Lock 'Em Up And Throw Away The Key

This morning I dealt with incarceration and homelessness in my class at UW. The statistics seem too bizarre to be real. One in ninety-nine Americans is behind bars. A Black male high school drop out has a two-in-three chance of being incarcerated by age thirty-five. For white drop outs the rates are around one-in-ten. What is spent on prisons dwarfs the budget for education and other forms of social support.

From 1980 to 1999 state prisoners incarcerated for drug related offenses increased twelve-fold. Federal drug war prisoners went up fourteen fold. In major cities such as LA and San Fransisco the homeless population is 30-50% formerly incarcerated. A prison boom that began in the seventies increased incarceration rates that had remained mostly steady for five decades seven-fold. Fully half of those in prison are Black. In Washington State, Blacks are 3.2% of the general population, but 19.4% of the prison population. Latinos and Native Americans are also disproportionately imprisoned.

Today's paper discussed the great need for a new misdemeanor jail facility in this area by 2012. A 440-bed jail will cost $110 million to build and $18.4 million a year to maintain. That, for you math buffs, is $114.57 per bed night. We keep building and filling these things.

We've been talking about Peter Marcuse's idea that what's different about this period of homelessness is that, due to globalization, most of the people who have been written off in our economy will never be needed again. This, he says, is why federal support for poor people's housing and benefits is so pathetic and dwindling still. When government and industry believe that the unemployed will again be absorbed into the labor market, they are maintained. If not, they are thrown to the wolves.

The restructuring of the economy that has taken place since the seventies, he says, has altered power relations. A huge reservoir of unskilled workers and long-term unemployed ensures that low-wage work remains low-wage. There is a decline in the bargaining power of the civil sector while the power of elites grows. One result is ever widening gaps in inequality.

One of the things that I point out is that the explosion in incarceration rates parallels the modern advent of mass homelessness. They both have their roots in the economic restructuring that took place under globalization. Both started at around the same time and increased at similar trajectories. Both are solutions to the problem of how to contain and even profit from those who are surplus to the workings of capitalism.

Harvard researcher Bruce Western has focused his work on the relationship between incarceration and inequality. Western finds that incarceration lowers ones earning potential by 16% and deflates rates of wage growth by 39%. Due to the disproportionate numbers of blacks incarcerated through the drug war, this has deepened the racialization of poverty by creating a downward spiral of incarceration and reduced economic opportunity. And it's a widening net. Women of color are the fastest growing segment of the prison population.

The Black middle class, however, remains largely untouched by the drug war. This has driven a wedge through the Black community, with those who have the least opportunity being criminalized and those who have the most largely not caring.

I asked my students to speculate on why so many restrictions and barriers are aimed at those convicted of drug offenses. These are restrictions that murderers and rapists don't have. A lifetime ban of TANF, federal student aid, food stamps, veterans benefits and public housing. None of them had developed enough awareness of the nature of evil to go there.

This is about ensuring that a whole class of throw-away people never attain the means to get back up. Or vote.

So long as urban and rural areas with high concentrations of unskilled workers and devastated economies continue to exist, so will the drug trade, which offers both oblivion and economic opportunity in one convenient package. And so long as there are politicians willing to peddle racism and fear as a thirst for law and order, we'll keep packing them off to prison.

LA: Ground Zero in War on Poor

I received an alert yesterday from one of our sister organizations in the Western Regional Advocacy Project, a coalition of west coast groups that organize from the bottom-up on issues of poverty and homelessness. While each of our organizations is dealing with the effects of rapid gentrification and increased repression of the visible poor, LA has always been ahead of the pack.

Long-time readers of this blog may recall the LAPD's uniquely sci-fi approach to data collection on homeless people, where officers would descend on the downtown tent city in the pre-dawn hours to wake people for a bi-weekly count, and then feed the GIS coordinates of the homeless into a GPS system in order to produce lovely color-coded maps of the homeless problem. You can follow this link to see LA's Cartifact Project for yourself. The animation of homeless migratory patterns under conditions of intense police harassment should set any thinking person's hair on end. The practice was halted last August when a judge ruled that people could not be prevented from sleeping downtown when no suitable alternatives are available.

Yet the harassment of the mostly Black downtown street population has continued. Organizers from LA Community Action Network were recently cuffed and beaten after documenting an illegal search by LAPD. The photo above is one of their organizers, surrounded by LAPD plainclothes. Here's the full press release.

For Immediate Release
Contact: Pete White, (213) 434-1594 or (213) 228-0024

Community Organizers Opposed to Downtown Gentrification Arrested for the 2nd Time in Two Months

Just minutes after intervening in an unlawful search of an African American woman, three African American organizers are detained at gunpoint; Two are assaulted and injured; One is incarcerated

On Thursday April 10, 2008 at approximately 9:30 PM, community organizers responding to a report of police abuse in downtown Los Angeles find themselves victims of police brutality and illegal arrest.

