Liberal SF Authorities Continue to Violate Court Order on Sweeps of Homeless People as DPW Workers Accompanied by Cops Destroy People’s Only Possessions, Court filing says

From [HERE] Early in the afternoon in late April, Steven Garrett left the tent that was his home near Octavia and Waller and went to the General Assistance Office.

When he returned, according to a declaration filed in SF Superior Court,  Department of Public Works crew had taken all of his possessions and thrown them in a pickup truck.

“I asked the DPW worker for him to give me my things back. He said he could not because the things were already in the truck,” Garrett said. “He did not bag and tag my things.”

Among the things taken:

My paperwork, tools that I needed for my work, socket wrench set, allen wrenches, phone chargers, all my food and the cooler it was in, an inflatable mattress, blankets and pillow, and all my clothes.

That’s against the law: The city can’t sweep homeless people off the streets unless there’s adequate shelter available—and they can’t take people’s stuff unless they put it in bags, attach tags that will allow the owner to reclaim it, and bring it to a place where the unhoused can go and get it back.

Garrett is not alone.

A legal filing by the Coalition on Homelessness cites a long list of specific cases, from 26 witnesses, where the city is violating a court order and conducting illegal sweeps.

BLACK WARD LONDON BREED GOES HARD AGAINST PEOPLE WHO LOOK JUST LIKE HER TO MAKE HER WHITE MASTERS HAPPY. NO TIME TO BE PERCEIVED AS SERVING HER OWN PEOPLE BY DELIVERING TANGIBLE, MATERIAL BENEFITS TO THEM WHEN THE WHITE LIBERALS ARE WATCHING.

FUNKTIONARY STATES:

BLACK WARD – A SUBVASSAL (STRAW BOSS), WHO HELD WARD OF THE KING’S VASSAL (A SPECIES OF SLAVE WHO OWES SERVITUDE AND IS IN A STATE OF DEPENDENCY ON A SUPERIOR LORD). THE VASSAL HIMSELF MIGHT BE OVERSEER OF SOME OTHER VASSALS. BLACK WARD IS THE ENGLISH EQUIVALENT TO THE BOULÉ IN GREEK. (SEE: SIGMA PI PHI, INFORMANT & STRAW BOSS)

“I frequently witnessed City workers destroy unhoused peoples’ property,” Dylan Verner-Crist, an ACLU investigator who has been monitoring the sweeps, said in a court filing. “At the sweep operations I attended, I watched City workers throw out usable sleeping bags, mattresses, clothes, furniture, tents, food, backpacks, suitcases, and other belongings, even when the belongings were evidently neither trash nor abandoned.”

From  Verner-Crist’s declaration:

At the encampment sweeps I attended, numerous unhoused reported that the City had either failed to offer them shelter or had offered them shelter that did not meet their needs and that, as a result, they could not accept. For instance, some encampment residents reported that the [Housing Outreach Team] workers had never spoken to them. Others reported the HOT workers had only offered them shelter in congregate housing, adding that they had previously been sexually assaulted or had severe psychiatric symptoms in such restrictive or unsafe settings.

The city is still dispatching armed police officers to address complaints about homeless people, records obtained by the Lawyers’ Committee show. Between December, 2022, when the injunction was issued, and May, 2023, SFPD officers responded to 1,120 calls for people sitting on the sidewalk and 3,166 times for “homeless complaints.”

“It’s still a law-enforcement response,” John Do, a lawyer for the ACLU, told me.

This, as Mayor London Breed is demanding more money for cops to address drug dealing and retail crime.

Meanwhile, the records show that police and city officials are repeatedly putting out misinformation about the court injunction, blaming the unhoused and their advocates for a situation that the city has failed to address.

The coalition, with the legal support of the ACLU, Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and the firm of Latham and Watkins, has asked a federal magistrate to appoint a special master to monitor the city’s compliance with a court injunction that bars the city from rousting unhoused people unless there is adequate shelter available or taking their possessions without a process for getting them back.

At this point, the filing notes, only the ACLU and the Coalition are monitoring the situation—and when an ACLU investigator or a Coalition staffer is on site, cops and city workers are much more likely to follow the law.

But the two nonprofits don’t have the resources to monitor every sweep all over the city. From Jennifer Friedenbach, the coalition’s director:

After the issuance of the Court’s preliminary injunction, the Coalition has assumed that it would no longer need to closely monitor the City’s conduct. Unfortunately, the Coalition quickly learned that Healthy Streets Operation Center (HSOC) displacement operations would be proceeding as scheduled, and that San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) would still be dispatched in response to complaints about homeless individuals sleeping in public. … Our budget and our resources are extremely limited. This ad-hoc, reactive monitoring work is not sustainable for the Coalition and its mission.

From the legal filing:

San Francisco is not complying with this Court’s preliminary injunction. While attempting to stay and ultimately terminate the Court’s injunction, the City has persisted in routinely criminalizing homeless individuals who have no access to shelter and has indiscriminately destroyed their personal belongings. Plaintiffs have diverted their extremely limited resources to uncover and document these ongoing and numerous violations whenever possible. But the City has made it impossible for Plaintiffs or this Court to assess the extent of the City’s non-compliance by failing to provide the thousands of dispatch reports, incident reports, and other enforcement and property logs that would show how many law enforcement interactions have violated the Court’s injunction to date. [MORE]