Editor's note: This story was originally published by Suncoast Searchlight.
Ben Daniels keeps a standard daily routine. He wakes up before sunrise with milk-free coffee or tea, when available, and a banana or granola bar leftover from the day before. Then he gets dressed for work — if he can find it.
For the past eight years, Daniels has been in and out of employment. Currently jobless, he spends most of his day at the public library, “carpet bombing job applications,” he said. He has experience as a cook, a landscaper, a factory worker and a grocery store temp. At the end of the day, he doesn’t return home.
Because he doesn’t have one.
“Last night, I slept in front of the courthouse,” the 44-year-old told Suncoast Searchlight. “One of their security lights is out, so it’s dark.”
Daniels spoke with Suncoast Searchlight at the Resurrection House, a day shelter in downtown Sarasota. Clean-shaven and neatly dressed in a long-sleeved T-shirt, jeans and a baseball cap, he gave little outward appearance that he slept on the ground the night before, under a dark security lamp.
He’s hoping to go unnoticed by anyone who may pose a threat in the middle of the night — or ask him to move. In Sarasota, and throughout Florida, that includes the police, because lodging outside on public property is illegal.
Criminal citations for sleeping outside have surged across Sarasota during the last six years, climbing from two dozen issued in 2020 to 343 last year — more than a 14-fold increase.
The citations are meant to be an entry point into a system of homelessness services like housing support, mental health treatment and recovery programs for substance use disorders.
But the system is limited — with waitlists that can stretch on for months — and many people experiencing homelessness don’t feel comfortable receiving help through the police and court system. Some said they would rather just accept a citation, even if it means they’re saddled with a fine they can’t pay or they spend a few days in jail.
One person in Sarasota was cited with sleeping outside more than 20 times during the past six years and owes hundreds of dollars in unpaid court fines.
Unlawful lodging out-of-doors is defined in Sarasota City code as “using public or private property for living accommodation,” without permission of the city or property owner. Sometimes that means setting up a tent or putting down blankets and sleeping bags. Other times, it could simply be starting a fire to cook a meal.
The lodging law took effect across Florida in 2024, but it had little effect in Sarasota, since the city has had a similar ordinance on the books since 2005.
To understand the function and impact of the current citation system, Suncoast Searchlight reviewed unlawful lodging-out-of-doors citation data over the past six years. The newsroom interviewed members of the Sarasota homeless outreach team, which includes Sarasota police officers and civilian case workers. A reporter also spoke with homelessness experts and about 10 people living on the streets of Sarasota who are considered chronically homeless, meaning they’ve been homeless for more than a year, or have experienced multiple stints of homelessness during the last three years.
Suncoast Searchlight’s investigation found:
- Police attribute the jump in lodging-out-of-doors citations to an amplified training program that equips all Sarasota officers with the knowledge of what to do when they see someone sleeping outside, so enforcement is no longer being left only to designated homeless outreach officers.
- Those working in local homelessness programs say Sarasota’s response to homelessness has improved after a lawsuit was filed against the city in 2015 by the American Civil Liberties Union. Now, instead of being sent to jail, anyone found lodging outside is first offered a bed at the Salvation Army Homeless Shelter — the only nighttime shelter in the city of Sarasota. If they accept the bed, criminal charges won’t be filed.
- The city’s current system offers limited options to those caught sleeping outside: either accept the bed and participate in Salvation Army programs, work with a case manager through a slow-moving community court system, or face a citation and wind up in the criminal justice system.
- While citations have increased — leading some to face repeated interactions with the court system — homelessness in Sarasota and Manatee counties has been decreasing, according to preliminary Point-In-Time, or PIT, data from the Suncoast Partnership to End Homelessness. The count is an imperfect estimate, tallied by volunteers who canvas the streets during one night each year.
“It comes down to the individual that’s being supported, as opposed to trying to pick one approach that’s going to work best for everybody,” said Iain De Jong, the CEO of OrgCode Consulting Inc.
De Jong works as a consultant with nonprofits and governments around the world trying to reduce homelessness. He said that while police and court-based programs can be useful, they can become problematic if they are the only entry point to services.
De Jong said he’d prefer to see communities start with social services before getting law enforcement involved.
