C.R. Douglas Gets It

C.R. Douglas at Seattle Inside/Out has been following the sweeps issue for a long time, and he's getting a little pissed off. Early last summer he made me giddy by pressing then Human Services Director Patricia McInturff on where homeless people are supposed to go until she started to twitch. More recently, During Douglas' monthly Ask the Mayor show, Nickels claimed that the people staying at Nickelsville were all political activists who had homes to which they could return. Douglas was obviously taken aback by the Mayor's claim. One expects politicians to distort and lie, but this was way beyond the pale and seems to have put Douglas over the edge. This week's edition of Seattle Inside/Out is his answer.

Douglas goes out on the street to show how bad things are, and then brings Human Services Director Alan Painter, Committee to End Homelessness in King County ED Bill Block, Seattle King County Coalition on Homelessness ED Alison Eisinger, and Operation NightWatch Director Rick Reynolds into the studio to get some answers. On a scale of 1-10 this show is an 11.

As Painter recites the city talking points in response to Douglas' questions, he looks as though he might be seated on a tack. It's a painful display. Douglas wanted SKCCH Director Alison Eisinger to just flat out say she supports Nickelsville as a solution, but for whatever reason, she couldn't go there. This left it up to Rick Reynolds, who admirably rises to the occasion by humanizing the problem and calling for something better. "Why do we continue to have persistent tenting situations if the need is being met? … It's a band-aid, but how many of us have never needed a band-aid?" He is riveting. Even Bill Block goes a little off the plantation, but not dangerously so. He mostly sticks to his talking points.

The Mayor's script is seriously lacking in credibility. Maybe it's time to try something else.

Homeless Sweeps As Media Spectacle

I got a call from a reporter yesterday asking whether we were doing anything to protest today's sweeps of lower Queen Anne over by Kinnear Park. The Mayors office has alerted the media that they'll be doing sweeps in this area from 7:30-10 am. Oddly, we didn't get the press release. Despite repeated requests, they've neglected to add Real Change to their press list for these sorts of notifications. They apparently prefer their media supine.

Lower Queen Anne is where this odyssey began for us. Last fall, crews went through this area destroying tents and throwing out belongings without posting notice, but left mountains of trash behind. This was repeatedly referred to by the Mayor's staff as a "botched" clean-up, but there was no mistake. The trash was left on purpose. It made a great visual for the press tours conducted since then by Parks Department and the Mayor's Human Services staff.

"Look at the garbage. Over here, we have condoms. Homeless sex. Icky. And look at all the beer bottles. Being homeless is one big party at taxpayer expense. And, oh god, what is that? I think I'm going to be sick. They poop too!"

I did the tour myself a few months ago. CR Douglas at the Seattle Channel invited me along. There wasn't much they could do or say to stop me from coming. His was one of the more critical takes. The City prefers it when the media just prints their press releases, and if Nickels understands anything, it's the importance of rewarding loyalty. Douglas got Human Services head Patricia McInturff in his studio and valiantly tried to pin her down on the question of where people are supposed to go. More than 2600 people counted outside last January, with 20 new beds added to accommodate those cleared from the greenbelts. A second grader can see through the math.

But McInturff wasn't having it. "Seattle has a Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness," she kept saying. It's a ten year plan, not a two year plan. Blah, blah, blah." City talking points are designed to evade inconvenient questions such as his. He got nowhere.

There's a conveniently located vitamin supplement store where they always invite press to meet for the tour. We know this through our frequent public disclosure requests, which have resulted in reams of paper in our office that detail the inner workings of the Nickels media machine. When I was waiting, I had a nice chat with the built guy who runs the jock fuel outlet. He said the campers didn't bother him at all. They keep an eye out and clean his parking lot. His experience was of responsible people maintaining good neighbor relations. He wouldn't talk to CR on camera.

Today's show sweeps are, in all probability, the opening propaganda shot that marks a return to a more aggressive schedule of clearances. "Look," they'll say. "Icky. What else are we to do? And look! Notices! Outreach! We're consistent. We're humane. We're kinder and gentler."

