extremely abused, and they're afraid to call it in, I say: that’s not okay, Q clearances cannot be held over somebody's head. It's building that trust within the community, so people can come forward.”
The police don’t have a say over clearances, and can’t guarantee they won’t be revoked, said the Chief. “There are certain levels of conduct that, yeah, you’re going to lose your clearance,” he said. But the Lab has a fair process on clearances, added Schwiner. “They have to go through so many hoops to ensure that they're working on it. Whether [an employee] gets it suspended for a small amount of time, or they have to work through whatever to get it back, it doesn't necessarily mean that the clearance is gone forever.”
Mental healthcare shortfalls
Clearances entering into a domestic violence situation may be fairly unique to Los Alamos, but mental-health problems are a universal risk factor for homelessness. The dramatic shortage of mental-health services is endemic to New Mexico and plays out in our community much the same as it does in others.
One of her first cases in Los Alamos was a mentally-ill man who was arrested three times for assault on a family member, said the VA. He went through mental-competency hearings to determine if he could stand for trial and was found incompetent each time. “The case had to be dismissed,” said the VA. “They couldn't move forward in the case because of the mental-health issues. So we were back at square one. Every time.”
What the man needed was not jail, but a behavioral-health facility, she said. The street is often where people in this situation end up, but the VA and Los Alamos Social Services worked to find a facility to take him. “The only place we could find was in Colorado. So we were looking out of state now because nobody in the state of New Mexico would take this individual long term.”
New Mexico has notoriously poor behavioral-health services, a fact that struck the Chief when he first moved here. “I’m from Ohio and my perspective is that it was easier to help people suffering from mental health disorders [there] than it is here in New Mexico,” he said, adding that it’s simpler in many states to assign a vulnerable person a guardian or get them into inpatient treatment.
In Los Alamos, the state’s lack of services combines with the county’s lack of housing to create a situation ripe for homelessness. “They're ready to lose their house, their home, they have no electricity,” said the VA, speaking of clients struggling with mental illness and dementia. “A lot of them are facing those housing issues where they're getting their utilities turned off, but Adult Protective Services will show up and say, ‘Everything’s fine.’”
Where the unhoused live
Often, said the Chief, Los Alamos residents who lose housing live out of their cars at the Main Gate RV Park, which is a legal place to park overnight. Others try to take up residency at the stables on North Mesa, which is not allowed. A number of people with connections to the stables reported to Boomtown that those who sleep there are generally stable-lot owners and not transients passing through town. The Chief confirmed this is what he’s heard as well.
It’s understandable that the location may tempt people who’ve lost housing, he said: the barns serve as a structure, there’s electricity to run a heater, and there’s running water. He sees this kind of homelessness mostly as the result of poor decision-making. “People can get help with things such as utility payments, but many times they don’t prioritize the essentials, and that results in homelessness,” he said.
As long as people park or camp legally, and nobody complains about them, police do not look to clear unhoused people, he added. “We're more involved in it when people are camping in areas outside of where you can camp, and we get those calls every now and then,” he said. “We had one a few weeks ago: somebody was camping down off of the Ponderosa Estates area. He’s actually on Forest Service land, so it's legal, for us anyway. We’re looking to help people and if they don't want it, fine. If they're sleeping in a business lot and the business owner doesn't want them there, we'll make it a call, and they just have to move on. But we’re not looking to jam them up over that.”
One of the more unusual calls the police received was a report of a man living out of a storage unit in town. “I got him connected with one of our apartment complexes,” said the VA, “And come to find out he works two jobs full time, he makes $70,000 a year and he chooses to live like that and hoard his money.”
While all three interviewees had stories of people who choose to be homeless and who refuse services, they agreed that such stories don’t represent the majority of the housing-insecure population. “No, not at all,” said the VA. “I can only think of the two right now that just don’t want help.” Mostly what she sees are domestic-violence victims who absolutely do want help, she said, but have nowhere to turn and little choice for shelter.
Does Los Alamos need a shelter?
A number of people in Los Alamos, from elected officials to nonprofit providers, would like to see some sort of shelter built in the county, whether it’s for unhoused people or domestic-violence victims. Chief Sgambellone is skeptical of the idea. “Yes: wouldn’t it be great to have a domestic-violence shelter here? Sure, but we're not going to pay $2 million to build it and $500,000 a year to run it for the three people that would need it,” he said. “Whether it’s substance abuse, whether it's shelters, whether it’s inpatient treatment, we just don't have the volume. We have the money! But we don't have the volume.”
