The Denver Police Department has begun patrolling the Central Library, amid a spike in drug use and illegal activity that has been the focus of heightened scrutiny in recent months.

Library officials are crediting the increased police presence and other safety measures with a significant decrease in illegal activity this summer. The downtown library has also added cameras, increased waste clean-up around the building and stocked overdose kits on site to treat patrons.

“Just observing how the building feels, there’s been a remarkable change,” said Michelle Jeske, the city librarian. “I don’t see the same activities I did a month ago.”

Typically police have only visited the library when called, but officers began regular visits in May. Police patrolled inside and outside the building for 219 hours between May 11 and June 16, according to a library news release. Both undercover and uniformed officers are are stationed in the library, said John White, a police spokesman.

“It used to be a lot worse here,” said John McClaugherty, a 61-year-old homeless man and library regular who said he stopped using the library briefly due to rampant drug use by others. “It was terrible going in the bathroom, there were needles. I feel a lot safer in here (now).”

Pairs of officers tend to monitor the library for four hours every afternoon, said Chris Henning, a library spokesman.

“A lot of the dealers have been preying on the homeless population. As the dealers move out, the problem has gotten better,” Henning said. “We’re seeing less loitering, less trash in the past month.”

There have been 14 overdoses at the library since Jan. 1, Henning said. The Central Library began stocking kits with Narcan nasal spray to treat overdoses in February, after a 25-year-old man died of an overdose. The kits have been used nine times since.

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March 16, 2017 Denver’s Central Library sees 6 drug overdoses since Jan. 1 Police made 40 arrests at the library between January and May, primarily for trespassing. Six arrests were made for warrants, six for drug violations and four for assault. The library called police 262 times in 2016, a 30 percent increase over the previous year. So far this year, calls have been down slightly.

Rachel Fewell, a library administrator, said many arrests at the library are due to banned library patrons re-entering the space. Before police were patrolling, many banned library customers would leave before officers arrived. Now, police on site have been able to respond to trespassing immediately. Some 700 patrons are banned at any given time, Fewell said.

As police crack down on illegal activity at the library, there has been an increase in waste and needles found at nearby library branches, including the Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, Byers, and Ross-Broadway branches and the Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library. Henning said the library is monitoring these sites but police aren’t currently patrolling there.

Seeing police on-site at the main library has relieved some patrons’ fears about safety, but others are uneasy.

Juan, a 37-year-old from Houston who refused to give his last name, said he was using the library every day but stopped when police started patrolling. Juan, who often sleeps in hotels and has no permanent home, complained about harassment and said the officers made him feel less safe.

The library has installed five new cameras outside the building, and will soon be hiring two new “peer navigators,” mentors who were formerly down on their luck themselves, to join the two social workers and three peer navigators currently on staff.

Multiple library patrons said Friday that drug use is still frequent in the bathrooms. James Short, a 51-year-old homeless man who has frequented the library for 30 years, said this year’s drug use has been the worst he’s ever seen.

“The problem is massive,” said library regular Eugene Konen, who is also homeless. “You’d have to put a monitor in every bathroom to catch everyone.”

The library closed the bathrooms on two floors in June to combat this issue — reducing the number of operating bathrooms from 12 to eight, said Henning, the library spokesman. That allows security to check bathrooms more frequently and concentrates traffic in bathrooms to certain floors. The library is considering different approaches, including employing monitors outside bathrooms.

“It certainly has gotten better as we’ve closed those two floors down but that’s not a model we can sustain long-term,” he said.