There is a particular problem that arises when a court orders a city not to sweep certain people’s tents and the city sweeps anyway. The court is not standing at the corner of Eighth and Harrison. The people who are standing there have chalk.
The Berkeley Homeless Union now plans to ask a court to hold the city of Berkeley in contempt, alleging that the city failed to follow U.S. District Judge Edward Chen’s orders around the sweep of the homeless encampment at Eighth and Harrison streets. Chen had exempted seven people from the sweep because they were in ongoing negotiations for accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act. One of them is a woman named Shawman. According to Yesica Prado, a co-founder of the union, city officials never explicitly told Shawman to leave. Instead, advocates allege, when she was away from her tent, officials took her cell phone, charger and headlamp for storage and, per the Daily Californian’s account of the allegations, “crushed and threw away” the rest of her belongings, tent included. The union had, in preparation, marked the area around her tent in chalk and written a message noting whose tent it was. The chalk did not prevail.
Robbie Powelson, a homeless advocate working with the union, described the sequence in real time: “I sent an email to the City Attorney’s Office saying that our understanding is that they were evicting Shawman right then and there and that they needed to stop. They did not respond, and I drove by earlier … The tent’s no longer there. There was clearly a violation of the court’s order.”
Prado said Shawman has still not been offered the official relocation she requested as her ADA accommodation. The city, asked for more information about her case, replied by email that it “has carefully conducted each of its interventions in the Harrison Corridor to be compliant with the court’s orders.” Carefully conducted is doing some load-bearing work in that sentence, given the crushed tent.
The contempt argument does not rest on Shawman alone. Powelson alleges the city treated everything at the encampment as a health hazard by generalised assessment rather than making the individualised contamination assessments the order contemplated — which is, if you think about it, a much more efficient way to handle belongings, provided the point of the exercise is disposal rather than assessment. He also alleges the city failed to provide promised moving assistance and to supply tents to a number of people, and that when residents routed requests through the union as their representative, the city ignored them. “There were levels to obstructing the order,” he said — a line that gets grimmer the more literally you read it.
Scale it up and the gap widens. Prado estimates more than 40 people were displaced by the sweep. The city says that as of September 21 it had offered eight replacement tents, plus vouchers for two more. Even taking the city’s numbers as complete, that leaves most of the displaced with, at best, a voucher.
And the voucher has its own design flaw, which is almost elegant. Ross, an encampment resident affected by the sweep, was offered one after the tents ran out, but struggled to redeem it because he does not have a phone. The voucher listed only digital contact methods — an email address and a phone number — to set up the appointment to redeem it. A housing authority handing a phone-requiring voucher to a person whose phone has just gone into city storage has, probably unintentionally, built a machine that processes the homeless without housing anyone. The contempt motion will ask a judge what all that careful compliance was for.