Instead, LAPD works with regional partners who have shelters “and other types of services that we can rely on when we need them,” he said.
Two shelters that LAPD works with are the Crisis Center of Northern New Mexico (CCNNM), a domestic violence shelter, and Española Pathways Shelter, a homeless shelter, both in Rio Arriba County. Asked if LAPD officers will escort people to those shelters and ensure they get inside, the Chief said, “I know we've gone off the Hill for various reasons, but I can't tell you off the top of my head how many people we've taken to the shelter. But if it’s night, and the victim advocate’s not around, and the person would need some sort of shelter and they're willing to go, yeah we would take them.”
Sometimes it doesn’t work out as planned, however.
“She was turned away”
“I had a girl last week where she ended up homeless. She escaped a situation in Albuquerque and drove up here because it was safe,” said the VA. The VA referred the young woman to CCNNM, but later learned the woman was turned away at the door because she identified herself as “homeless” rather than as a survivor of domestic violence.
“It’s part of their grant process: somebody has to disclose that they are being abused in some way, and in this particular situation, this victim had never disclosed before.” It’s very common for victims of domestic violence to struggle with that label initially, said the VA. But without that disclosure, the shelter will not admit a person.
“I'm still dealing with that. I was not happy,” said the VA. “I sent her down to the shelter, but because she was not expressing everything she was going through at that time, it didn't meet their qualifications. It’s just on their intake, if they don't meet those check-boxes. Even though she was a referral from myself saying ‘no this is what it is,’ even coming from a police department, she was turned away.”
It’s not just CCNNM. Several people reported to me that other shelters turn people away, too, and that police don’t always stick around to make sure someone they drop off gets inside. “Folks at the shelter say there is no warm handoff [from the police], no referral, and sometimes they can’t help them,” said one source close to Española’s homeless shelter. Asked about this, and if it means the “regional” approach LAPD relies on is underfunctioning, the Chief said, “I hadn't heard of that, but I would hope that anybody taking somebody down there would ensure they’re going to be accepted or their needs are going to be cared for. And if not, figure out another way. We're problem solvers, right? Sometimes it doesn't happen the way you like it to, but we figure out something else.”
In fact, he said, his department relies on local hotels more than regional shelters: “Just thinking about it, we probably do this more than transporting off the Hill,” he said. “We have gift cards and arrangements with local hotels that we utilize, and we would probably do that just because it's more convenient.”
Relying on local hotels for temporary shelter also has shortcomings, however. “I work closely with our hotel staff, and a lot of them they're booked out for months and months, because we have the individuals who are contracting out from the Lab,” said the VA. “So even for a short-term stay in the hotel, that's not a possibility. Our apartment complexes: same thing. Some of our complexes have started doing three-month leases just to accommodate the needs of the Lab.”
“Depending on what LANL’s doing, it can be a challenge,” acknowledged the Chief, “But again if it's a Visa gift card, we could take them to [the hotel at] Cities of Gold for example.”
What’s the fix?
The LAPD has a strong track record in helping people with immediate, emergency needs like overnight shelter after a domestic-violence situation, said the Chief, but police departments are not set up to solve social problems. “I think there's certainly some level of expectation that we're going to be able to solve all social ills. It's just not a reasonable expectation,” he said. “We’re more designed for the short term, and then we partner with other facilities and agencies for more of a long-term approach.”
Real progress in solving the root cause of social problems, he said, must come from the top. “True change is going to be statutory changes that include funding, covering the gamut of mental health, substance abuse, homelessness,” he said. “I know this topic is important to the New Mexico Legislature, and I would like to see them address mental-health related statutes and expand the abilities of social-service agencies to provide proper care.”
If you or someone you know would like to share your experience with housing struggles in Los Alamos, please contact the Boomtown editors here. We respect requests for anonymity.
Further reading and resources:
The National Domestic Violence Abuse hotline: 1-800-799-SAFE
Los Alamos County Victim Services: call (505) 662-8222 or (877) 261-4090 for TTY capable and translation services. You do not have to file a police report to get victim services.
Read the ACLU’s report on domestic violence and homelessness
Domestic violence, housing, and homelessness: statistics from the National Network to End Domestic Violence
American Housing Survey reveals rise in doubled-up households during recession
Vehicle residency: homelessness we struggle to talk about
Guardians' dark side: lax rules open the vulnerable to abuse