Then they'll steamroll forward, secure in the knowledge that once the story's been covered on their terms, they've got a good window during which the sweeps will once again be yesterday's news.

Meanwhile, Operation Nightwatch is turning people out into the night with just a bus ticket and a blanket in record numbers.

This is where we get to the Big Lie. The one about the sweeps being OK because we're ending homelessness. We're not. It's getting worse. There are more shelter turn-aways than ever. One Night Count numbers are on the ascent. More people are dying.

We won't be out protesting tomorrow's sweeps. We're too busy organizing to kick the Mayor's ass on June 8-9 when we hold Camp4Unity, our third and largest encampment yet at City Hall. There will be time to get to know each other and build the relationships that sustain and deepen a movement. There will be a memorial service for the dead. Strong statements will be made. Groundwork will be laid. We are gathering force.

Download the flier PDF here, and the handbills here. Spread the word. The real trash is on the 7th floor of City Hall, and he wears a big empty suit.

Inconvenient Math

My friend over at Whitney's Corner offers this homely urban scene along with his typically stunning nature photography this week. It's the Crisis Clinic suicide prevention sign, posted at either end of the jumper magnet that is the Aurora Bridge. He points out that the Crisis Clinic declined to be listed as the resource referral point for homeless campers on the very excellent grounds that no "resources" exist to which those displaced might be referred, and that this means you have better odds of being helped if you're a suicidal bridge jumper than a harassed and homeless camper. A reporter I recently spoke with tidily described this as the "inconvenient math" of the homeless encampment issue.

Since I flunked algebra twice in high school, I should probably get Dr. Wes to help with this, but let's try to render the equation. More than 2,600 people surviving outside during a recent One Night Homeless Count translates as >2,600. The number of full shelter beds that night are still being tabulated, but we do know that the emergency overflow capacity of about 100 beds was maxed out at 140 occupants. So max capacity might be represented for now as x + 140. So (x + 140) - >2600 = ->2600 mathematically demonstrates there are more than 2,600 people who were counted on one night surviving outside of a maxed out emergency shelter system.

It's almost painful to watch Patricia McInturff dodge C.R. Douglas's dogged line of questioning regarding this problem. She trips over her victim-blaming rhetoric as she visibly struggles to evade the obvious. No simple thing to do in public. No wonder she's retiring. Having spent whatever credibility she has telling transparent lies in service of the Great White Whale, a lanai in Hawaii must be looking pretty damn good.

Back to the Crisis Clinic, we have an email to the City from their ED Kathleen Southwick. If the City puts their number on the signs, she writes, displaced campers "will just be mad at us and we won't be able to help find their stuff and most likely won't be able to help them find shelter. ... I know the City's goal is to keep people off their property, but people are living there because they don't have anywhere else to go."

It's that inconvenient math thing again.

But Community Service Bureau Director Darby DuComb didn't have this problem. She just followed orders and listed their number. What's she have that the Crisis Clinic doesn't? Outside of a different boss?

City Inside/Out

CR Douglas' City Inside/Out episode on homelessness this week is worth seeing. We did a Lower Queen Anne greenbelt Parks Department tour that he uses as the set-up for a panel interview with Human Services press flak Patricia McInturff, Operation Nightwatch Director Rev. Rick Reynolds, and Committee to End Homelessness in King County honcho Bill Block. McInturff artfully ducks Douglas' pointed questioning on shelter capacity and does her level best to make City policy look reasonable. Reynolds, in his diplomatic way, doesn't buy it. Block gets defensive about Ten Year Plan success, delivers his Housing First rap, and, as always, has nothing to say on the encampment clearance issue. A lot of average people on the street seem mostly critical of how homelessness is being handled. I seem pissed off ("I think the city needs to have a policy that actually helps people instead of deepening their misery.") and sleep deprived, which is about right. I'm also fighting a cold. If you look at the KOMO interview I did in my office later that day, my voice is a good octave lower than normal. I kind of growl. When I apologized to the anchor later she said, "I've never met you, so I thought that was just how you talk."

