The Sweeps Campaign. Time to Reassess.

One year after launching a campaign to oppose and reverse the city’s zero-tolerance policy of public camping, how does the landscape look? What has changed? How should the Real Change Organizing Project's strategy adapt over the coming year to current realities? Your feedback is welcome. Anonymity, if that's necessary, is OK and understood.

• Over the course of our campaign, we have demonstrated deep public skepticism, outrage, and opposition to city policy on public camping.
• Protocols have been created to guide the sweeps that are rendered largely meaningless by their own loopholes and the city’s failure to adhere to their own guidelines, particularly in the area of storage of possessions.
• We have assisted SKCCH and Columbia Legal in documenting the City’s failure to follow their own protocols in preparation for a potential legal strategy.
• We have found that insufficient political will exists in the City Council to hold the Mayor accountable regarding protocol implementation. Public Safety and Human Services Chair Tim Burgess has resisted attempts to create meaningful oversight.
• CEHKC, the decision-making body for city policy on homelessness, has consistently refused to take a position on this issue. Claims of affordable housing and shelter with services as an alternative to camping and a “pathway” out of homelessness are consistently made by CEHKC in concert with the Nickels administration to justify the sweeps policy.
• CEHKC’s Ten Year Plan strategy for ending homelessness has lost credibility due to their failure to meet housing goals, dismal prospects for future funding, and the increasingly apparent limits on internal democracy.
• 70 additional shelter beds have been set aside to accommodate displaced campers. The extent to which these “extra” beds simply displace other homeless from shelter or actually offer new capacity is unclear.
• Seattle Center has been opened as additional severe weather capacity in response to pressure regarding the survival realities of homelessness in Seattle.
• The city has funded human services outreach to campers. The extent to which this outreach is backed by meaningful capacity remains very unclear.
• The media narrative — that homeless campers threaten public safety and exist in conditions of disease, addiction, and filth — has been challenged by a counter-narrative of inadequate public resources for the destitute and, with the Nickelsville camp, of homeless people doing for themselves despite the hostility of city officials.
• A report has been issued documenting that the city’s PR strategy on the sweeps is intentionally grounded in a “discourse of filth and contagion.”
• Leadership in the faith community and the Church Council have stood up to city bullying to offer safe haven to Nickelsville.
• Service providers witness daily evidence of the hardship and misery created by the city’s commitment to ongoing, routine sweeps, despite clear evidence of inadequate alternatives.
• City PR strategy has focused on distorting the facts to reassure the public that meaningful alternatives exist, and that City efforts are carefully calibrated to offer the maximum possible response, and to stigmatize homeless campers as lawless outsiders who inexplicably refuse to cooperate in the city’s efforts to help,
• We have, through our protest and efforts to provide material support to homeless campers, found that broad public opposition and skepticism exists regarding city strategy.
• We have been largely unsuccessful in leveraging that support to create meaningful system change to stop the sweeps and offer meaningful survival alternatives.
• Outside of one recent meeting between City officials and faith leaders, which ended in impasse, the City has consistently refused dialogue.

Strategic Questions for RCOP:

• How do we most effectively continue to broaden opposition to the City’s zero-tolerance of public camping?
• How do we effectively counter the city’s twin strategy of dehumanizing homeless campers and delegitimating their survival efforts with empty claims of reasonable alternatives?
• City policy and human services response has narrowly focused attention on shelter and service availability. How do we effectively broaden the issue to address growing suffering in the face of a declining economy and growing inequality, affordable housing lost, inadequate public health resources, and issues of racism, criminalization of the poor, and declining civil rights?
• A City frame has developed that says responsible and compassionate efforts to end homelessness and provide alternatives to public camping are underway, and opposition is “political” and driven by advocates who will simply never be satisfied. How do we effectively respond?
• What is RCOP’s unique role within the broad spectrum of opposition and concern regarding conditions for homeless people in Seattle?
• Where does power reside, and where are the leverage points to hold power accountable?