“Are there going to be some people who are traumatized by that experience? Likely. Are there going to be some people where that is the moment where change clicks for them and they want to move forward? Probably. Do we have good data on that? Not that I’m aware of,” De Jong said.
To be sure, those left behind by Sarasota’s current system are not the majority of the homeless population — only about one in 10 of the people without housing in Sarasota and Manatee counties are considered chronically homeless, according to PIT data.
And Sarasota’s homelessness enforcement tactics have changed over the years. The city is a far cry now from 2006, when the National Coalition for the Homeless named it the “Meanest City in America” for people experiencing homelessness.
“There has been a definite shift with (the Sarasota Police Department),” said Terry Drake, an attorney with the 12th Judicial Circuit’s public defender’s office, who often works with homeless clients. “(The police) were really terrible for a while, to be honest. They were really mean. Now, they’ve done a lot of trauma training and (crisis intervention) training and stuff like that to make them more aware of the situation.”
Even when issuing charges, police say they seldom put people in handcuffs or send them to jail for lodging outdoors. Instead, they issue a ticket and direct them to a special type of court called Community Care Court. There, a judge will offer offenders the opportunity to meet with a case worker and create a progress plan, which can lead to charges being dismissed.
“Everybody’s path is different,” said Shellie Legarsky, Sarasota’s coordinator of homeless response and supervisor of the homeless outreach team’s civilian case workers. “Sometimes we have to have very difficult, tough conversations with them to get them motivated and get them moving … but if they’re moving along in the process and doing what is needed, then we don’t care how long it takes, we’re going to continue to work with them.”
But not everyone has the patience for Community Care Court, an often slow-moving process that can leave people living on the streets or at the Salvation Army for months while on long waitlists for services.
Daniels, who has been homeless since 2018, said that a few years ago he spent about six months in Community Care Court, trying to resolve a trespassing charge. He called the experience “completely superfluous.”
“I had to go to court once a month for six months, and it was like, ‘Hey, go through this program, and then we’re going to get you into all this other stuff that’s going to help you, like housing programs, personal assistance,’” he said. “None of that transpired.”
After six months, Daniels said he got tired of waiting and withdrew from the program.
“There was nothing beneficial about it,” he said. “I could have just pleaded no contest, and had none of that headache, and been left in the exact same spot that I was after jumping through all those hoops.”
Improvements have happened slowly, and some are still left behind
More than a decade ago, being homeless in Sarasota was a one-way ticket to incarceration.
It was becoming a problem, not just for the people who were being handed a criminal record because they had no place to stay, but also for the overcrowded Sarasota County Jail.
“There were dozens of citations a night,” said Michael Barfield, who was, at the time, the vice president of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. “The jail became the homeless camp, and the sheriff was complaining.”
In 2013 — seven years after Sarasota was named the “Meanest City in America” — local officials responded.
Sarasota partnered with the county to hire Robert Marbut, a national homelessness expert and consultant who later served as the Executive Director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness during President Donald Trump’s first term.
Based on Marbut’s recommendations, Sarasota launched multiple projects, including a city-funded independent agency to help people move into permanent housing and a large come-as-you-are shelter — both of which stalled amid uncertainty about the public record status of the agency and disagreements between the city and the county about where to build the shelter. Other initiatives, like creating a police homeless outreach team and a coordinated case-management system, were more successful.
Amid its efforts to solidify a long-term approach to homelessness, Sarasota was sued by the ACLU of Florida’s Sarasota Chapter. On behalf of six people in Sarasota who were homeless, the lawsuit claimed that by arresting them for sleeping outside when they had no other options, the city violated their Eighth Amendment right to not be inflicted with “cruel and unusual punishment.”
“Our concern was that the city was criminalizing homelessness,” Barfield said.
Barfield is now the executive director of the Florida Center for Government Accountability and an investigative reporter with its newsroom, the Florida Trident, which has partnered with Suncoast Searchlight on other investigations. He was not involved in this reporting.
As part of its 2017 settlement with the ACLU, the city agreed to enforce its lodging-out-of-doors ordinance only if a shelter bed was available and the person refused it.
