Abstract
Recent national and statewide reports indicate that homelessness is rising across the West Coast. Within this context, social work and law enforcement are increasingly joining forces to deploy combined- interdisciplinary- ‘outreach teams’ to improve engagement and services with individuals living on the street. This thesis explores the implementation of one such collaboration between social workers and law enforcement in Northern California, using Lipsky’s (1980) well-known street level bureaucrat framework. Drawing from nine weeks of observations and field notes collected with the outreach team, the thesis provides a bottom-up description of how law enforcement members specifically use their discretion to: 1) translate abstract policies into streetlevel practices; 2) navigate their roles as social service liaisons; and 3) negotiate the occasional tensions and conflicts between providing social service referral and enforcing laws. Findings generally highlight how the discretion afforded the deputies positively contributed to the decriminalization of homelessness as well as brought forth new and innovative ways to leverage informal supports in the community to better assist individuals experiencing homelessness. Nonetheless, findings also highlight that vi law enforcement personnel often offer assistance in ways that conflict with social work conventions and ethics; as for example reinforcing paternalistic and stigmatizing tropes about homelessness that demean and disempower the very clients they seek to help. As social workers and law enforcement personnel continue to work together to ameliorate homelessness, this thesis identifies ongoing challenges, opportunities, and pressures that will likely arise in the complex policy context of homeless service programs.