When police officers Kevin Williams and Mike Cipriano drove up to a panhandler under a highway overpass in downtown Trenton Friday night, the man quickly put his makeshift sign in his pocket when he saw their marked police car.
Some nights, they would have moved the man along or warned him against obstructing traffic while asking motorists for a handout.
On a bitterly cold, single-digit temperature nights like Friday, they offered him help.
"We'll give you a ride to the Rescue Mission, no questions asked," Williams said to the man.
Williams means no questions about the law because Cipriano does ask him a question.
"You got somewhere to stay tonight?" Cipriano inquires.
"Nah, I'm staying in a truck," the man responds, pointing further down Bridge Street.
The man relaxes more when the officers talk about lending a hand.
The man says he worked at a restaurant in Hamilton but was laid off because of his criminal record. He wants to move to Wisconsin and is doing what he can to get by. He has gas in his truck and will be fine, he says to the officers.
They tell him that if he changes his mind, to waive them down later, or any Trenton police car, and they'll come back and pick him up.
"Like I said, we'll take you no questions asked," Cipriano says.
"We're just trying to look out for you tonight," adds Williams.
"Ok," the man responds.
Williams and Cipriano were on "endangered person" patrol. It's a duty triggered by the outside temperature dropping to 10 degrees overnight, windchill included. When it does, a patrol car is assigned to scour the city for homeless and endangered people and offer them a ride to a shelter.
The officers would have several more exchanges similar to the one they had with the panhandler under the overpass during their 12-hour shift from Friday into Saturday.
In circuitous routes through the city's four wards, they go down a mental list of anywhere the homeless or people who could use a warm place to stay usually gather: known encampments, parks, dead-end streets, intersections where they panhandle, and the city's train station.
Williams and Cipriano are rookies each with less than 18 months on the job, but they already know the city well.
They do not get any takers for a ride in the first three hours, but they find several people and make the offer. They suspect that it's so cold, many of the homeless and transient population have made it indoors already.
While Williams and Cipriano do their patrol, the Rescue Mission of Trenton is also reaching out to the same population. They're offering rides too, plus food, blankets, and hats and gloves. For the mission, it's triggered by their own policy, "code blue."
One Rescue Mission staffer, James, knows the people he is helping. He was one.
He's a former addict, panhandler and shelter resident. "I can remember being out here, man, cold, rain, sleet, it didn't matter, not in my case," he said as his partner Will drove.
He supported his heroin habit for two years through panhandling, always seeking, "one more bag."
"I am so glad to be clean and sober where I can help somebody else," James said.
They hand out food and supplies, but like the police, they do not transport anyone.
The Rescue Mission outreach teams and Williams and Cipriano encounter the same people sometimes just minutes apart - like a known group of people who live in tents on East Front Street across from Mill Hill Park, a man hanging out in front of a convenience store on Lalor Street, and a man on a bench at the Trenton train station.
"Everybody OK?" Cipriano calls out to the tent dwellers, shining his flashlight.
"Yeah, we're OK," a man's voice comes from inside the tent, which stays zipped.
"Want to go to a shelter?" Williams asks. "No, were good," the male voice says.
Trenton Officer Mike Cipriano talks with NJ Transit officers abut a man in the train station. (Kevin Shea | For NJ.com)At the train station, which the officers pass several times, they encounter a man apparently sleeping on a bench, but New Jersey Transit police officers are already assisting him, and have called an ambulance, suspecting he's under the influence of narcotics.
Williams and Cipriano say the endangered person patrol is not just a good thing for the city, and the people they encounter, but it helps them in their training.
While on the assignment, they do not respond to 911 calls, or other incidents, and say the duty sharpen their skills in building rapport and solving problems. It gets them looking for things, and people, without the typical routine of looking for crime.
Getting people to get into a police car without handcuffs, "It's a little bit of a sales pitch," Cipriano said.
On Hamilton Avenue, the pitch almost works on a man smoking a cigarette and sipping a beer in front of a liquor store. The man says he might need a ride in three hours.
"Three hours? Cipriano says.
The man acts intoxicated and enjoys some playfully sparring with the officers, asking their names and saying he wants to promote them, "I'm gonna make you sergeants."
"Look, we see you hanging out, and we know it's cold, we're just making sure you have somewhere to be."
The man declines, but thanks them for lookin' out for him, and then retrieves his beer from the front stoop of a house.
Williams says on a warmer night, their approach to the loiterer would be "different."
"Not tonight, when it's this cold," Williams says and pulls away.
- Staff Photographer Michael Mancuso contributed to this story.
Kevin Shea may be reached at kshea@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter@kevintshea. Find NJ.com on Facebook.