{"id":2258,"date":"2016-01-04T19:50:30","date_gmt":"2016-01-04T19:50:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huffsantacruz.org\/wordpress\/?p=2258"},"modified":"2016-01-04T19:50:30","modified_gmt":"2016-01-04T19:50:30","slug":"santa-cruz-freedom-sleeper-protests-hit-kpfa-as-media-coverage-expands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huffsantacruz.org\/wordpress\/santa-cruz-freedom-sleeper-protests-hit-kpfa-as-media-coverage-expands\/","title":{"rendered":"Santa Cruz Freedom Sleeper Protests Hit KPFA as Media Coverage Expands"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\n

 <\/p>\n

NOTES BY NORSE:\u00a0 One of my main concerns about the effectiveness of the Freedom Sleepers is their out-of-the-way location outside a closed City Hall (always at night, and during the Xmas holiday all the time). \u00a0 Local media attention has been biased or non-existent.\u00a0 It’s refreshing to read word is spreading, even as activist Toby Nixon and his unhoused comrades brave rain, wind, and cold to keep the protest alive each Tuesday<\/span><\/span> night.\u00a0 (Tomorrow<\/span><\/span> February 5th<\/span><\/span> will be Freedom Sleep-Out #26).<\/p>\n

It’s been my feeling that protests need to be mounted downtown in full public view of merchants and tourists, encouraging shoppers to do a phone-in to City Hall, or a direct boycott, or join CD actions or take up other militant actions of their own to stop the threats to homeless survival in Santa Cruz.\u00a0\u00a0 The Xmas and New Year’s season is particularly significant commercially and religiously.\u00a0\u00a0 Police can quietly terrorize but generally ignore Freedom Sleepers at City Hall at night, but would find it more difficult to make them invisible during the day on Pacific Avenue.<\/p>\n

The recent Public Safety Hysteria has been overseen and orchestrated by the Martin Bernal\/Tina Shull\/Scott Collins Mangle-the-Mendicants Manager team.\u00a0 These well-paid unelected officials are at the center of the increasingly militant homeless-hostile Santa Cruz government. \u00a0 They created the “no homeless RV’s allowed at night” law (goes into effect January 8th<\/span><\/span>), as well as police state police-generated Stay-Away orders from all city parks, greenbelts, and other sleep-at-night-to-survive zones.\u00a0\u00a0 The <\/span>Take Back Santa Cruz, the Harvey West Association, the Downtown Association, Santa Cruz Neighbors, the Santa Cruz Sentinel, and the SCPD rhetoric is now the new neo-fascist SantaCruztoosoftonthepoor “normal”.\u00a0 This language has successfully supplanted the earlier\u00a0 hypocritical “we’re the most compassionate town around; it’s a national problem; we’re going to end it in 10 years<\/span><\/span>” rhetoric by psuedo-progressives used to reassure university students muddled liberals.<\/p>\n

Leave comments at<\/span>\u00a0 <\/span>https:\/\/www.indybay.org\/newsitems\/2016\/01\/03\/18781448.php<\/a>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
Driving Out the Mosquitoes: Making Homelessness Illegal<\/strong><\/span><\/div>\n
by Dennis J. Bernstein, Reader Supported News <\/span>
\n<\/span>Sunday Jan 3rd, 2016 6:16 PM <\/em><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The seaside city of Santa Cruz, California, is one of several municipalities in Northern California that have become home for the herds of bubble up dot-comers rolling the dice in Silicon Valley. From San Francisco to San Jose to Berkeley, and down the coast to Salinas and Monterey, local officials are salivating at the multitude of possibilities for bringing in the tax bucks. And more often than not, these local officials are rolling out their welcome mats for the Silicon set, right over the bodies of the growing numbers of the poor and disinherited in this wealthy nation.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n
\"santa-cruz-homeless_franco-folini.jpg<\/span>
\n<\/span>santa-cruz-homeless_franc…<\/strong><\/span>
\n<\/span><\/div>\n

<\/center>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019ve actually installed mosquito boxes to drive out the homeless and hungry,\u201d says Keith McHenry, co-founder of Food Not Bombs (Global). \u201cThey\u2019ve set up these horrible sound machines that they put under the bridges and in parks that just turn on automatically and drive people out of the areas, because they make you nauseous and give you a terrible headache.\u201d <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span> I spoke to McHenry as he passed out free food in front of the post office in downtown Santa Cruz. McHenry described a situation that is familiar to many advocates for the poor and homeless across the region and across the country. \u201cThe poor and growing numbers of the desperately hungry in this city, state, and country are under attack,\u201d said McHenry. \u201cThere are new laws just in the last couple of years, and others that have been strengthened, that make it a crime to be poor and hungry.