Because Sarasota does not operate its own homeless shelter, the city contracts with the Salvation Army to provide beds for people brought in by police. The beds are available for 24 hours, but longer stays require participation in case management or joining a Salvation Army program — something many people experiencing chronic homelessness are not willing to do.
The reforms reduced reliance on arrests and expanded services, local experts said, but they didn’t eliminate the gaps. Some people, like Johnny Roberts, still feel they’ve been left behind.
Roberts has been homeless since 2023, and was charged with unlawful lodging out of doors twice in 2025 after declining a bed at the Salvation Army.
He has accepted the bed on other occasions, and has been in and out of the Salvation Army and other programs throughout his homelessness, but he’s struggled with drug addiction that makes it hard to stay active in programs and find work.
A few weeks ago, when a police officer approached him while he was sleeping on Lido Beach and, once again, offered him either a bed or a citation, he decided to take the bed and join another Salvation Army program.
This time, he said he’s going to make sure it sticks.
“You get tired of the what ifs. Where am I going to go? What am I going to eat? Where am I going to eat? Where am I going to get clothes? How am I going to clean my clothes? All those factors weigh on you,” Roberts said.
More police officers are involved with homelessness outreach than ever before
One man stood on a corner where he used to sell drugs.
Just down the road, a group of people were hanging out at the bus stop, because they didn’t have anywhere else to be that day.
At the Salvation Army Shelter, another person was waiting to have disability benefits approved — a process that can take several months or even years.
Nathan Lynn knew them all.
During a ride-along in June, the Sarasota police officer told a Suncoast Searchlight reporter about many of the people he encounters each day as a member of the homeless outreach team, or HOT. Lynn joined the team almost five years ago, one of several officers added as Sarasota expanded its homelessness outreach efforts. Since then, he’s become familiar with names, situations and life stories of nearly everyone living on the streets of Sarasota.
The HOT has grown from two members in 2014 — one cop and one case worker — to a team of nine today. It includes five police officers, a police sergeant, two case workers, and Legarsky — the city’s homeless response coordinator.
But they aren’t the only ones enforcing homelessness-related ordinances anymore.
As part of the city’s expanded outreach efforts, all Sarasota police officers are now trained to enforce the lodging-out-of-doors ordinance by offering a bed or issuing a citation when they encounter someone sleeping outside. The HOT provides the annual training.
The department also started a program in September 2024 in which all new recruits spend a week shadowing the HOT officers. Eleven new officers have gone through the program so far, according to the police department.
Sergeant Jaime Gloeckner, who supervises the police side of the HOT, told Suncoast Searchlight that the expanded training has helped drive the recent increase in citations, by giving more officers who aren’t HOT members the confidence to enforce the ordinance.
“Other officers can absolutely step in,” Gloeckner said. “Anybody is trained.”
The team has also become the go-to homelessness experts for the city’s civilian staff members, even providing a brief training to new employees in all city departments, according to Legarsky, who supervises the case management side of the HOT.
“Every two weeks, with the city orientation, I have a 15-minute session with new (civilian) hires, so they understand homelessness, what our team is doing, and how they can help us in the process,” Legarsky said. “It’s education across the board.”
Options are limited for those who don’t want police involvement
There were 990 lodging out-of-doors citations issued between Jan. 1, 2020 and April 22 of this year. While most people were cited only once or twice during that six-year period, others were cited dozens of times.
For some, it takes several citations before they agree to enter Community Care Court, which can leave them with a criminal record that sticks around even after they find housing.
One man received 24 citations — the most of anyone reviewed by Suncoast Searchlight. Court records show 10 charges resulted in guilty findings, and all but one of those came with a fine of $503. None of those fines have yet been paid. In September 2024, the man entered Community Care Court, and all of his subsequent lodging out-of-doors charges were dismissed. He received his last charge in May 2025.
Multiple homeless individuals who spoke with Suncoast Searchlight said that Community Care Court didn’t feel like the correct solution for them, but they didn’t feel like they had other options.
Levon Scott has been participating in Community Care Court since April, after he was issued his first sleeping out-of-doors citation in Sarasota. Since then, he’s received two additional citations, including one that was filed this past Wednesday.
It’s Scott’s first time participating in the program, and he told a reporter he feels his case worker genuinely wants to help.
But months after that first citation, he’s still sleeping outside.