As CR and I strolled through the greenbelt with the parks crew, we saw around a dozen structures that varied widely in terms of overall squalor. There were a few patches of appalling mountains of trash (mostly empty tobacco pouches and beer cans), and other spots where camp sites were clean and had thoughtful divisions of function. We ran into around three actual campers. The one who had the most to say is on film talking to CR through the wall of his tent.

This is the same tour that Nicole Brodeur got a few months ago, and then Bruce Ramsey of the Seattle Times, just prior to their first hateful editorial in favor of the Mayor's policy. I've spoken to a City Councilor who did the tour as well. Patricia mumbles something about the trash still being there because of difficult logistics or something. That's bullshit. It's a museum piece. They've preserved the most trash heaped camp in the City to show off to the press as representative, and they've even let people keep living there. Even as CR sees through this, he still can't resist the dramatic footage. That's why it works.

A Season of Holiday Hate

Given the confluence of a recent grossly uninformed Seattle Times "Squatters, Be Gone" editorial, Nicole Brodeur’s recent revelations that the homeless are to be hated and feared, and yet another alarmist op-ed regarding the extremely sudden scourge of armed homeless drug addicts, C.R. Douglas’ very Seattle Crosscut piece asking whether it might be time to crack down, and the tasteless yuck fest at the expense of those who don’t have shit that appeared issue before last in the Seattle Weekly, I’m beginning to wonder whether the holiday season has been rededicated to hating the homeless? Hey Seattle, let’s start a new tradition!

When Real Change moved the Mayor’s official-but-lets-preserve-deniability policy of homeless sweeps to front and center by surfacing hard proof through our FOIA requests, we knew that we ran the risk of creating a backlash. The Mayor’s office, along with the top parks and human service honchos on city payroll, has responded with a lying disinformation campaign that is based in the denial of plain facts and the tight control of information.

Meanwhile, the smear campaign is on. In a city where the shelters turn people away every night, those who survive outside are being depicted as subhuman, diseased criminals. Alongside this, the phony compassion rhetoric wilts to slime like two month-old lettuce.

Pushback begets pushback. Week after next, homeless people are going to see who their friends are. Details on Monday.

Seattle Panhandling Ban? Carr Says Bring It On.

C. R. Douglas' Seattle Inside Out (click to see the show) recently took up the issue of whether Seattle should adopt a Tacoma-style panhandling ordinance. The Tacoma law has dealt with the free speech argument by imposing time, place, and manner restrictions that are so stringent as to effectively ban panhandling altogether. Panhandling in Tacoma is a misdemeanor, punishable by a $1,000 fine or 90 days in jail.

On the pro side was City Attorney Tom Carr, who says we should adopt their ban on dusk to dawn panhandling here in Seattle, and the preternaturally square-jawed Paul Guppy from the right-libertarian Washington Policy Institute, who said that if you ban panhandling the homeless will flock to the housing and treatment options that are now so richly available.

Guppy. the Aryan-looking chap pictured above, wins the prize for sophistry (a subtle, tricky, superficially plausible, but generally fallacious method of reasoning), for his argument that we should ban panhandling because it's unpleasant, and to allow it is to deny ordinary people access to public space. He also said that we should remember that homeless people are humans that should be treated with respect, and the best way to do this is to pass legislation that limits their visibility.

Tom Rassmussen vigorously pointed out the inadequacy of current housing and services, and pointed out that people complain about violence, noise, and drug dealing in Seattle, but literally no one is complaining about panhandling. Rasmussen also noted that Seattle already has an aggressive panhandling ordinance, and it seems quite adequate. About 150-200 people are arrested each year under its provisions.

They also interview some Tim Harris guy, who fills out the bill as the wild-eyed radical.