Sex, Drugs And Random Acts Of Madness At SD Central Library

SAN DIEGO — On a warm Saturday night last month, San Diego’s elite came decked out in ball gowns and suits to nosh at a polenta-martini bar and sip craft cocktails at Central Library, a nine-story postmodern masterpiece near the city’s version of skid row.

The San Diego Public Library Foundation’s sixth annual Celebration Under the Dome might’ve been the most joyous night of a particularly rough year at Central Library, where police have responded, on average, to calls for help once a day, seven days a week since it opened in 2014, public records show.

Drug overdoses are common at Central Library, and strap-down evacuation chairs are mounted in plain sight on every floor. Police have regularly responded to calls reporting prostitution, indecent exposure and rape. Librarians and staff have encountered theft, violence and attempted suicides. In July, staff and patrons witnessed a homeless man fall three stories to his death.

Of the 3,000 patrons who peacefully shuffle in every day after the doors swing open at 9:30 a.m., about 20 percent of them are homeless. Many of them are peaceful, library regulars. But others, who suffer from mental illness and addiction, overwhelm librarians and staff. The years-long grind of trouble, disturbances, violence and illicit behavior has led to low employee morale and frequent police, fire and ambulance visits.

It’s a phenomenon that has plagued urban libraries around the country and is especially acute in San Diego — particularly at its Central Library, where library system Director Misty Jones oversees a staff that has become increasingly accustomed to random acts of madness.

“Every library [in the nation] is facing the same thing,” Jones said in a soft, native-Alabaman inflection. “A significant increase in untreated mental illness and substance abuse — particularly opioid addiction. So what you have is this trifecta: A person who’s homeless, mentally ill and has a substance-abuse problem.”

The combination has been a catalyst for trouble. Since 2014, the San Diego Police Department has responded to 2,560 emergency calls from Central Library. Between January 2014 and Aug. 31, 2019, police responded to 735 disturbing the peace reports. (That includes 160 disturbances reported during the first eight months of 2019, which topped the annual total for every year since the library opened.) There were 911 calls reporting 153 mental health-related incidents, 57 alcohol or drug overdoses, 30 assaults with a deadly weapon, 107 batteries, 18 rapes, 16 indecent exposure cases, 30 threats made with a weapon and seven bomb threats between January 2014 and August 2019, according to data Patch obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

This year, three people have attempted suicide at the Central Library: Two tried to jump from the observation deck on the top floor building but were prevented by staff from doing so. On July 30, a homeless patron climbed up on a desk on the third floor near the magazine section and fell down through the atrium. The man landed on scaffolding just above the first floor around 3 p.m, according to police reports. Witnesses, who asked to remain anonymous, say the man impaled himself on a decorative trellis hanging over the main checkout counter, just above patrons and staff. Some Central Library employees who saw the traumatic scene have not yet returned to work, library sources said.

Jones, who was a social worker at a psychiatric hospital before becoming a library administrator, says some members of her staff can suffer from “compassion fatigue.”

“Librarians and staff, that’s what we do: We help people. And they really, really want to help people. But every single day you’ve got someone who doesn’t have access to shelter, three meals a day, clean clothes, or anywhere to store belongings, and it’s in our nature to fix it for them,” she said. “And when you can’t fix it, it does wear on some staff.”

The symptoms and conditions aren’t confined to Central Library. Many of San Diego’s 35 other branch libraries have faced similar adversity. The San Diego Police Department has responded to 5,702 emergency calls at those libraries including 905 911 calls to the Pacific Beach library since 2014, and more than three hundred to five other libraries.

Police have made 435 arrests at libraries systemwide including 22 arrests related to 911 calls classified as mental-health related. Officers also made a dozen arrests for alcohol and drug-related offenses, 1o threats with a weapon, 83 disturbing the peace complaints, two assaults with a deadly weapon, seven "runaway juveniles", seven "sleepers" and a bomb threat, according to police statistics.

One female librarian in the North Park neighborhood’s library branch was punched in the face by a patron who’d been asked to leave, according to Mike Zucchet, general manager of San Diego Municipal Employees Association, the city workers’ union.

Library staff nowadays “are not just librarians anymore,” Zucchet said. “They are mental health counselors, they’re calling 911 constantly for overdoses, so they encounter unconscious people and are sometimes asked to engage and perform CPR. They’re essentially HAZMAT specialists dealing with blood and feces and other leftovers in the library areas.”