Scott has been homeless since 2020, when, at the age of 27, he got tired of living with family and left home to try and make his own life. Now 32, he spends most of his mornings at the Resurrection House, where he spoke with a reporter.
“I wanted to start trying to do things on my own, instead of trying to depend on people to be there to help me all the time,” he told Suncoast Searchlight.
Whenever police approach Scott for sleeping outside, he said he tells them just to give him a citation rather than take him to the Salvation Army.
“I always tell them, I don’t want the bed,” he said. “I feel like getting a bed would be wasting my own time.”
He said he has stayed in the Salvation Army on two occasions — after approaching the shelter himself, rather than letting a cop drop him off — and graduated from a drug recovery program the shelter offers. Both times, he said, he didn’t remain housed for long, but offered few details on why.
“I wouldn’t say that homelessness is making me depressed,” Scott said, “but it’s not what I’m used to, so I kind of feel down about it at times.”
Repeat citations can lead to arrest
The increase in annual unlawful lodging citations was years in the making.
Starting with 24 in 2020, the number didn’t change much the following year, but almost quadrupled in 2022 and continued climbing from there, until it hit 343 in 2025.
At the same time, homelessness has been declining across Sarasota and Manatee counties.
According to the preliminary 2026 Point-In-Time data, there were 931 people experiencing sheltered or unsheltered homelessness at the beginning of this year, down from 1,044 people in 2020.
The Point-In-Time data is gathered by volunteers who canvas the streets and shelters during one night of the year and count the number of people experiencing homelessness. It provides a snapshot, but it isn’t a perfect measure.
Taylor Neighbors, the CEO of Suncoast Partnership to End Homelessness — which gathers the PIT data — said the 2024 state law, which made national headlines, may have caused more people to hide in fear of being arrested, making them harder to count.
“We live in times where people don’t want to give their information,” Neighbors said.
Few of the lodging out-of-doors citations involve an arrest, though. Of the 990 citations issued in the last six years, only 37 were labeled as “on-view arrest.” The rest were labeled as “summons issued,” which means a police officer issued the citation with a community court date, according to Gloeckner.
Gloeckner said most on-view arrests are based on warrants issued after someone has failed to appear on a previous citation. But during the June ride-along, a Suncoast Searchlight reporter witnessed an on-view arrest.
In the almost five years that Lynn has been a member of the homeless outreach team, he said this was only the second time he has arrested someone for lodging outdoors.
Lynn had come to a stop on a downtown street where a man was sleeping on the sidewalk. He asked the reporter and Carly Briesemeister, a case worker, to stay in the car as he spoke to the man. Lynn recognized him and worried he would get violent.
“Can you ask him if he went to his eye doctor appointment?” Briesemeister said, as Lynn stepped out of the car.
While Lynn spoke with the man, Briesemeister explained that she had been working with him while he stayed in a HOT bed at the Salvation Army earlier this year. At the beginning of June, shortly after helping him set up an appointment with an optometrist, the case workers told the man he could no longer sleep in the HOT bed because he had missed several curfews.
He didn’t want to work with the HOT after that, and Briesemeister hadn’t heard from him since.
Lynn put the man in handcuffs and loaded him into a patrol car.
The officer later explained his concern that the man, who was a regular lodging out-of-doors offender, wouldn’t show up for court if he had been issued a citation.
He also said the man didn’t answer the question of whether he’d gone to the eye appointment.
The man, and other Sarasota residents who cycle between the streets, shelters and the criminal justice system, illustrate a challenge De Jong has seen in communities around the world. He said chronic homelessness can develop when a community doesn’t offer enough different pathways out of homelessness for people with varied needs.
“It’s really about a diversity of options as opposed to a fault of any particular program,” De Jong said. “If the person is in a position where they’re like, ‘I won’t work with law enforcement. I won’t talk to law enforcement. They can do whatever they want to me.’ … This isn’t going to be the approach that’s going to work for this person. Let’s try something different.”
This story was produced by Suncoast Searchlight, a nonprofit newsroom of the Community News Collaborative serving Sarasota, Manatee, and DeSoto counties. Emily Andersen is a watchdog/investigative reporter at Suncoast Searchlight. Email her at eandersen@suncoastsearchlight.org.
