LAWRENCE, Mass. — A table labeled Triage was the first stop for people living outdoors on their arrival to the open-air treatment tent off Canal Street.
The site, in place a week ago Thursday, and likely a model for future operations, was part of a new police and community partners response.
Funded by the city’s Community Development Department, it was organized to help people in local encampments who are living with addiction or mental illness, or both.
Triage was the right word for the intake table.
So far this year 15 people have died in Lawrence from drug overdoses. Police and rescue personnel have responded to 58 overdoses. These were officially documented incidents; the true number is likely higher, say people familiar with local drug trends and the potent synthetic opioids that dominate the street market.
So the 16 unsheltered people who entered the treatment tent sat first at the Triage table with recovery coach supervisor Steve Heald.
Heald works for Essex County Outreach, which is attached to the county’s 34 police departments, the sheriff’s department and community partners. At the intake table, he entered the people’s names, health histories and any contact information into a computer data base.
The information connects police, recovery coaches and social service organizations, allowing them to better coordinate help programs and continuing care for people including the homeless, who are often hard to track and locate.
Thirteen of the 16 people opted for services during the operation, named Sweep and Treat, in which police went to encampments to bring willing participants to the treatment tent to connect them to methadone clinics or detox beds or other services.
The initiative relies on police, recovery coaches, caregivers and others to build trust and connect with the estimated 128 people who are living in Lawrence encampments — mostly riverside locations and numbering about a dozen — with treatment and other services.
Cooperation is a key to success in the admittedly daunting challenge of getting unsheltered people on the road to recovery and out of encampments.
At the same time, a person unaffiliated with the sweep initiative, Michael Gorman, an advocate whom unsheltered people widely trust, said he hopes the initiative is guided by goodwill and respect, and that it succeeds.
Gorman is founder of The Movement Family, a volunteer group supported by local restaurants, bakeries and students, which hosts Wednesday night dinners and socializing at the Buckley Transportation Center in downtown Lawrence for people who are homeless.
Gorman’s philosophy is guided by caring for the well-being of people who are homeless.
“Encourage, encourage, encourage,” says Gorman.
Most parties agree that success in helping people with addictions get clean is hard won and not a given.
Also, most people, including police, say that arresting people is not a formula for helping people to get into recovery and lead more fulfilling lives.
Four of the people who sought treatment options at the Canal Street tent arrived there on a shuttle bus from Lawrence District Court.
They were people with outstanding arrest warrants whom police had encountered at encampments earlier in the day and were told that if they sought treatment, police would work with the court to help resolve the warrants, said Lawrence police Lt. Dan Fleming.
Essex County Outreach recovery coach Hector Brito works in Lawrence with local police.
In an interview at the tent treatment site, between making calls to find shelter space or a hotel room for people seeking recovery, Brito said warrants are a nightmare for people with addictions.
He was an addict for many years before getting clean and going to work helping others get clean.
“I know what a warrant could do to you,” he said. “It destroys you. It keeps you running, but at the same time, it keeps you drugging because you need to bring that pressure down.”
Brito isn’t alone among recovery coaches who know what it is like to contend with addiction.
Heald, who was a police officer for 30 years, is in longterm recovery, coming up on 22 years.
“I think about how long before it took for me to say ‘I am done,’” he said.
Heald said she remembers this when he recognizes some of the same people returning, time and again, after failed attempts, for recovery treatment.
It was difficult for him to see the rough shape some of the people were in as they came to the treatment tent, he said.
But there is hope for recovery, he said, and he also hopes that the Thursday recovery tent was the first of many operations like it.
They came a long way in changing people’s attitude toward police, he said.
Kelly Frazier and a team of fellow volunteers started helping Lawrence’s homeless population in 2009, bringing them food and coffee and arranging for health care, treatment and other services.
Since 2022, Frazier has been the city’s homeless initiative coordinator, assisting not just people chronically unsheltered but those displaced by fire, domestic violence and youth and families without housing.
Frazier said she has seen the number of unsheltered homeless people in Lawrence drop dramatically from the peak years, around 2018, when 250-300 people were unsheltered, living under the Casey and other bridges as well as along the railroad tracks.
Over the years, she said she has probably seen more lose their lives than those who have entered recovery and succeeded.
Still, there is hope. Recovery does happen.
Two years ago, in July, Frazier was present, as was The Eagle-Tribune, when city officials visited an encampment under the south side of the Casey Bridge and later removed a couple from a nearby encampment under the Duck Bridge.
The couple, named Haley and Shawn, had been living there for three years.
They lugged their belongings, a futon, table and boxes and bags of clothes, up the steep river bank to the high chain-link fence to hoist the stuff over it.
Haley said in an interview at the time that she had overdosed 16 times and did not know where they were headed.
As it turned out, Frazier said, Haley ended up going to a detox center in Salisbury and today is clean, working and a mom with a baby and engaged to be married to someone she met at her workplace.
Shawn entered methadone treatment and remains homeless and continues with the treatment program.
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