From [HERE] A federal judge has temporarily banned San Francisco from clearing homeless encampments, saying the city violated its own policies by failing to offer other shelter.

Magistrate Judge Donna M. Ryu in U.S. District Court in Oakland granted an emergency order Friday night that bars the city from taking away tents and confiscating the belongings of encampment dwellers.

The move came in a lawsuit filed on behalf of homeless plaintiffs that sought to stop San Francisco from dismantling homeless encampments until it has thousands of additional shelter beds.

Ryu cited evidence presented by the plaintiffs that the city regularly and illegally failed to offer shelter to inhabitants before clearing the encampments and improperly seized or threw out their belongings, including cellphones, medication, identification and even prosthetic limbs.

The city’s arguments in its defense were “wholly unconvincing,” the judge said.

In a statement, Mayor London Breed decried the emergency order.

“Mayors cannot run cities this way,” she said. “We already have too few tools to deal with the mental illness we see on our streets. Now we are being told not to use another tool that helps bring people indoors and keeps our neighborhoods safe and clean for our residents.”

The Coalition on Homelessness sued San Francisco in September, alleging that the city clears out encampments not to connect homeless people to services and housing as it claims, but in response to neighborhood complaints and to drive out homeless residents.

The lawsuit is among several pending in Western states where visible homelessness has grown amid a shortage of shelter beds and affordable housing.

The coalition in San Francisco also requested a preliminary injunction to stop city workers from seizing tents, clothing and other belongings of homeless people unless it follows its own policies of bagging and tagging items for safekeeping for up to 90 days. [MORE]