An Aberdeen man told the City Council he has concerns about police responses to some recent incidents he’s reported to them about homeless people trespassing in his neighborhood.

“I understand that the APD is very busy, and trespassing is at the bottom of the priority list. But the homeless trespassing on the properties in this area is getting worse all the time,” said Darrin Bates, of Summit Street.

Bates presented the council members with nearly three typed pages detailing two recent incidents.

One was when he reported a homeless man sleeping in the alcove of 801 E. Wishkah St., known among some locals as the “Old Taco Bell” location. Bates was concerned after calling at around 7:30 a.m. that the man was still there five hours later.

So he called to report it again.

A sergeant returned Bates’ call and told him there must have been a mix-up with the address. Someone from the APD arrived about 30 minutes later. They spoke to the homeless man, who was asleep, and asked him to leave, then left as well.

Bates is also concerned the officer didn’t wait until the homeless man collected his things and started moving on, especially after saying the man appeared sick.

“Why didn’t he check to see if the man needed assistance? Or call an aid car?” Bates wrote.

The homeless man had left by the time Bates returned to the site after another couple of hours passed. Bates brought with him a garbage bag to throw away the homeless man’s bedding but found a “pipe used for drugs,” he said.

So he called police again to report finding the pipe.

“I waited 30 to 45 minutes,” he wrote, before proceeding to throw away the cardboard and bag up the sleeping bag and padding. He put on a pair of nitrile gloves, picked up the pipe and went across the street to wait.

The officer arrived, took the pipe, put in in a special holder and advised him to not pick up needles, pipes or other forms of drug paraphernalia and call the department instead.

“Every month I call 15 to 20 times, and the officers that respond have been very professional,” he said, but added that “this is the worst experience.”

Bates also said that a property damage complaint wasn’t responded to by police so he ended up going to the department to jump-start the reporting process.

Police Chief Robert Torgerson said people going through such non-emergency matters as Bates should just keep contacting the department until they obtain a response. If a supervisor is busy, ask for the person upward in the ranks and keep working your way up until someone can provide assistance, he advised.

Bates told the council members that the people trespassing leave paraphernalia around, have hung a roll of toilet paper from nearby bushes behind the building to defecate, leave trash and all sorts of personal belongings that sometimes end up in his yard when the wind blows.

The company in charge of the building sends a clean-up crew once every couple of months but Bates said he usually can’t wait that long.

“If we want a decent neighborhood to live in, I have to clean this up,” he said. “Quite frankly, I do not have enough room in my garbage can for all the stuff these people leave behind.”

Mayor Erik Larson asked the police department to put together a time line of events using records and other material to illustrate what went on during the periods Bates talked and wrote about. The information will be given to the council for their review within the next couple of weeks, he said.

“Our officers deal with a large volume of calls,” Larson said. “Some of the calls officers respond to require more time to handle than others.” He explained that domestic violence incidents are just one example of more serious and complicated incidents that require a great deal of time during a police department work shift. “We want to make sure people know how this process works. It’s good information for people to have.”

The mayor asked for three additional officers to be hired next year and has asked the City Council to approve the funding for added staff in next year’s budget.