“Two Worlds Colliding”

From the day it first opened six years ago, everything about San Diego’s new Central Library was ambitious. The library, with its soaring, brutalist atrium, is home to a charter high school, an elegant reading room drenched in Southern California sunlight, and an art gallery on the rooftop deck — all underneath a Richard Meier-esque dome recognizable from anywhere downtown. The usual suspects of San Diego’s donor class put their names all over the building after they picked up a $62 million outstanding tab to finish the $196 million building. There’s the “Denny Sanford Children’s Library” section, the “Hervey Family Rare Book Room” and the “Helen Price Reading Room,” among many others. Even naming rights to the whole property were sold — the building is officially called the “San Diego Central Library @ Joan ^ Irwin Jacobs Common.”

But the most consequential part of the whole endeavor was where the city’s political and library donors decided, way back in 2000, to put it: In the hinterlands of gentrification, at 330 Park Boulevard — a former police department auto yard next to a then-forthcoming Major League baseball stadium. Pairing the ballpark and library was viewed as a necessary doubling down to redevelop this turf, the most blighted part of downtown called East Village. Though only a few blocks away, the stadium and library sites seemed a civilization apart from the already-redeveloped bars, restaurants and million-dollar condos to the west. It was urbanist manifest destiny: The library was even built to gaze east, toward an expanse of what was once parking lots, warehouses, heavy industry and homeless outreach services.

Today, condos, apartments and office buildings glisten where many of the old parking lots and warehouses used to be. The homeless outreach services remain, however — as does San Diego’s sizable homeless population. Central Library has both spurred neighborhood redevelopment yet also blended into the existing fabric of the neighborhood, in a way — as it’s become one more organ of the city’s expanding homeless outreach: Within the library is a National Alliance of Mental Illness office, a veterans-services outpost, a career center, several mentoring and gang intervention services and family-outreach services, among others. Some people derisively refer to San Diego’s Central Library as a nine-story homeless shelter, but that hardly tells the story within a neighborhood being pulled in opposite directions simultaneously.

Local homeless advocate Michael McConnell notes that hundreds of single-room occupancy hotels and other low-cost housing have been demolished to make way for luxury units and boutique hotels in the neighborhood.

“I think this is going to be problematic for years to come,” McConnell said. “You have these two worlds colliding: They’ve built up this huge homeless service system, which is where people are obviously going to go to get homeless services — that’s the whole point of it, right? And then you have the further gentrification of that area.”

City council member Chris Ward, whose district includes downtown, and who is chair of the local nonprofit Regional Task Force on the Homeless, is optimistic about what the library has done for the neighborhood. “I think [the library has] been another keystone amenity for the general neighborhood but there’s also been a lot of development in the pipeline that sort of has happened over the last decade too,” he said.

“The more we try to reform and improve our strategies around homelessness and get people off of the streets, I think you’re going to see even more of a realization of the vision that we want to have for the neighborhood. And the library is definitely going to be a focal point for that,” Ward continued.

Ward said the local philanthropists have had a big say in addressing the issues the Central Library has been dealing with.

“From time to time I have heard from some major donors that are disappointed that there seems to be more of an issue with the density of homeless individuals, and homeless belongings in the perimeter of the library — that it makes for a very unattractive, undesirable experience,” he said. “I think there’s also some sensitivity because of the high school [within the library] and they’re concerned for the safety of our youth, and that is important that philanthropists are speaking up as well.”

Ward said the confluence of the employees’ union, along with Jones, the mayor, and philanthropists all pressed the city council to hire a new security company in order to get this public institution under control.

“I’d say just about everybody that is engaged with central library operations was advocating for it,” Ward said. “Everyone acknowledged that we needed additional security for the benefit of the general public.”

Starting in July, half the security guards are armed and have either military or law enforcement experience. They’re led by a retired U.S. special forces veteran.

“Every Day It’s Like A Battle”

Security chief Vic Slater sits at his desk in the center of the Central Library’s atrium, a sort of panopticon for the building, as his radio steadily fills with chatter. He’s the new supervising officer for the new security team at the Central Library since July 1, and, like Jones, this 59-year-old from the Bronx is unusually yet ideally suited for his role. Slater is a military veteran with experience in special-warfare hostage rescue and counterintelligence operations in the Middle East, who later worked in behavioral sciences for the Department of Homeland Security. He was also part of the recovery crew at Ground Zero.

From day one, Slater radiated a new-sheriff-in-town vibe, patrons and library staff say.

“Every morning we line up and greet the people coming in one by one, saying hello and looking them in the eye,” he said. “Just by saying hello, I can find out a myriad of information about a person — who’s happy, who’s mad. I know what I’m dealing with. And by seeing us greet them, they know who they’re dealing with.”

Slater seems to have intel on everyone within the walls. One morning a man walked up to his desk, asking if Slater had seen a particular individual who’d missed his parole hearing. He gave Slater a name and shared a photo on his phone. Slater looked at it and said, “Second floor, by the computers.”

Jones and other employees say Slater and the new security company has made a huge difference. For his part, Slater says he’s on a first-name basis with 15–20 police officers in the area. “So if I need a cop, I text,” Slater said.

When you walk into that atrium now, one of the first things you notice is at least one security guard in uniform, sidearm on his belt and his eyes on everyone who passes by. “Every day it’s like a battle,” one security guard said, shaking his head. “You have the people who are mentally ill — it’s like you’re always stepping on their toes. You have the people who just come in here to charge their phones. Then you have the people who aren’t really homeless who just come in here to cause trouble. We have guys coming in here bringing baseball bats, just prepared for battle.”

The guard seemed poised to say more, then he sprung forward to stop a tall, wiry, tattooed man who had a switchblade clipped onto his belt. (“It’s a pencil sharpener!” the man said, holding it up.) The instant the guard sent that man back out the door, a woman walked up from the other direction: “Excuse me sir, there’s a couple outside shouting at each other, having a domestic dispute,” she said, and he jogged out the front door and around the corner.

“Don’t Come to Central"

The reasons libraries attract homeless people in such significant numbers are obvious and nuanced, experts say.

“Libraries are everything homelessness and homeless shelters aren’t,” according to Ryan Dowd, who runs a homeless shelter in the Chicago area and teaches library staff across the world on how to interact with homeless people with his Librarian’s Guide to Homelessness. He explains: “Shelters are crowded, libraries have more space. Shelters are loud, libraries are quieter. Shelters are fairly dirty, libraries are fairly clean. The streets are dangerous, libraries are safe. Homelessness is boring, libraries have lots to do keep someone from getting bored. A library is like a mini-vacation from being homeless. And of course, libraries also have bathrooms, heat, air conditioning, water fountains, Wi-Fi, etc.”

The result is that libraries and local jails have become the front lines of homeless outreach services in American cities. Combine that with soaring rates of homelessness in many places in California, which has a quarter of all the nation’s homeless people. Regionally, homelessness has increased by more than 40 percent in Orange County in the past two years; in LA County by more than 12 percent over last year; in San Francisco, by 17 percent in three years. San Diego’s homeless population is down slightly from a year ago, but it used a different counting methodology from previous years.

During the day, libraries everywhere offer homeless people a place to go. For most, that means resting, charging phones, getting on the internet, or reading newspapers and magazines. But it’s also brought to the library a host of problems (a citywide Hepatitis A outbreak in the city in 2017 that claimed 20 lives disproportionately impacted the homeless population) — and librarians and staff have been the front lines of defense.

A staff member with decades of library experience who declined to be named talks of low morale among co-workers, of feeling jaded toward the homeless, of spending way too much time every day writing incident reports for bad behavior. “The hard part for me is, I like to help people,” he says. “That’s why I’ve been here for years. But you get jaded.”

The unruly scene has caused him for years to urge friends to go elsewhere.

“One of my best friends has a year-old child, and even though we have a great toddler story time in the children’s section, I tell him, “Don’t come to Central — go to your branch library instead,” he continued. “You have all these great librarians and all this great creativity that they do, but people don’t come because it’s a nine-story homeless shelter.”

Slater says that before he took over the security detail, Central Library was an environment where employees didn’t feel safe coming to work, and they were resorting to telling the former security guards how to do their jobs. What was also clear to him, he said, was the desire by the mayor as well as the mayor, city leaders and library donors to regain control of the Central Library.

