A Customer Information System for the homeless?

Another possible reason behind Vancouver's tent city?

http://www.tetrad.com/custm/hifis.html


While following up on some research for my term project I went back to the link that Richard gave us for the company Tetrad. I decided to look at some of the projects they have with other companies and the CMHC write-up looked interesting. It turns out that they have a system to track the homeless in terms of why they are using the shelter. They actually have a category for “Avoiding Law Enforcement”. I wonder how many put a check in that box? The funnier one is “Financial Management” … Yep, I bet there’s lots of checks in that one too.

Just the other day I parked at the library and when I was going up the stairs a Security Guard says to me “Homeless Alert”. I looked at him very confused and he repeated it. I still didn’t get it so he had to explain that there was a homeless guy sleeping on the stairwell so he wanted me to avoid him. He went on to wonder aloud why the guy would choose a stairwell over a shelter. I think I’m starting to get the picture. Could this registration process have anything to do with why tent cities keep cropping up?

I can see the desire to get statistics on homeless to be able to help them better. But do we really think that people going to a shelter are going to give their real reason for being there? Or are they going to give what they think is the easiest answer that will illicit the least amount of questioning. Plus, many homeless have probably already been victims of a breach of trust and now we’re subjecting them to a registration procedure? It doesn’t seem to make any sense to me. First we are at risk of alienating the people we are trying to help. Second, the accuracy of the data collected is entirely suspect, so therefore, what good is it?