‘We do what we have to do:’ Meet the elder protecting his neighbors at a St. Paul encampment

Dan Campbell, a 61-year-old former roofer who lives in an encampment in the woods, has gotten used to helping people escape death.

He’s reversed more overdoses over the years than he can count on his hands. He’s a pro at performing CPR to keep people alive. And he first met one of his closest friends after finding him passed out beneath a snow pile and pulling him to a fire to warm up.

Campbell saved his friend then, but he died alone in his tent years later when Campbell wasn’t around. He didn’t think the police ever properly investigated it.

“That was pretty hard on me,” Campbell said. “Still is.”

Campbell lives in a tent community by the Mississippi River now. And whenever he hears shouts in the distant woods, he investigates — despite his slow gait from a hip in need of replacement. He’s taken it upon himself to be a guardian for people largely invisible to the rest of the world.

Safety concerns in and around encampments are at the center of local debates over how best to address unsheltered homelessness, including in St. Paul, where Mayor Kaohly Her justified closing the Pig’s Eye Park camp over such concerns.

But inside the encampments, it’s often residents like Campbell who take on the responsibility of managing safety and basic needs — especially in the absence of significant institutional support in doing so.

Recently, safety concerns increased at Campbell’s community — known as the Shepard camp — after an influx of residents fled there from the Pig’s Eye Park closure. In the span of a couple days, the population rose from the dozens to an estimated 150-200 people, at a location that is darker and more difficult to navigate than the previous camp. Yet, it’s unclear how the city plans to improve its response, even as cold weather approaches.

While Her’s office did not respond to multiple requests for an interview about the city’s encampment response, Campbell has continued to do what he’s always done: look out for the people he sees needing far more support than they are getting, even if it’s a taller task than before.

How does he help?

Campbell first became homeless after sustaining a traumatic injury that put him out of work. Everything seemed to go downhill from there.

A few years back, an outreach worker helped him find an apartment where he paid subsidized rent with a voucher. But it didn’t last long. After the property owner sold the building, Campbell had 60 days to find new housing before his voucher expired and nothing worked out. He lost his voucher, then he lost hope.

“It’s just done. I’m done now,” Campbell said. “I didn’t even do anything wrong and now I don’t have help anymore.”

So two years ago, Campbell pitched his tent at the Shepard encampment and focused on helping everybody else get by. There were just four of them at first. Despite signs warning of contaminated soil, they set up past the train tracks in a portion of woods that sat atop a former junkyard.

Campbell said he went there because it’s where the city told him to stay.

Over the years, Campbell watched as more people moved in. Most everyone carried some form of trauma, he said, without much support, and it only seemed to be getting worse.

“I mean, I see that they need help,” he said. “I stick up for them because then what happens?”

At 61-years-old, Campbell is one of the oldest residents at the camp and is regarded by many as an elder.

His campsite has become a pillar in the community. There, he invites neighbors into his shelter to warm up when temperatures drop. He shares the limited money he has for food to keep other residents fed. And when trouble arises, he’s among the residents who jumps in to deal with it.

“They deem these places unsafe. I think they’re safer than the places downtown,” Campbell said. “A bully can't bully somebody down here without people getting together and stopping the bully. No matter how tough the bully is, he can always be stopped with a community. That's the way it works.”

After the camp grew in size, Campbell said there was a period of more disorder, as the community went through a period of adaptation — but it has since calmed down as people found smaller social groups within the camp to lean on.

Encampment is ‘not lawless’

Calls for service to and immediately surrounding the Shepard encampment increased in the weeks that followed the Aug. 5 Pig’s Eye Park encampment clearing, including an uptick in calls from residents at a neighboring apartment.

The camp is not visible, but is located in the woods beside the building’s parking lot, with a gated path in between. A police trailer camera has since been set up in that parking lot, as well as by the primary entrance to the camp.

However, most of those calls do not represent an incident in which emergency services were required, or one in which violence was involved.

In the month after the clearing, the city documented 250 service calls at the Shepard encampment. The largest category within those calls — at 36 percent — were logged as “proactive policing,” which is when officers stopped at or near the encampment during a regular patrol. Officers also accompany city workers during weekly trash cleanings, which have been routine even before August.