Things seem to be getting better since Slater and the new security team came aboard in July. Jones and staffers compliment their work. Slater claimed a 33 percent reduction in incidents, and that he’s saved two people’s lives: a 22-year-old female who had overdosed on opioids in the bathroom, and another woman who overdosed outside the building. He claimed he’s cut down the incidents of prostitution inside the library to zero. Also he said he recently disarmed a man in the bathroom at gunpoint because he wouldn’t surrender his knife. Since that time, he’s also witnessed two deaths: A deceased individual outside the building, and the man who fell to his death in July.

Other changes recently made by the library have to do with the sketchy activity in the bathrooms: The doors are now always open, and a guard is often stationed outside. The individual doors to stalls were cut higher along the bottom and now have a large cutout on the top, so that a guard can peer into each bathroom stall every 30 minutes. “That often goes about as well as you’d expect,” Slater said with a slight smile, but he maintained that it’s necessary to prevent — or at least discourage — illicit behavior.

Despite having to occasionally observe strangers using the bathroom, Slater says he enjoys this post-retirement line of work here at the library, difficult as it is.

“I’ve been shot twice in my life,” he said, then smiled. “It’s safer than what I was doing before.”

A Library’s “Mission”

San Diego leaders are hardly standing on the sidelines when it comes to homelessness. They’ve opened multiple tent shelters to the east of the library, and are in the process of opening a massive homeless intake center a few blocks away. The City Council approved a 10-year, $1.9 billion action plan to address homelessness. Whether this ever-expanding number of services in close proximity will alleviate or exacerbate the burden on the library is a matter of debate.

A 64-year-old homeless man lacking many of his front teeth sat cross-legged in a dirt median one sunny day in October, eating lunch along across the street from the Central Library. He says he’s been going to the library “since forever.” He visits most days to charge his phone, and read the newspaper and magazines. He wouldn’t admit it, but it seems to be a haven for him. “I sleep in the outskirts of town, I shower at the YMCA, and I make money selling blood plasma — so I need to eat a lot of protein,” he said, as he chewed on rolled up cold-cuts from a Tupperware container. He wasn’t enamored of the new security regime. “They have a lot more security now, but I’m not sure if it does all that much good,” he said. “Most of the people aren’t going to cause much trouble at all, but sometimes there’s funny business that goes on in the bathrooms. [Security] walk around with their radios on full blast — it makes it hard to read but it lets everyone know when to stop acting,” he said with a laugh.

Among the most active workers at the library are the two full-time caseworkers for the National Alliance on Mental Health on the third floor. Every morning they do outreach around the perimeter, meeting people and offering services. “We handle basic case management and help with resources and referrals,” according to Janine Nadal. They’ll help provide ID vouchers, referrals to shelters for crises, domestic violence or substance abuse, or to city-provided housing if an applicant is eligible. They tend to work with 15–20 people a day. “The harm reduction and harm prevention has totally minimized,” Nadal said about the library’s changes. She should know — if security gets called to handle a mental situation with a patron, Nadal or her co-worker, Natalie Perez, work alongside to deescalate the scene as a sort of mediator, or at least explainer.

Everyone recognizes that libraries have reinvented themselves in the digital age, but fewer seem to recognize that libraries do this all the time, for all sorts of reasons, according to Jones. “This is one of the reasons I’ve stayed in the library world,” she said. “Libraries have this really unique opportunity to reinvent themselves all the time and be what the community needs them to be. Across the world they’ve become community spaces that bring people together. Part of that is seeing the very best of people, but you also see the very worst of people.

“Libraries respond to what their community needs,” she continued. “And unfortunately what the community needs are homeless services.”

Jones says it will remain that way, as the library will still welcome everyone while enforcing its rules. She says certain people sometimes suggest she should simply shoo homeless people away — that the library shouldn’t be providing services for them, or even a place for them to sit. But the only people she isn’t so keen on welcoming are those who feel this way.

“If [welcoming homeless people] keeps people away, then that’s OK. Maybe this is not the place for them to be. But we’re going to continue to serve everybody regardless,” Jones said.

“We don’t look at people by their housing status,” she said. “We treat every single patron based on their behavior, not on their background. That’s what our mission is and that’s what we’re doing to continue to do.”

Adam Elder is a writer in San Diego who's written for Esquire, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NewYorker.com, VICE, The Guardian, WIRED.com and elsewhere.

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