Officials said, a homeless encampment site was cleaned up Thursday and Friday in a combined effort. The site was in Bristol Township, on Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission property, and also took over a resident’s shed on their property.
Community tipsters in the spring started to report the existence of the encampment amid growing fears as more people started to settle in on the state-owned property. Reports of gunshots heard reportedly coming from the 5700 block of Beaver Dam Road only yards away from the make-shift shelter.
In the early hours of June 7 Bristol Township Police were dispatched to the area for a shots fired report. On-scene witnesses said responding officers set up lighting on Beaver Dam Road, performing grid search collection techniques for at least one hour, and spoke with a number of individuals. Police officials at the time would only say an active investigation was in effect, declining to confirm or deny bullet casings were collected.
Township Manager Randee Mazur on Friday at the clean-up site said the situation was worse than anyone knew because of countermeasures taken by the street camp.
We had a homeless encampment on the turnpike commission’s property, and they were also living in the shed of an 89-year-old resident who didn’t know because they had boarded up the one side facing the house and they we’re coming in and out of the other side, Mazur said. Adding there was a lot of drugs and other suspicious behaviors happening.
Credit: Joe Nelson Lower Bucks Source
Prior to disassembling the unauthorized camp site, a property owner “tore down” a shed of their own making because the homeless were tunneling in and sleeping there, sources told Lower Bucks Source. The public safety hazards that developed and existed in the wooded area off Beaver Dam Rd and on the privately owned properties is being cleaned up by the commission and township work crews, officials said.
“This morning (Thursday) the township police, state police, turnpike and township people all showed up. Following a brief foot chase, the cops made at least two arrests. Then they began destroying the encampment and tore it all down. They had dumpsters ready and have been filling them all day long as well as clearing brush and debris to make it more visible from both the turnpike itself and the road here,” said a community observer.
Bristol Township has been encountering this issue for probably a decade now with it becoming more pronounced and often visible post COVID, officials said. The Bucks County Co Responder team who work with Bristol Township, Bristol Borough and Tullytown police were “hopefully” going to ease the homeless encampment problem as one of their targeted goals. One member of the team resigned recently, and the second member is currently on leave, multiple sources told LBS. It’s not clear currently if co-responder staff working in and with police in surrounding Lower Bucks municipalities are covering the two positions assigned and working out of Bristol Twp.
Some relief for the homeless issue is coming soon with Family Services Association of Bucks County planning a complete overhaul of the emergency shelter it operates in Levittown. Bucks County recently released data of its Point In Time Count which showed a 27 percent rise in homelessness in comparison to the year before.
Over the last two years in background conversations with township officials, the search for a multi-pronged nuanced response has been fleeting. Council President Craig Bowen has spent a great deal of time along with the rest of council trying to address the challenges of individuals living outdoors on private, state, or locally owned properties. Then he discovered something new on Friday he could not wrap his head around.
We just talked with the police officer and there’s actually a fellow was back there who owns a home and doesn’t want to be there. He was in the back of the camp site, said Bowen.
“He’d rather be outside and that’s hard too hard to rectify that when somebody wants to live out in the woods then in their home.”
Credit: Joanne Ames Lower Bucks Source
Credit: Joanne Ames,. Lower Bucks Source