DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES--I was in a car with a supervisor and three women. The supervisor was not awful but not very good. He also backed into a parked car that had a person in it which was pretty awkward, he was not a good driver. There were planned protests that night for the Breonna Taylor decision that had come down earlier in the day, (no charges were filed against the police), and the woman who was driving the car I was in kept referring to them as "riots" even though they literally hadn't happened yet, which was annoying.
We started out about 6 p.m. and worked until 3:30 a.m. We had a list of six places to visit. One had been cleared out months ago and had no homeless, another had been cleared out a couple of weeks before but we found one man who I guess got kinda left behind on his own. He didn't move along with the others and was just still in the area by himself, it was sad. We weren't supposed to give anyone food or water or anything but he was by himself, so I ran and got him some Gatorade from the supervisor's car that he'd brought along with him for us to have, which was nice of him.
We interviewed one person at each encampment who gave us an estimate of the number of people there, and a guess at races and sex. Some gave us approximate ages too. At one site there were four people who were asleep so I just counted them and left, I really didn't want to wake them. At another, there were three people who literally were just about to shoot up heroin. They were really nice. We got the information and wished them well, then left them alone. Everyone we talked to was pretty nice and understood what we were doing. I never felt unsafe or anything.
I just wish it had all been put together better. Why were we given sites that had been cleared out? There should've been better coordination. For those reasons, we all agreed to err on the side of overcounting rather than being conservative.
I really worry about an undercount.
At one site there was no "encampment" per se but there were a lot of obviously unhoused people around so we just counted everyone we could from our cars. That was the only time we didn't get out of the cars to try to get an interview--it was smack in the middle of downtown with no parking and there were quite a few homeless so it just made sense to count them from the car.
Everyone on my team did genuinely want to get a good count of as many homeless as we could, which felt good. In the end, I felt we tried and did a good job for what we were given to do.
--DTLA Anonymous