LA CAN community organizers received a call Thursday evening reporting that an unidentified African-American woman was handcuffed and being searched on 5th and Los Angeles streets. LA CAN operates a CommunityWatch program that monitors police abuse and compliance with court injunctions against LAPD in downtown Los Angeles. Joe Thomas and Steve Richardson took cameras to the scene and Herman Jones arrived in his vehicle. The woman was released and she explained that LAPD had just jacked her up for nothing, saying they were looking for drugs.

Thomas, Richardson and Jones then left the scene by car to investigate and monitor police activities because historically poor, Black residents have been mistreated by police in an attempt to keep them away from Downtown’s trendy ArtWalk, which was happening that evening. LAPD officers followed them and conducted a "felony stop" while the car was simply stopped at a red light - meaning guns were drawn and all three were cuffed and searched, although no crime had been committed.

After the three were handcuffed, Thomas was dragged down the street and hit by officers and Richardson was brutally choked and held down by multiple officers. When witnesses with cameras arrived on the scene, the officers stopped the illegal behavior and uncuffed Jones and Thomas, instructing them that they were free to go. Richardson was arrested on the charge of "resisting arrest" and was incarcerated. The arresting officer stated that he grabbed two fingers of one of the officers while he was being held down in handcuffs and that was the basis of their charge. Both Richardson and Thomas sustained injuries to their fingers, wrists and necks and received medical treatment for these injuries.

There were 10 to 15 officers on the scene when additional witnesses arrived, the majority in plain clothes without badge identification. Officers were asked for their names, badge and serial numbers, which they are obligated to provide pursuant to Federal Consent Decree, on multiple occasions and all but two officers refused to give witnesses their information. The ranking officer was asked to provide information for identification purposes later at Central Division Headquarters and he again refused. This refusal was recorded via camera phone.

This incident underscores an alarming and ongoing trend of police officers illegally arresting LA CAN organizers performing perfectly legal police monitoring duties. Just two months ago, Pete White of LA CAN was also arrested by Central Division officers while documenting a raid in a Skid Row residential hotel. The charges against him were later dismissed in the "interest of justice" and a federal civil rights lawsuit was subsequently filed. Community organizers have not been exempt from the widespread abuses under the Mayor’s Safer City Initiative, but the impacts reach much further to the thousands of poor and mostly Black residents targeted by the Initiative. The Inspector General has assigned a special team of investigators to monitor the large number of complaints.

Victims, witnesses, photos, and relevant video footage are available upon request.
###

LA organizers have asked supporters to let their Mayor's Office and Police Chief know that these events are being watched and followed outside of LA. I encourage you to email them with brief statements of concern. Here's the letter I sent yesterday.

As a leader of a Seattle community organization that works with homeless people in a similar context to that of LA-CAN, I am gravely concerned with recent reports of police harassment and abuse aimed at this organization. The tactics I have heard described remind me of those employed by the likes of Bull Connor during Freedom Summer.

As you recall, these tactics were not successful, and only succeeded in mobilizing vast numbers of allies who were appalled by what they saw.

Increased repression against the visible poor is one of today's key civil rights issues, and police brutality that is strategically directed toward those who act and speak in solidarity with homeless people is an extremely serious matter that will not be tolerated in any manner.

I am writing to let you know that we in Seattle are following events in LA closely, and are prepared to do all that we can to support LA-CAN and others who dare to stand up for the poor.

Please direct your emails to:
Mayor’s office staff that received LA-CAN's original letters and met with them after Pete’s arrest:
Larry.frank@lacity.org
Rafael.gonzalez@lacity.org
Leonard.jackson@lacity.org

Police Commissioners Anthony Pacheco, John Mack, Andrea Ordin, Robert Saltzman, and Alan Skobin:
V8834@lapd.lacity.org

Subprimevilles

The BBC reports on the situation in LA, where more than 100,000 home foreclosures have led to an explosion in Tent Cities of the dispossessed. These have been dubbed "subprimevilles."

Here also is a Reuters story from about a year ago about subprime foreclosure victims living in cars.

"It's an old saying in the social services world that most people are one to six paychecks away from being homeless. But if you can't make your mortgage, it's more like a month or two. It's really fragile out there, particularly with the subprime situation," said William Wise, a spokesman for relief agency St. Vincent de Paul of Eugene, which works with the city to find overnight parking spots for homeless people.

