City uses ‘interveners’ to thwart panhandlers : Evanston, Ill., hires pair to walk the streets and remind donors there are alternatives to handouts.

When Melvin Smith sees someone doling out cash to a beggar on the streets of this college town, he dips into his pocket too.

He has a handout to deliver--to the donor. It is a little red card, advising that next time, “for your safety, security and panhandling-free shopping comfort,” it would be smarter to keep the coins.

The money would be much better spent, the card suggests, on contributions to an established social-service organization. A list of local programs, from church meals for the needy to mental health treatment, is included.

“They’re professional con artists,” Smith said of the mendicants dotting the sidewalks. At 77, wearing thick bifocals and a Senegalese cap, he is an Evanston institution. The retired publisher of a community newspaper, actively involved in black community issues, he now earns $7 an hour for a job that includes getting out this message: “Just say no.”

According to the odometer dangling from his belt, he walks 15 to 20 miles a day. He never interferes with a transaction. He never talks to the panhandlers. He carries a cellular telephone in case he needs to summon help.

Coming face to face with a panhandler has become a universal experience in many U.S. cities and inner suburbs like Evanston, population 73,000, just north of Chicago. So is the crisis of conscience that nearly always results, especially in affluent places like this where a gourmet cup of coffee can cost more than $2 and galleries sell $50 picture frames.

People who can afford such luxuries wonder if they should buy them while someone in front of them starves; but then they wonder too if their money will go for cheap wine or drugs rather than shelter or food.

In other places, police have swept beggars away from business districts; city councils have passed laws against “aggressive” panhandling; storekeepers have taken it upon themselves to scream at street people to move away from their doors; others have distributed vouchers for food at missions.

Downtown Evanston merchants considered all those options when it became clear last year that the panhandler population had grown and was apt to keep growing. “It’s pretty hard to advertise or market if shoppers feel the environment is intimidating,” said Terry Jenkins, executive director of EVmark, which manages the business district with $250,000 a year in special-assessment money collected by the city from property owners.

Police, he said, investigated about 30 panhandlers and found that nearly all had homes, arrest records and substance-abuse problems. The best of them were taking in up to $200, tax-free, each day.

A city task force decided “to try an innovative approach that still maintains compassion and dignity,” said Adam Rod, manager of business relations for the Evanston Chamber of Commerce.

Jenkins hired Smith and another “intervener” for a one-year experiment. Panhandling in the business district, he said, has been cut in half since August.

The Prince of Peace, as one panhandler identifies himself, is not pleased. In a dirty jacket that may have once been tweed, his hair and beard long and unkempt, the Prince clutches a shopping bag by its fraying handles and lurks in a bookstore doorway, collecting what he can. When he spies Smith, he hurries across the street. He will return hours later, once the coast is clear.

Around the corner, on a bench, a 31-year-old man with a red knit cap, Army jacket and corduroy pants, holds out a paper cup and rattles its contents: $1.45 in coins.

He says he’s been trying for two hours to drum up $12 for a room because the local shelter has a two-week limit. He’s been trying to get a job for two years, he adds, having come up from Chicago to get away from gangs.

He grunts angrily at mention of Smith. “You mean the guy in the African hat?” That’s the only work, he says, he would reject. “I would try to help, not turn against anybody out here that’s trying to survive.”

Local social-service agencies report that they have seen no significant increase in contributions since the red cards began circulating.

Even Smith has his doubts. He refused to sit on the task force because he didn’t like the racial overtones--many of the panhandlers are black. Besides, he added, “panhandlers are the Frankenstein of our society. We created them. We had industry here, and those jobs are gone.”

So he keeps on, hurrying up to a Taiwanese mechanical engineer he overhears in a vitamin shop. “If I have big change, I give it,” said Terence Tay-Jiam Liu. “One man I gave money to . . . said: ‘Oh, it’s not enough.’ So I give him more.”

Smith digs out a red card. “We encourage you not to give to panhandlers,” the older man said. “You know the government gives them help. They live in better homes than I’ve got.”

“Oh,” Liu said. “Oh, OK.”