Playing Homeless

The city’s homeless census took place last night. In this week’s New Yorker, Ben McGrath looks at the control decoys in the city’s homeless census:

Dr. Kim Hopper, a medical anthropologist at the Nathan Kline Institute and the former president of the National Coalition for the Homeless, is the architect of what the city is calling the Shadow Count, and the man in charge of implementing its “plant-capture” method: you plant a known quantity of itinerant decoys among the street population at large, and see how many of them you can spot in a night’s worth of searching for actual homeless people; the percentage of decoys missed ought to resemble the percentage of the true population unaccounted for in your surveyors’ ledgers.

The guidelines for playing a homeless person:

Prospective decoys—Hopper wants a hundred and fifty—will be handed an instruction card shortly before heading out to assigned locations, at midnight, for three hours of role-playing. The card begins, “Your job is to pass for a homeless person on the street tonight. But you will be unusually stable, well-behaved, dressed for the weather, and approachable.” As props, Hopper recommends bringing along only a blanket and “a crummy hat.”

Booze? “Several people have asked if that’s O.K.,” Hopper said last week, in the midst of final preparations. “We had to develop some artful answer: ‘You’re employees of the research foundation for mental health; these are work hours for you and the usual rules apply.’ But if people feel like misbehaving in a civil fashion on their own, I can’t police them.”

Reading material? Hopper’s inclination was to say, “Yeah, whatever helps pass the time.” But one of his students asked if he could bring his homelessness textbook along. “That’s probably not the thing that ordinary homeless folks would be doing,” Hopper cautioned.

Then again, Hopper isn’t calling for total hobo impersonation. “We would like very much if the students saw this as a research study rather than an audition,” he said. “We don’t want people begging or accosting passersby, or whatever they think homeless people do when they’re out during the middle of the night.”