Wanted: Volunteers to Dress as Vagrants (No Law & Order Experience Necessary)

The City’s Department of Homeless Services is offering $100 to volunteers to serve as quality control decoys for their annual homeless count:

As part of a new quality-control measure from the Department of Homeless Services, some 150 “fake” homeless – graduate students clad in old clothes and blankets – will be sent out to see if the volunteers spot them.

If the volunteers approach the decoys, the fakes, who are making $100 each, will ‘fess up and hand over a sticker to make sure they are not mistakenly counted.

The idea is to test the effectiveness of the count, which has been criticized by some homeless advocates because it partly relies on estimates.

“What happens to this cadre of 150 could be a fairly faithful replica” of the count’s accuracy, said Dr. Kim Hopper, a research scientist at the Nathan Kline Institute, who is leading the decoy effort.

Some 1,500 volunteers have already signed up and will gather at 10:30 p.m. Monday for a quick training session, then hit the streets at midnight for a few hours.

Not clear if they are offering a bonus for multiple visits.