As homelessness has reached crisis levels, more cities are clearing tents and encampments in operations commonly called sweeps. Since a U.S. Supreme Court decision in June allowed cities to punish people for sleeping outside, even if there’s no shelter available, some have made their encampment policies more punitive and increased the frequency of sweeps.
Some cities have programs to store what they take, sometimes created in response to lawsuits. In theory, these storage programs are supposed to protect people’s property rights and make it easy to get their possessions back.
In reality, they rarely accomplish either objective, according to a ProPublica investigation of the policies in regions with the largest homeless populations.
Because cities don’t consider them to be people.
And only rich people’s stuff is important. Poor people’s stuff is just garbage. /s
Of course that’s not true.
They’re nuisance people.
They’re people who don’t matter.
But still people.
People who can be treated inhumanly, since they’re powerless to fight back.
That claim is clearly bullshit on its face, if you take just one moment to think about it.
A city would need to:
- Accurately determine what counts as a “possession”
- Collect the possessions
- Keep every individual’s possessions separate from all others
- Safely store those possessions while keeping them separate from one another
- Index those possessions in a way that enables them to be retrieved
- