A shopping cart and a scooter sit on a stretch of sidewalk between a parking lot and a chain-link fence near Wheeler Mission. Beside them, Sammy Carroll rests in the shade as a white Bloomington Police SUV turns into the lot.
Carroll pushes himself to his feet and raises a hand in greeting. Bloomington Police Sergeant Mark Fabris parks beneath a tree, steps out and meets him in front of the car. Carroll leans against the hood as the men talk.
The officer, Bloomington Police Sergeant Mark Fabris, tells the man about the deck he finally finished building onto his house, saying it almost killed him.
Carroll laughs and talks about a friend coming from Arizona in August and his plans to head west with her. Fabris listens, asking questions about the trip and the desert heat.
Then Carroll nods toward the police car.
"So what brings you out here today?" he asks.
Fabris looks at Carroll's belongings on the sidewalk.
"I just wanted to let you know, they got this new camping ban coming up," Fabris says. "I wanted to see how that was going to work for you guys up here."
Beginning Wednesday, Indiana's Senate Enrolled Act 285 will prohibit unauthorized camping, sleeping, or long-term sheltering on publicly owned land.
Carroll has been unhoused for three years since he was evicted from his Bloomington apartment for missing rent payments. He has lived on the Westplex Avenue sidewalk since then. He plans to move to Arizona in mid-August.
"I got six weeks from the beginning of July 1 to figure something out," Carroll said. "It's just another way to get us to leave."
Despite Carroll's proximity to Wheeler Mission's overnight shelter, he hasn't stayed inside since he was kicked out for fighting years ago. He is trying to get back in so he doesn't violate the law before leaving in August.
"If they don't let me back in, I'll probably be right here and be arrested," Carroll said. "I got nowhere to go. I mean, I can go find a place out in the woods, but that'd be trespass."
Building trust
Downtown Resource Officers, colloquially called white-shirt police, have worked with Carroll for two years, connecting him to resources and checking in on him. The unit was created in 2014 to address homelessness and mental illness concerns through outreach rather than traditional policing. The unit works primarily in the city's downtown, connecting people with housing, treatment programs and shelters.
"I trust them 100 percent," Carroll said. "If not, you know, they would pick me off the sidewalk a long time ago."
Carroll says the white shirt police have helped him stay in contact with support systems, even while living outdoors. But under Senate Enrolled Act 285, those officers will be required to change how they operate.
The law, signed in April, requires law enforcement officers to determine whether a person needs emergency mental health detention. If not, officers must issue a warning that includes information about local shelters and diversion programs.
The warning starts a 48-hour clock. If a person remains within 300 feet of the location where the warning was issued after those 48 hours, they can be charged with a Class C misdemeanor, punishable by up to 60 days in jail and a $500 fine.
The law includes legal protections for people experiencing homelessness. A person has a legal defense if no shelter beds or treatment options are available within a five-mile radius, or if they were recently released from an involuntary mental health commitment.
Read more: Bloomington leaders, advocates raise concerns over new homelessness law
While Carroll says he knows the police are doing their job, he is worried about how people facing enforcement will react.
"People gonna be uncordial," Carroll said. "It's just gonna get rough. I want to be off the streets when it does, because I don't want to be part of that battle."
According to a 2025 count, Monroe County is home to 305 unhoused individuals. Not all of them are ready to get help.
Fabris gets in his patrol car. In the first 15 minutes out of the office, he responded to two calls: the first, a man screaming at the intersection of Kirkwood Avenue and Walnut Street; the second, suspected drug use by a woman on the B-line trail.
Both times, Fabris offered help getting resources like rehabilitation. Both times, the offer was rejected.
Effective law?
After three years as a DRO, Fabris knows the ban won't help everyone get to providers. He says some people won't even be worried about the misdemeanor charge because it is less than nuisance charges they've already received.
"If an A (Misdemeanor) or B Mis didn't really scare you off, then I don't think a C Mis is going to do it," Fabris says. "Some people are just set in their ways."
Fabris pulls the car away from the trail and heads east through downtown. As he drives past Seminary Park, a group of three naps in the grass and another sleeps on a nearby bench.
A few minutes later, driving past People's Park, two people sleep in the grass under a tree while another sits nearby scrolling on his phone.
Today, Fabris keeps driving.
Later this week, each of those encounters could require enforcement.
"Let's say we're being proactive as we want to be downtown, and then we notice this," Fabris said, waving a hand toward the park. "We've got to take action on it."
People experiencing homelessness commonly move between Seminary Park, People's Park, Kirkwood Avenue and Walnut Street, Fabris said. Under SEA 285, officers will have to determine whether someone has remained within 300 feet of where they were warned and who is violating the law.
