When former Charlottesville Mayor Dave Norris heard that City Manager Sam Sanders had lifted the closing time in Market Street Park following now-debunked allegations of police misconduct against several individuals sleeping in the park, he knew complications would follow.

“I think before you do that, you have to seriously consider the ramifications and you have to assume that it’s going to be flooded eventually with tents and with people sleeping in the park,” Norris said in an interview on Charlottesville Right Now. “And so you have to be very mindful of the fact that this has now become essentially a city subsidized homeless shelter [or] homeless encampment.”

Indeed, in the week after the park was ordered to remain open, more than a dozen tents had popped up and there had been an arrest for a stabbing that happened in or around Market Street Park on Sept. 24.

At a press conference on Thursday, Sept. 28, Charlottesville Police Chief Michael Kochis revealed the results of both an external and internal review of the evidence including video from an officer’s body camera that revealed officer’s politely requesting people vacate the park by its 11pm closing time. One officer did use his foot to nudge the heel of a man who had gone back to sleep after initially agreeing to leave.

“Police officers are often the easy target of those who are frustrated with certain situations,” an emotional Kochis said at the podium. “I get that, but it’s not okay to exaggerate and fabricate events in attempt to bring attention to such a complex and important issue like the unhoused.”

Kochis said police have been summoned to the park 266 times in the past several months by concerned nearby residents, and noted that Sanders did consult with him prior to announcing the change in the park’s open hours.

Despite the revelation that police acted properly, the park remains open through the night as city officials including current Mayor Lloyd Snook have said the city needs to do more to address the issue of homelessness.

Norris agrees, and says the problem isn’t new. In addition to his time on Charlottesville Council from 2007 through 2015, Norris worked closely with the unhoused population in Charlottesville as the founding director of PACEM, a network of Charlottesville-area churches that serve as overnight shelters during the colder months. He saw firsthand what happened in the same park in the fall of 2011 during the Occupy Charlottesville movement in which protesters took over the park for for about six weeks. Initially, the protesters had city leadership’s support but the situation escalated and the group was eventually evicted in late November with 18 protesters arrested.

“Over time, that encampment in what was then Lee Park started taking on more homeless people who came to live in the park alongside the Occupy folks,” Norris recalled. “And they weren’t equipped to run a homeless shelter, a homeless encampment. And again, you have to think this thing through about how to keep it safe, how to keep it supportive of the people that are staying there. What kind of services are you going to have in place? What kind of sanitary provisions are you going to make? That’s not what the Occupy movement was there to do. And so when they started taking on this other whole aspect of running a homeless encampment, that’s when you started to see a lot of problems.”

Norris hopes current city leadership will take a lesson from that history.

“There’s a lot that goes into making sure it’s a place that’s safe and supportive and you can’t just open up a city park and say, come sleep here, and then not expect unfortunate things to happen,” he said. “We’ve already seen some unfortunate things happen. And so I think the answer, again, we have to get our arms around this issue of homelessness, but we need well thought out solutions and strategies.”

He says he frequently hears the assumption that more services for the homeless will simply make Charlottesville a magnet for unhoused people in other areas.

“We have to pull our head out of the sand a little bit here and acknowledge and come face to face with the fact that this is largely a homegrown problem,” he said.

He blames the lack of deeply affordable housing and adequate mental health and substance abuse treatment options at the state and local level.

“You have to expect that people are going to fall through the cracks when you don’t do the things that we need to do to make sure that we have an adequate safety net and that we have adequate supply of affordable housing,” he said. “And so this is what happens.”

Hear the full interview with Dave Norris here.