The city of Phoenix’s controversial new parks ordinance banning food distribution and medical care to the homeless in city parks is on hold right now after a judge granted a temporary emergency restraining order that prevents the city from enforcing it.
But Clarissa Sosin reported city leaders may have known the ordinance wouldn’t be popular even before they passed it.
Sosin is a staff writer at Phoenix New Times, and she dug up an unreleased survey the city put out before the council took the vote that shows respondents were overwhelmingly against the ordinance. This, despite the fact that a pollster she showed it to said — its questions seemed slanted to try to drum up support for it.
She spoke with The Show more about it.
Full conversation
CLARISSA SOSIN: It wasn’t a very long survey, maybe 10, 12 questions in all. And it, I mean, it was pretty basic. It was: Do you live here? How do you use the parks? Which parks do you use? Do you feel safe going to the parks? And then the main question was: Do you support the the ordinance?
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah.
CLARISSA SOSIN: And then there were a couple open-ended questions of like, do you support it and if you do or if you don’t, why? So people could kind of type out their answers.
LAUREN GILGER: Right. And this was not something that was made public. How did you find it?
CLARISSA SOSIN: I was looking among some of the surveys they’d put out in general, and so I put in a couple requests. I have a couple more that I’m waiting on. But I also was talking to someone who’s been working on the ordinance against the ordinance, and he said that he’d heard about the results and that they weren’t in favor of the city. And so I was pretty excited when I got the survey back since I’d heard it was going to be interesting to look at.
LAUREN GILGER: And then it was. So you took those survey questions, ran it by a pollster in town, Mike Noble. What did he think about the wording of this survey, the approach the city seemed to take here?
CLARISSA SOSIN: So he called that question, the one main question about the ordinance, he called that the key question. And he said typically key questions are supposed to be presented where if you support and oppose, it’s really important to put both those words in it so that people like both ideas come to mind, that the option of supporting and opposing comes to your mind while you read the question.
LAUREN GILGER: Mhm.
CLARISSA SOSIN: This question only asked if you support it. And then a couple other flaws he saw were that it didn’t define the ordinance. Nowhere actually in the survey did they define the ordinance, so it was relying on people who were responding to either have previous knowledge or do research themselves.
And then in the answers, there was also no way for someone to be like, "I don’t know." There was "I have no opinion," I forget the exact wording of it, but there wasn’t like, "I just don’t know. Like I’m not sure. I don’t know what it is." There was no way for them to say that and sort of opt out in a sense.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Was this an opt-in online thing? Was this something the city sent out to folks? How did they get folks to engage?
CLARISSA SOSIN: Yeah, from what I’ve seen, they they put it on their city website and then they’ll promote them on social media. I assume they send them out in some sort of community emails, but that’s how I’ve seen them promoted before.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. And this survey was sent out during the debate around this very controversial ordinance, which was controversial kind of from the beginning. Lots of folks in the advocate community saying this will hurt the work that they do.
We’ve heard those voices on our show. We’ve also talked to City Council members, though, who say that lots of folks who are upset about finding needles in the parks or things like that, or drug use in the parks, wanted something like this put in place. Just remind us the debate around this ordinance.
CLARISSA SOSIN: Yeah, so this survey was sent out during the second half of the debate on the ordinance. They passed a first version, I want to say it was in December. This was before I actually started really reporting here in the city, but I was hearing about it on this show, actually. That’s how I first heard about the ordinance.
And that version only included medical care in parks, so it was banning medical care in parks. So they then went back to rewrite it, and they put implementing it on hold. And so this survey came out during that time period where they were having meetings with community members in neighborhoods and doing the survey and doing other ways of getting feedback about the ordinance and how they should rewrite it.
LAUREN GILGER: OK. We should say this is tied up in court now. There have been a couple of lawsuits filed to try to stop it. So the kicker here though, right, Clarissa, in your reporting is that this despite the fact that this pollster tells you these questions were pretty slanted in one direction, respondents overwhelmingly said they were pretty opposed to it, right?
CLARISSA SOSIN: About 70% of people who responded were opposed to the ordinance, even though the question didn’t even bring up the idea of opposition. And I believe it was about it was the majority of them were strongly opposed.
LAUREN GILGER: And it wasn’t an incredibly small sample size, right? Like, this was a couple of thousand responses.
CLARISSA SOSIN: Yeah, about about 3,000.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Talk a little bit about what Mike Noble told you about the methodology.
CLARISSA SOSIN: I mean, so it was very flawed overall. It was out for about a month, which he said is is way too long because like things can happen in that time period. Someone could respond and change their opinions, so you need it to be a much shorter period of time. Also, everybody who responded had to self-identify that they were from Phoenix, and they did that by putting their ZIP code, but there was no way to verify that. And then there was also no other gathering of demographics.
Typically, you would look into more information about the people who are responding and what part of the city they live in and and who they are so you understand where you’re getting all of these responses from. And then he also just the way they were putting it out, too, like just putting it on social media or sending it out in a newsletter or the ways that they were doing it, like there are ways to make sure you reach a broad swath of people, and that’s not how you reach a broad swath of people.
LAUREN GILGER: What did the city have to say about this? Like, they seemed to recognize that this was not supposed to be a scientific poll or anything like that, right?
CLARISSA SOSIN: Yeah, they they said it was non-scientific. They said it’s just one part of the process of a multi-pronged process of how they engage with the community when it comes to doing things like this.
LAUREN GILGER: But they’ve used survey results like this in other city council debates.
CLARISSA SOSIN: They have. They have cited them saying like such and such percentage of respondents said this about this.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. What about this question that found 52% of respondents had been deterred from visiting a park because of safety concerns, 38% because of lack of maintenance, cleanliness? That seems to kind of bolster the city’s argument here in terms of this ordinance?
CLARISSA SOSIN: Yeah, that one was interesting because it does seem to to bolster it. But Mr. Noble pointed out that that question was flawed also because typically when you’re doing a survey like this, you you start with the do you enjoy the parks, right? The question right before it was basically like, do you feel safe going to parks, do you go to them?
And so only the people who said they don’t feel comfortable going to parks should have been asked the like, "Well, why do you not feel comfortable?" And instead, the question was asked of everybody. But it should have just been targeted at the people who said, "Yes, I am uncomfortable."
LAUREN GILGER: Let me ask you lastly, because as you said, there were a couple of open-ended questions involved in this survey that I think had some really interesting responses based on your reporting. Tell us about some of the ones that stood out to you.
CLARISSA SOSIN: Yeah, the ones that really stood out to me were ones from people who like you could tell they were either out doing the work or knew people who were doing the work, or who they just like there were a couple that were echoed a judge’s opinion.
One of the judges in the two lawsuits that are ongoing. She wrote that there were littering laws that could be changed or reinforced, or that like toddler birthdays also like put out a lot of trash, and so why aren’t they targeted? And so there were people who they wrote things like that, like echoing the exact same concerns.
LAUREN GILGER: It’s very interesting. All right. Lots to watch for on this front. Clarissa Sosin, a staff writer at Phoenix New Times, joining us to talk about her story. Clarissa, thank you so much for coming on The Show. I appreciate it.
CLARISSA SOSIN: Yeah, thank you for having me.
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