\u201d <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span> McHenry, and more than a dozen other housing and homeless advocates interviewed for this article, expressed alarm at the expanding attempts by state governments and local municipalities to criminalize the homeless by passing harsh laws and local ordinances that make it unbearable and downright dangerous to live on the street. <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span> \u201cNow they\u2019ve got these new \u2018stay-away orders\u2019 here in Santa Cruz,\u201d said McHenry, \u201cand city employees can just ban you from parks for up to half a year at a time. And you can end up getting a year\u2019s sentence if you violate these stay-away orders. They treat the homeless and hungry like they\u2019re pigeons, or some kind of vermin that can just be driven away. Their human rights are being totally violated.\u201d <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span> Osha Newman is a civil rights attorney who represents the homeless in Berkeley, Oakland, and Richmond, California. Newman said he is extremely troubled by this new stepped-up brutality against the homeless in the East Bay. \u201cIt\u2019s an everyday, daily routine,\u201d said Newman in a December interview. \u201cThe cops kicking and punching and prodding the homeless, even as they sleep. Beating them awake. It\u2019s outrageous. Now Mayor [Tom] Bates and his anti-homeless supporters have succeeded in passing a new batch of draconian laws against the homeless, including one saying that you cannot have belongings that take up more than two square feet on the sidewalk. Can you fit your life\u2019s belongings in two square feet?\u201d he asks. <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span> Down the coast from Santa Cruz in Salinas, California, the homeless have been dealt with in a most brutal and destructive fashion, according to legal proceedings filed in federal court. After being ignored and disregarded \u201clike so much trash,\u201d a group of the homeless organized their own self-governed village, \u201cTents by the Garden,\u201d complete with working toilet facilities. <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span> \u201cIn 2012, me and the rest of the homeless community out here in Salinas started Tents by the Garden,\u201d said Rita Acosta, one of the founders of the homeless community, who is now the lead plaintiff in a federal court action against the city of Salinas for illegal seizure and destruction of personal property under the 14th and 4th amendment. <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span> \u201cWe had like 28 people in Tents by the Garden that was all into it altogether,\u201d said Acosta in a phone interview at the end of December. \u201cWe also started a PHSH program (Public Hygiene to Stay Human), and we got porta-potties on our camping area. But then the city had a sweep here in January 2013 and they moved us all out, closed off our area, and put up gates. Now they complain about the streets being all unorganized. We were organized. They closed our area down and put us on the sidewalk. So now they\u2019re complaining about it. This is their mess. They\u2019re the ones who made it. They need to clean it up. If it was up to us, it wouldn\u2019t be like this, because we had it more organized.\u201d <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span> Anthony Prince is one of the lead attorneys on the case being brought by Acosta and the homeless of Salinas. Prince said his clients have filed for a preliminary injunction against the city that challenges the constitutionality of the city\u2019s policy and practice of seizing and destroying property that belongs to homeless people. \u201cAs you may know, under the 4th Amendment to the Constitution, people have a right, a property interest which cannot be breached without due process. The government cannot seize property, personal property, without notice and opportunity to be heard. Those are the two essential elements of due process.\u201d <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span> The Salinas legal battle centers around a new city ordinance adopted in October. The city codified its brutal, forced-dispersal policies with a new ordinance that allows the city to seize and destroy property of the homeless, almost at will. Salinas City Ordinance 2564 authorizes the city to confiscate and destroy \u201cbulky items\u201d as well as items that are deemed to be \u201cdirty,\u201d \u201csoiled,\u201d \u201cdamaged,\u201d or \u201cbroken.\u201d <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span> Prince asserts that 2564 is indeed unconstitutional and in flagrant violation of the recent Ninth Circuit\u2019s ruling in Lavan v. City of Los Angeles. In affirming a preliminary injunction, the Ninth Circuit held that because homeless persons\u2019 unabandoned possessions are \u201cproperty\u201d within the meaning of the Fourteenth and Fourth Amendments, a city must comply with the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause, and the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable seizures, if it wishes to take or destroy those possessions. <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span> According to the amended suit filed on December 22, 2015, the homeless plaintiffs assert that \u201cThe City of Salinas has adopted and begun to implement a municipal ordinance that run roughshod over these constitutional rights and threatens the homeless residents of Salinas with grievous and irreparable harm.