Encampments, he said, might be easier to track.
The largest encampment in Bloomington is less than ten people, Fabris said. In anticipation of SEA 285, Bloomington police and local service providers began working June 1 to move its residents into housing.
South of city limits, though, a much larger encampment sits on country land around power lines. Fabris said he isn't sure whether its residents have been notified about the new law.
"Come July 1, they'll have a 48-hour obligation to remove them," Fabris said. "If you think removing seven to eight people in 48 hours is difficult, imagine 40 to 45."
Because the camp is already known to authorities, Fabris said the law requires it to be addressed almost immediately after July 1, either through arrests or diversion.
"These are complex individuals, complex cases, and not one size fits all," Fabris said. "Getting someone into one service thinking it's going to fix all their issues is not usually possible."
'Can't arrest our way out of homelessness'
Fabris said SEA 285's timeline is more difficult to work within than the previous 30-day notice policy in the county. Not only does it shorten the time officers have to connect people with services, he said, but it also makes conversations harder because people must be found.
"Folks won't be as visible, so it'll be harder to kind of interact with them," Fabris said. "The time crunch of saying, 'Hey, you kind of need to figure your life out in 48 hours' is going to be difficult."
Additionally, Fabris said the years of trust built between the DROs and service providers are about to be put to the test. He said providers might be less likely to communicate about camping violations because the police must take immediate action.
Even if the police use the diversion tactic, Fabris said he doesn't think it will work without additional resources provided by the state to support the law.
"Those systems don't work now," Fabris said. "I don't know how forcing something is going to make it better."
In January, Mayor Kerry Thomson supported the bill for putting policies in place to get people to the services they need. However, she said it needs to be followed with funding for mental health and recovery services and for housing.
"We have to provide services in order to make sure that people actually get served, because otherwise the problem is just growing," Thomson said. "We can't criminalize our way out of homelessness. We can't arrest our way out of homelessness."
Forrest Gilmore, executive director of Beacon Inc., said without increased funding and shelter capacity, the law shifts pressure onto already strained services.
On the second floor of the Shalom Center, ceiling tiles have been removed in Beacon's administrative office while repairs are being made to a roof leak.
At his desk beneath the surviving tiles, Gilmore works through the organization's budget.
Downstairs, the shelter is busy between breakfast and lunch. More than a dozen people hang out in the lobby. One person sleeps on the floor. At the front desk, a woman asks for a new bra while others drift in and out of the building.
Gilmore said it's evident the system is operating near its limits.
"I think the biggest flaw in this bill, and there are many, but the biggest flaw is that they haven't addressed in any way an expansion of service capacity or ability to help people," Gilmore said.
Strained relationships, services
For more than a decade, Beacon and Bloomington's Downtown Resource Officers have worked side by side, with service providers focusing on housing and treatment while police handled situations that required enforcement.
"The biggest thing that the DROs have done for our community is just create that connection between people experiencing homelessness, between social service agencies and the police force in a way that just helps resolve conflict rather easily," Gilmore said.
"We're not giving people the services that they need because we've just got too many people in need and not enough resources to help."Sergeant Mark Fabris, Bloomington Police Department
That relationship is going to change, according to Gilmore.
"We can no longer have fully honest conversations with the police department," Gilmore said. "We can't let them know about camps, we can't have their help or involvement with camps, and so there has to be this silence there, because the second they know, they have to respond."
Clearing and caring for people living in encampments has long been a task shared between service providers and police, according to Gilmore. He said the plan for moving people out of camps and into housing has been "obliterated" by this law because providers can no longer rely on police help.
Gilmore estimates there are 160 unsheltered individuals in the county and he said there aren't enough shelter beds for all of them. He worries the problem will be exacerbated by neighboring counties without service providers.
Because the law allows officers to divert people to services instead of making arrests, Gilmore said some communities may opt to transport people to counties where those resources exist, such as Monroe.
"There are very few communities, especially around us, that have any sheltering at all, certainly any all-year-round sheltering," Gilmore said. "They're all going to be under the same law. So, does that mean all those counties are going to have to send everybody to Bloomington?"
According to Fabris, Bloomington's services are straining.
In the DRO office, a flag hangs on the wall behind Fabris's desk. It says, "We do this not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy."
Fabris said he bought the flag as a joke because many people misunderstand the DRO job, often pointing to ongoing homelessness and mental illness as evidence they are ineffective. He said he juggles dozens of responsibilities each day, but there is never enough time to get everything done.
Starting Wednesday, he will add enforcing SEA 285 to his list. The first arrests could be made later in the week if diversion to services doesn't work.
"Our system is already overworked," Fabris said. "We're not giving people the services that they need because we've just got too many people in need and not enough resources to help."