Rather remarkable that coverage of this story seems limited to postings of the BBC clip by bloggers. Google turned up no coverage of the subprimevilles by mainstream U.S. media. This story from last November by Democracy Now reports on how subprime foreclosures have disproportionately hit minorities. Over the past year, the foreclosure rate has risen by nearly 100%.

I did come across this article, Plan Would End Homeless Tent Cities, from a year and a half ago in the LA Times, which details the compromise reached between the City and the ACLU on police action against homeless encampments. Does this sound familiar?

"Any settlement that leaves people living on the street in filthy conditions and permits chaos from 9 to 6 every night in one critical area of the city is unacceptable," said Carol Schatz, president and chief executive of the Central City Assn. ...

[Mayor Antonio] Villaraigosa has said that improving skid row by increasing affordable housing and improving homeless services is one of his top priorities. There's also been a flurry of legislation in Sacramento aimed at reducing the "dumping" of homeless people downtown and at beefing up law enforcement.

Anyone who believes that campsite clearances and the increased criminalization of visible poverty is driven by noble intent isn't paying attention.

Compassion or Class War?

Saul Williams has remade U2's Sunday Bloody Sunday as an anthem against class war being waged on the homeless. I'm thinking the city portrayed here is probably LA, but it could be pretty much anywhere. As our cities have become islands of affluence, campsite clearances have become business as usual, and it's always trotted out as compassion. Municipalities share tactics and rhetoric, and over time, refine the process. Real Change has, for example, obtained documentation of Sargent Gracy's trip to LA to meet with Chief Bratton last year to learn from that city and San Diego.

So, this week's poll. Is the Mayor's new policy on campsite clearances about compassion, or class war? As always, vote at top right.

The results are in, and produced our most lopsided polling margin to date. Class war beat out compassion as a descriptor of the Mayor's policy by a resounding forty to two! Who were those people? Patricia? Craig?

What Zero Tolerance for Camping Means

I have it on good authority that Seattle has a zero tolerance policy for homeless encampments. This is not a policy that, so far as I know, has officially been acknowledged. Here's how it looks. An encampment is discovered. Police or some other functionaries are quietly dispatched. Belongings are disposed of. Warnings are given to not return. Most people never see it or notice

But stop a moment to consider the meaning of "zero." Not one. Zero.

The reality of this came home this morning when a vendor stopped me as we passed each other outside of Real Change. This guy is around sixty. Quiet. Gentle. Built strong. The city is his home. Literally. He beds down outside every night.

"The police came up to me in my sleeping bag last night and told me I needed to get into a shelter," he said. " Apparently this happened near midnight in some out of the way spot in Queen Anne.

The joke here, in case you're not laughing yet, is that the shelters are full and are turning people away each night.

"They said they wouldn't ticket me this time," he said, "but I needed to go. Are the shelters federally funded."

This vendor believes that if he goes to a shelter, the people who are watching him will know, and he'll lose his social security benefits. He's eligible in another five years.

"I've darn near lost everything," he said. "I can't afford to lose that too."

This was a guy who can take care of himself, but he still reminded me of a frightened child.

It was just the thing I needed to renew my feelings of rage for the day.

It's almost always something.

I tried to reassure him that there was no relationship between shelter and his benefits, but he looked dubious. If you've ever tried to reason with schizophrenia you know that I mean.

Afterwards, I considered his odds of living to collect social security and decided they weren't all that great.

This is how Seattle will eventually achieve that twenty percent decrease in "chronic homelessness" that they presently need to lie about. If you set things up so that contacts with police are more frequent and threats of arrest, ticketing, and fines follow, people will eventually get the idea and go somewhere else. Somewhere not quite so urban, where they're not being counted with quite the same meticulous precision. In LA, the police go out to the urban camps to ostentatiously wake people up and count them every two week, and then feed the GPS data into a GIS system, This has to be seen to be believed. While some locales are more extreme than others, the pattern is similar everywhere.

City goes upscale to reinvent itself as a center of affluent consumption and convenient enviro-friendly urban living in these challenging times of sink or swim capitalism, and the authorities are enlisted in helping the homeless learn that they're no longer welcome. Meanwhile, business, philanthropy, government, human service providers and others are focused on solving chronic homelessness through Housing First.

The cops provide the stick when no one's looking. We all congratulate ourselves on our ability to offer carrots. End result: they go away. We declare victory over homelessness. Woo-hoo!

I've actually noticed a new phrase entering the lexicon alongside ending "chronic homelessness" and "street homelessness." We are now out to "reduce visible homelessness."

This, at least, is refreshing in its honesty. Here it crops up near the end of a City of San Diego press release. Here's a guy running for office in San Fransisco with an anti-visible homeless plank in his platform.

Here, as well, is a fascinating bit I found in a summary of a Law School journal article.