\u201d <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span> The homeless were in federal court just a few days after a pair of homeless men died of exposure in the nearby city of Monterey. The two men were discovered huddled together without tent or blankets, and with only minimal clothing to protect them from the elements. \u201cBy allowing the city to seize essential property, like blankets, clothing, and tents, Salinas\u2019s Ordinance could put the lives of members of the homeless community at risk.\u201d said Prince. \u201cWe are determined not to see that happen here.\u201d <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span> \u201cIn past sweeps I have had my possessions \u2013 my tent, bedding, clothes, blankets, food stamps, identification, birth certificate, family photographs, and important legal documents \u2013 taken from me and thrown away,\u201d said Acosta, a longtime resident of Salinas who is now homeless. She talked freely about the daily violence of poverty, enhanced by the brutality of official policy. \u201cWell, it\u2019s a lot rougher for us now that we\u2019re back sleeping on the sidewalks,\u201d she said. \u201cSome of the tents are out toward the streets. We\u2019ve actually had cars hit people\u2019s tents and stuff like that. And I, myself, I had somebody reverse their van into my tent because they thought they were in drive, and they reversed all they way into the tent and pushed me all the way into the back. So it\u2019s scary. It\u2019s dangerous. It was a lot more safe when we had our own area.\u201d <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span> In an August 2015 directive on the subject, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness warned that \u201cthe forced dispersal of people from encampment settings is not an appropriate solution or strategy.\u201d <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span> Dumpster Diving for Survival <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span> \u201cNow the police department comes out here with the city,\u201d Acosta continued. \u201cThey start around 8 o\u2019clock<\/span><\/span>. They just start from one end of the street until they make their way all the way around it. They tell us \u2018you guys should have been ready, getting your things out.\u2019 But how can we be ready with our things out when we don\u2019t have any place to take our things? So it makes it a little bit difficult. Whatever we can\u2019t take with us they have like a bulldozer thing that just comes in and scoops everything up and puts it straight into the trash … straight into the garbage can. They don\u2019t ask or anything \u2013 they just take it. They just tell us, \u2018We gave you enough time to take your things out.\u2019 Out? To where?\u201d asks Acosta. \u201cThere is no where else to go.\u201d <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span> Acosta makes the point that many homeless people still work, but find it more and more difficult to keep their jobs and their lives in order because of these new laws being imposed on the homeless. \u201cIn the Sherwood Park area,\u201d she said, \u201cthere was this young man, he works. So when they were throwing his stuff away, he was yelling \u2018Hey, hey that\u2019s my … you\u2019ve got my work stuff in there.\u2019 And he actually jumped into the dumpster, into the big trashcan, to get his stuff out. No sooner than he jumped out, another big ol\u2019 load came and almost crushed him. He was actually lucky he jumped out when he did. When you ain\u2019t got nothing they just want to take more from you,\u201d Acosta reflected. <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span> In Berkeley, poor people\u2019s attorney Osha Newman tells a story similar to Rita Acosta\u2019s: The homeless, tired of being ignored and disrespected, founded their own community in Albany, between Berkeley and Richmond, on a piece of land known as the Albany Bulb that juts out into the bay. \u201cThere was a whole community of people living out on the Albany Bulb taking care of themselves,\u201d Newman lamented, \u201cnot taking a penny from the government, asking nothing from the city but to be left alone, [and] those 60 or so people, they were evicted, with nothing. Kicked out of Albany and into Berkeley, where they have been kicked around ever since.