Delray Beach police have increased patrols at the pavilion on State Road A1A at Atlantic Avenue. Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
By Larry Barszewski
When Caffe Luna Rosa employees complained to Delray Beach city commissioners about homeless people bothering restaurant patrons and visitors to the nearby beach pavilion across State Road A1A, the city’s police force jumped into action.
The department upped its presence with periodic walks around the beach and by taping off the entrances to the pavilion at night, a Luna Rosa employee said, along with having two community outreach officers each pulling daily four-hour shifts in front of the pavilion just in case.
“There has been somebody here almost all day every day,” said Alex Koulianos, seating restaurant patrons on Sept. 20, two weeks after she, some other employees and some restaurant neighbors spoke out at the commission’s Sept. 5 meeting.
“I know you spent taxpayer dollars to make the pavilion bigger, but we didn’t know it was going to become a homeless shelter,” Robert Guarini, who lives above the restaurant, told commissioners. “The village by the sea is turning into the village of skid row over there.”
Luna Rosa employees said some of the individuals were urinating in the streets, exposing themselves, taking food off tables at the restaurant and getting into fights with residents and visitors.
“I have called the police numerous times. There has been domestic violence; there has been illegal drugs; even as of today, there was an arrest on the pier, I mean on the pavilion,” said Luna Rosa supervising server Diane Bolt, who said she previously worked as a police officer in St. Louis. “But the worst one I knew was going to escalate, we had an assault, and a man was badly beaten and was threatened to be killed and he pressed charges.”
At the commission meeting, Delray Beach Police Chief Russ Mager told commissioners the complaints would be addressed promptly.
“Downtown, in the last week, we had similar issues occurring in the downtown corridor, in the ‘clean and safe’ area. We made 13 arrests in the last week as a result of that,” Mager said. “We want to apply the same efforts that we did in the downtown area in the last week to the beach area.”
In a Sept. 25 email to The Coastal Star, Mager said his department has “increased our police presence in this [beach] area and assigned seven day a week police coverage. Our objective is to enforce the laws and ordinances, remove those who are committing crimes and provide a safe and secure environment for our community.”
At the commission meeting, Mager urged residents to call the police when they have a problem, instead of just complaining to their friends or commissioners about the situation.
“They’ll tell other people and it never even gets to the Police Department, but we’ll hear the complaints,” Mager said. “I am encouraging everyone, [561-]243-7800, call the Police Department so we can get there and address the issues.”
Mager said it’s only a small number that’s at the heart of the issue.
“We have 104, based on a homeless count, we went up five from last year to this year. The county went up like 450,” Mager said. “We have identified 16 chronic offenders that we want to get out of here, so to speak. So, we are working on trying to, either medically or (through) family, to get those people out of here.”
While the department and many agencies run programs to help the homeless and keep people from becoming homeless, chronically homeless people present more of a challenge. Getting them to move from one place only shifts their presence to someplace else.
Mager said in recent months he has seen the chronic homeless move, in turn, from Libby Jackson Wesley Plaza to Old School Square, then Worthing Park, then Veterans Park, then First Presbyterian Church, then the beach and other locations, prompted each time by police activity to discourage their presence at any given location.
“You can see how it’s gradually working its way, not intentionally, it’s just kind of happened that way as we dispersed the issues and the concerns in the past over the last several years,” Mager said. “They seemed to recircle and ended up downtown and obviously pushed east, but we’re going to work on collaborating with our counterparts with regard to Clean and Safe, the Community Outreach Team, and road patrol, to address it.”
For now, the problem is no longer on Luna Rosa’s doorstep.
“We intend to go back and say thank you” to the commissioners for the police presence, Koulianos said.
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