Typical Seattle Homeless Encampment Scene

The image at right, if you've been reading local press accounts of Seattle homeless encampments, is the sort of scene that takes place hundreds of times a day in the wild frontier of criminality and filth that exists in our greenbelts.

First, Nicole Brodeur plays the dead baby card in her sensationalist "reporting" of last month. Then Craig Thompson, whose recent fantasy genre op-ed in the Seattle PI connected homeless encampments to organized crime and the Asian heroin trade, took the smearing of homeless people to heights that none of us could have foreseen.

"A violent, well-organized, Asian heroin gang took over the forest on the west side of Beacon Hill. They beat up most homeless people they found, especially women, and set up shop. Their command and control center was a camouflaged bunker made of concrete blocks, a wooden frame and a door that could have stopped a round from a service revolver. It was a hobbit hole for junkies, with a killer view of the mouth of the Duwamish."

Ergo, we must eradicate homeless campsites in the enlightened best interest of those with nowhere else to go.

Reinforced concrete bunkers? Weapons? Heroin cartels and meth manufacturers in the greenbelts? Was a shred of evidence presented that these issues have anything what-so-ever to do with the current controversy. No. This is sensationalism at its worst, and is an unconscionable libel on those whose only documented crime is to attempt survival in a city that has gone to war against its most vulnerable.

Thompson's vaguely racist scare journalism — with its visions of Asian gangs running the greenbelt heroin trade — brings to mind another war of several decades ago. In this war, we destroyed villages to save them. In shorthand, this tactic was referred to as "draining the sea." If we attack the places where they live, all those frightening homeless people will have no choice but to go somewhere else.

At least in Vietnam we offered Strategic Hamlet concentration camps as an alternative. Today in Seattle, with shelters well over capacity, we're offering nothing.

If this is what "ending homelessness" has come to in this city, I want no part of it.

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.