\u201d <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span> Back in Santa Cruz, as the free food is being dished out by homeless volunteers, who also made it, Keith McHenry tells me that major cuts were made to the homeless services center, based on cutbacks by the Feds. \u201cThey shut down emergency services,\u201d he said, \u201cso the meals for hundreds and hundreds of people in early July, late June, disappeared. The showers disappeared, the mail service for a while disappeared \u2026 but came back, although at a much more limited level. And then around 50 employees were fired, who were dealing with the homeless service. It ended up being a total crisis. Two people living at the shelter, when they got their eviction notices, ended up getting hit by cars and killed. The local homeless people said that they were basically depressed and freaked out and didn\u2019t want to go back out on the streets. One case was of a middle-aged woman who got hit by a car,\u201d said McHenry. \u201cI don\u2019t think that case has been solved; it was a hit and run. And so there\u2019s been such tension in the homeless community in Santa Cruz. Many of these people actually owned homes in Santa Cruz, but during the housing foreclosure crisis, folks lost their own places or they were renters that lost their places because their landlords were foreclosed on.\u201d <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span> According to a recent report from the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies, 21.8 percent of the nation\u2019s children and 15 percent of the population overall are poor and often hungry. Despite the growing needs of so many people, the Feds continue to cut vital services and assistance meant to help the most at risk among us. \u201cAdded to this,\u201d said Jennifer Jones, the Executive Director of the FPWA, \u201care the funding cuts for meals for home-bound seniors, vocational training programs for those who\u2019ve lost their jobs, food for low income families, and the list goes on. At a time when our nation needs to protect people from continued and increasing hardship, and support economic growth, the Federal government has imposed sequestration cuts and proposes further budget cuts that take us backwards.\u201d <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span> \u201cIt\u2019s also now become illegal to feed the hungry,\u201d asserts McHenry, who has been arrested many times, once on Christmas Eve in a Santa outfit, for giving out free food. \u201cSanta was tossed into the police wagon and the food was tossed in the garbage by the cops, while dozens of hungry people looked on,\u201d said McHenry. \u201cThey are making laws across the United States against feeding people outside, in city parks … Their new strategy is to make it so hard for you to get the permits to feed people, and limiting it to just a small amount of time.\u201d <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span> \u201cIt\u2019s not illegal to be homeless in the United States,\u201d said Anthony Prince, \u201cbut what we see increasingly is an effort to criminalize the status of being homeless. As you may know, it is against American jurisprudence to criminalize a person or a sub-class of people based on their status, but that is exactly what the new laws do.\u201d <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span> Photo: Homeless veterans at sunset on the outskirts of Santa Cruz. (credit: Franco Folini) <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span> Dennis J. Bernstein is the executive producer of Flashpoints, syndicated on Pacifica Radio, and is the recipient of a 2015 Pillar Award for his work as a journalist whistleblower. He is most recently the author of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom. <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span> Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News. <\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span> http:\/\/readersupportednews.org\/opinion2\/277-75\/34391-focus-driving-out-the-mosquitoes-making-homelessness-illegal<\/a><\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span> Reader Supported News <\/span>
\n<\/span> http:\/\/readersupportednews.org\/<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  NOTES BY NORSE:\u00a0 One of my main concerns about the effectiveness of the Freedom Sleepers is their out-of-the-way location outside a closed City Hall (always at night, and during the Xmas holiday all the time). \u00a0 Local media attention … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[18],"tags":[91,4,107],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huffsantacruz.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2258"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huffsantacruz.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huffsantacruz.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huffsantacruz.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huffsantacruz.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2258"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/huffsantacruz.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2259,"href":"https:\/\/huffsantacruz.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2258\/revisions\/2259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huffsantacruz.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huffsantacruz.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huffsantacruz.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}