Fuck You Nicole Brodeur For Making Me Cry

Nicole Brodeur's column today on the homeless man who was killed trying to cross I-5 to get to his camp made me cry. It's a lovely piece of writing that almost redeems her for the sensationalist piece of crap she wrote several months ago on homeless encampments. If anyone sinks low enough to use this tragedy as an argument for campsite clearances, I'll have to remind them the Dept. of Transportation already has two dead homeless people to their credit this year and doesn't seem to be helping matters.

Come Out, Come Out ...

The more the City’s crackdown on visible homelessness unfolds, the more I feel like the proverbial blind men feeling up an elephant. The aggressive City-owned property clearances that began last spring have continued unabated after advocates cried foul over brutal tactics and an absence of protocol. City policy that has emerged has more to do with addressing legal vulnerability than meeting public concerns.

Then there’s the Washington State Department of Transportation, with two unintended tragedies on their hands this year: Isaac Palmer, killed by brush clearing machinery last June in his sleeping bag, and now another “transient” dead on a construction site. WSDOT has pursued a shadowy but equally aggressive clearance strategy of its own.

The City has also placed No Parking 2-5 a.m. signs in known car camp areas. As recently as January 30th, Human Services head Patricia McInturff said on KUOW’s The Conversation that there is no real Department of Human Services response to car camping.

Well, someone somewhere has a “response.” What is this? Twenty-fucking-Questions?

Why all the bureaucratic hide and seek? What does it take to arrive at basic accountability? The practice of chasing people from place to place — while throwing away whatever survival gear work crews find — simply deepens the misery of the desperate without offering alternatives.

On March 13, the Real Change Organizing Project will sponsor a day of downtown visibility with morning, lunchtime, and evening rush hour shifts that culminates in a return to City Hall. This time, the goal is to camp on the Plaza 200 strong. Whether you spend the night or the lunch hour, we need to hear from you. Make a commitment to stand for basic human decency. Please email campout_for_change@yahoo.com today.

Another Secret "Policy"

Apparently, the Washington State Department of Transportation has some new draft protocols for clearing homeless encampments. Real Change has seen WSDOT campsite clearances as recently as last week performed with storm trooper-like gusto and no notice, and what appeared to be unbadged cops and unmarked cars. Personnel performing the clearances were told not to talk and the only thing the guy in charge would say was "no questions."

We've been told that there are linkages between WSDOT and city action and policy, but we've yet to find what those are. We're still working on getting the draft policy.

Many will remember Isaac Palmer, the man who died during a WSDOT clearance project early last June. Palmer was in a sleeping bag beneath some blackberry brambles when a brush clearing machine inflicted fatal head injuries. His death occurred at a time when campsite clearances by the city were escalating. While the WSDOT task was to rejoint a stretch of I-5, this came connected to a full-scale campsite clearance project of their own.

Now another transient has died on a WSDOT project, although the details of this are still extremely unclear.

Heavy machinery keeps running over homeless people. If people had better survival alternatives, maybe this wouldn't be happening.

The idea of there being a regional strategy on campsite clearances raises some interesting questions about where this stuff is coming from. Suddenly, homeless people are not to be tolerated. They can live in the shelters, if they can get in. Otherwise, it's open season.

Shhh! Don't Tell the Advocates!

A May 18 memo that identified priorities for police action against homeless encampments got surfaced by a recent public disclosure request. A later list had a different set of priorities that included more purely urban encampments. These tend to be below freeways and visible from downtown highrises. Hard to tell where the focus is now, with so many clearances happening. Worse, the State, through the Department of Transportation, seems to have stepped up the pace of campsite clearances as well. Whatever level of coordination exists between city and state remains a mystery for now, but they seem mutually committed to placing all public space off-limits to survival activity.

Here's some questions that the document raises for me.

• With campsites busting out all over the city (remember, this is just a list of the "worst" sites) and the shelters full, where were all of these people supposed to go? My sense is that no one in the Mayor's office much cared, and that they still don't.

• Why was the City pursuing a clearance policy this aggressive with no protocols to guide them? Through the summer and fall, clearances were performed with little to no warning, no guidelines regarding possessions, no outreach, and no provision of alternatives. While the new protocols are quite clear on tightening the law to criminalize the use of public space for survival, they are equally open-ended and exception-ridden when it comes to the City's responsibility to campers. The goal seems to be to maintain the gloves off approach, while pretending to meet the concerns of advocates.
  

• This list was generated by Parks Security Supervisor Larry Campbell in response to a request from Sgt. Paul Gracy. Where did Gracy's orders come from? Tim Ceis knows better than to put things like that in an email. And why the sudden interest? The City's been saying that over 2006-2007, street homelessness went down.
  

• From the "This type of focus may create additional attention from homeless advocates," statement at the end, it's pretty clear that this was a below the radar operation. Yet it also implies an escalation. When did the Mayor's secret campsite clearance policy really start?
  

So many public disclosure requests to make. So little time.