The second largest category — at 26 percent — were calls logged as disturbance related.

MPR News requested an interview with St. Paul Police Department leadership, but was told interviews related to encampment response should go to the Mayor’s Office, which had not responded to several prior requests.

Halie Gudmonson — an outreach worker who visits the encampment almost daily — said that oftentimes when tensions do ratchet up, it’s because people’s basic needs are not being met. Nervous systems are in distress, she said. The source of tension can be as simple as someone missing meals or medication.

“A lot of the day-to-day stress and a lot of the day-to-day escalation can be reduced through just meeting basic needs,” Gudmonson said. “And a lot of that can just be mitigated by a presence of providers and supplies and camp infrastructure,” of which she said, there is not currently enough.

As the lead case manager for a state-funded street outreach program through AVIVO, Gudmonson is part of the service ecosystem at Shepard. She will oftentimes go in go in alongside EMTs with the fire department (through the CARES unit), who have worked to develop trust with many residents there. A handful of medical providers make routine visits, oftentimes alongside outreach workers with RADIAS Health, who also make multiple visits each week. The city’s three-person Homeless Assistance Response Team is another consistent presence.

Together, several of these workers are able to help refer people to housing and support residents while they await an opening, but it’s a process that takes time and workers are spread thin.

Gudmonson said the big picture solution for safety is creating more low-barrier supportive housing so people can get housed. But in the meantime, many residents who are taking it day by day until their situation changes want the camp to feel safer — and have ideas for what would help.

Tucked away in the woods, the Shepard encampment gets dark at night — which is when residents say more of their belongings go missing. Some residents have brought up wanting solar lights to string up in the trees, or fire extinguishers to keep across the camp, especially as more residents light fires to keep warm as winter approaches.

Efforts to improve safety and keep people resourced are aided by volunteers and mutual aid groups, but for the most part, Gudmonson said, the onus has been on the residents.

Yet despite real safety concerns, she said that the encampment is “not lawless.” There’s a social order with clear point people, like Campbell, who have built credibility within the encampment — and who try to keep each other safe. If there’s an emergency, or signs of trouble, specific people will often group up and triage the situation.

That was the case in a situation that MPR News witnessed, in the weeks that followed the encampment closure.

‘It’s simple. You handle it.’

One morning, 59-year-old Corinna Gonzales said she woke up to a machete in her face.

Gonzales trembled as she recounted the story: her son-in-law poked at her with the weapon while her daughter stood by, the two of them yelling at Gonzales about their son. They accused Gonzales of withholding his whereabouts, then slashed her tent, stole an electric bike and took off.

Gonzales said she called the police after that. About eight officers arrived 20-30 minutes later and asked her questions. Then, the officers took off to look for the couple, before leaving when they couldn’t be found.

“Well, why did they leave? And they didn’t come back and tell me anything,” Gonzales asked. “I would like to see some service and support from them. I don’t see none of that.”

Gonzales said the police didn’t follow up with her that day, or in the weeks that followed. And later that morning, when she dialed 911 again after spotting the couple walking around the camp, they didn’t come back.

But someone did disarm the man with the machete later that day — it just wasn’t the police.

It was Campbell, the camp elder.

On the other side of the camp, MPR News watched Campbell follow a man with a machete, who matched Gonzales’s description, down a trail. Campbell held a baseball bat low to his side. Then about five minutes later, without any commotion, Campbell calmly returned.

However, this time, he was holding the machete.

“I just told him, ‘Let me see that. No, you can’t have it back,’” Campbell later said with a laugh. “It’s simple. Most of them, that’s all. You handle it.”

The day with the machete was abnormally wild, he said, though some days could get tense.

But for the most part, helping involved less of a spectacle — like fixing another resident’s generator or cutting down dead tree limbs himself to protect his neighbors’ heads in case of a storm.

Campbell did his part to make things better.

“Just like every other human being, we don't want people to get hurt,” he said. “So we just do what we have to."

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