Part Two describes the evolution of homeless legal advocacy. First, it looks at the initial wave of litigation during the 1980s over the right to emergency shelter for the homeless. It then examines the second phase of litigation during the 1990s that challenged the attempts by municipalities to reduce the visible homeless population through various measures, such as anti-vagrancy, anti-camping, and "quality of life" ordinances. While this litigation has led to important victories and captured the public's attention (though not always its wholehearted support), it remains only a part of the picture. Suing over the right to emergency shelter or the right to panhandle on streets or sleep in parks is critical to many homeless people, but it does not address the underlying causes of homelessness, such as the crisis of affordable housing, decreasing income and public benefit levels, and lack of access to other needed services.

Here's a good one. The US Interagency Council on Homelessness' Philip Mangano, the man for whom my contempt know no bounds, met with the National Coalition for the Homeless and the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty last August and agreed to work with them to end the criminalization of homeless people.

How the hell is he gonna do that? That's half of his strategy.

According to the agreement letter that the first meeting produced, there should be a follow-up meeting happening right around now. Can't wait to hear how that's working out.

LA: There's Something Happening Here

What it is ain't exactly clear.

A few months ago, at a meeting of west coast homeless organizers that was held in San Francisco, an activist from LA said that the police repression of homeless people in that city was so intense that, "if an ash falls off an African-American man's cigarette onto the sidewalk, they might find themselves face down and cuffed for littering."

Hard to believe, I thought, but we are talking about the LAPD here, so anything is possible.

A recent LA Times article offers additional evidence that LA is at the forefront of criminalizing the poor.

Police presence in the skid row area was increased by 50 officers last year, and more than 6,000 arrests have been made since last September. Since November, uniformed officers have performed street counts of homeless people every two weeks, often peering into tents and tarps with flashlights and waking people up to determine accurate numbers and gender of street sleepers.

Not surprisingly, the numbers of homeless people in downtown LA have been more than halved. Also not surprisingly, the numbers in other areas of the city and outlying areas such as Santa Monica have risen.



In a sci-fi twist that has to be seen to be believed, officers feed the exact GPS coordinates of the homeless they find into a GIS mapping system, and every two weeks a new map of downtown LA is generated. The general pattern has been one of attrition and dispersement. One can view an animation that shows the changing patterns, and download detailed 11x17 maps of homeless concentration areas.

The "Cartifact Downtown Los Angeles Homeless Map" project description is worth quoting in it's entirety:

The purpose of the downtown Los Angeles Homeless Map is to visually tell the story of downtown's homeless population. Before a problem can be solved it must be understood. These maps exist to convey the situation on the streets to City leaders, the Police Department and all those who are concerned with homelessness in our city.

Background
Downtown Los Angeles is the epicenter of the largest homeless population in the United States. Though the problem of homelessness and the plight of those living on the streets of downtown has long been acknowledged, there has been little data to show whether the situation is becoming better or worse.

In 2006 the Los Angeles Police Department's Central Division began taking counts of the homeless population living on the streets. In November the department started to take these counts every two weeks, providing the first standardized view of downtown's homeless street population.

Cartifact, a custom mapping firm located in downtown Los Angeles, approached Central division and offered its cartographic expertise. In its raw form the usefulness of the data was limited, but on a map it could be made to tell the story of a population and how it was changing over time.

The Count
Central division performs its homeless counts every two weeks. Officers canvass each block encompassed in its boundaries and make a count of men, women, children and various kinds of shelters. A log is made of the address and the number present in each category.

Creating the Map
Cartifact takes the raw data from Central division and pulls it into its GIS system. The system geocodes each address to produce coordinates for the address. The plotted points are then placed onto a map of downtown Los Angeles and styled to better convey the information. The finished map is provided back to LAPD in order to serve the needs of the department, and is also placed here for public access.

There are a number of transparent yet still remarkable fictions going on here. The first is that this is about anything other than repression, and that some form of legitimate "research" is actually occurring here. As everyone knows, a thing observed changes, especially when it is observed in an unusually obtrusive, frightening, and objectifying manner.

LA started working out their Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness in 2002. In 2006, the Bring LA Home plan was completed and released. More recently, a coalition of progressive urban academics released the provocative Reality-based Approach to Ending Homelessness in LA report, which focuses on supporting livable wage and other labor-led approaches while halting the assault on the civil rights of the very poor.

One gets a strong picture of the extremely disparate elements at work in LA at the Bring LA Home Website, which seems to resolve conflict in the coalition by simply offering air time to everyone. While we can only pray that the novel approach of the LAPD does not spread to other cities, it's clear that, for both better and worse, LA is way out in front of the rest of us.