Two kinds of residents live on Diamond Head near the lighthouse: the well-off and the almost penniless.
The penniless are the homeless tent-dwellers who live in encampments hidden in kiawe thickets on the mauka slopes of the volcanic crater.
Some have been up there for more than 20 years. Government enforcement efforts, year after year, have failed to entice them to move.
The campers rarely come into contact with the well-off, but sometimes the encounters that do occur are dramatic, including home break-ins and people discovered sleeping in outbuildings.
Colleen Heyer and her husband, Judd Klinger, said they saw one man stealing a 12-pack of beer on their home security camera.
She also has had to call 911 many times to get the police to evict a man living unsheltered on her driveway, using an area by mailboxes as his toilet.
Klinger said he walked into his yard one morning to find a stranger sleeping in their children’s treehouse. He called up to the sleeping man, “Can I help you?” He said the just-awakened man jumped about 8 feet out of the beach heliotrope tree and chased after him with a long knife.
“He was shouting, ‘I am going to kill you,’” Klinger said. “I ran into the house and slammed the sliding door shut. He began beating on the glass on the door with his knife saying, ʻThis is my house. Get out or I will kill you.’ I called the police. The officers arrived in five minutes, wearing protective bullet-proof vests. They disarmed and arrested him.”
Camps Cleared Friday
Diamond Head is unusual because its residential homes are surrounded by large swaths of open public land from the volcanic crater slopes to the sea. The homeless and the homeowners are co-residents.
It makes for what Colleen Heyer’s brother, Charles Kelley, calls “a scary situation.” He said he tried over many weeks to get a mentally disturbed woman to leave his garage, where she would come regularly to bang on the door to be let in, saying she had to help a baby who was in mortal danger.
There was no baby, he said, but the woman kept coming back to urge him to do something.
Neighbors say their encounters with the homeless are usually less eventful, but they are persistent, sparking many calls to 911. In fact, the city says increased calls for help are what spurred it to speed up efforts to coordinate with the state to create a more aggressive enforcement effort to clear homeless camps on both the ocean and mountain side of the crater.
On Friday, the state cleared a total of 50 camps stretching back to Kapiolani Community College’s Culinary Institute and cited three campers for being in a closed area. The city cleared 17 camps on the ocean side and cited seven people for violating park rules and one for blocking the sidewalk with his gear. Nobody was arrested for criminal activity.
Every officer from the Hawaiʻi Division of Conservation and Resource Enforcement on Oʻahu was there — about 25 officers in all, said Dan Dennison, a spokesman for the Department of Land and Natural Resources.
Also participating were more Honolulu Police Department officers and state sheriffʻs deputies than are usually involved in Diamond Head enforcement efforts.
“We were in complete coordination,” said Mike Lambert, director of the state Department of Law Enforcement. “We have never done anything on this scale before. The ultimate goal is to keep the homeless from returning to Diamond Head. We are hoping to send the message that their loose dogs, the drug use and the fire hazards they are creating by doing things like cooking meth on the crater’s dry ridges as reported by one resident cannot be allowed continue.”
Nobody wants another Lahaina.
“We are compassionate to a point but at some point we have to do our jobs,” said Lambert’s deputy, Ernest Robello.
A Few Unexpected Successes
During the week before the sweep, homeless care providers visited the camps offering health services and housing possibilities. But Dennison acknowledged that if most campers agreed to come off the hill, there would not be enough shelter space or housing for them. Also, there are very few beds available for residential addiction and mental health treatment.
However, there were a few unexpected successes at the tents set up Friday in Diamond Head’s Triangle Park to offer hot showers, sandwiches and first aid medical services. Participating providers of homeless care included city’s Crisis Outreach Response and Engagement program, the Institute for Human Services and Partners in Care.
Two women agreed to move into shelters.
One was Bernadette Anderson a longtime Diamond Head camper who agreed to be driven to the park by Partners In Care executive director Laura Thielen.
Anderson told me the day before when I ran into her on Diamond Head Road that she was tired of the sweeps and living outdoors. She has been there for at least 15 years, mostly living in an abandoned Army bunker on the lower side of the crater.
She has resisted past efforts to get her out of the historic bunker, even the most extreme efforts such as when a DLNR administrator, Curt Cottrell, threatened to fill the bunker with boulders to make it impossible for her to live there. She dared him to do it, saying she would pull out enough rocks to hollow out a living space.
I have interviewed other homeless campers for years, watching them transition from late middle age to old age. Homelessness takes a toll.
“Homeless get older faster; their substance abuse catches up with them,” said Connie Mitchell, the IHS executive director, who was sitting in one of the tents in the park.
Mitchell arranged for Anderson and a pregnant woman to move into a specialty shelter that would allow them to bring their dogs.
I called Mitchell on Saturday to see how it was going with Anderson and the other camper.
“Who knows how long they will stay in the shelter?” she said. “Things change so fast, but I am hopeful.”
ʻWe Will Find Ways To Do It Betterʻ
That’s how most government officals and homeless outreach workers seemed to feel about Fridayʻs enforcement: hopeful.
“This is a start,” said Scott Humber, the mayor’s director of communications. “We will learn from it. We will find ways to do it better.”
Homeless campers usually flee when they see law enforcement, but the new feature of the joint police-service provider event in Triangle Park drew in some of the most entrenched campers with its offer of food and hot showers.
“Such offers of immediate help may encourage them to begin to trust us more,” said Roy Miyahira, the city’s new head of the Homeless Solutions department.
Diamond Head residents who have lived as co-neighbors with the homeless campers for decades were more skeptical, having seen them return within days of previous enforcement efforts.
“At least the city and the state are trying,” said resident Ann Rayson. “That is all they can do. It was smart to offer services in the park. The Diamond Head homeless are a hardcore group.”
City and state officials say they plan more aggressive enforcements to encourage other entrenched homeless campers to move out.
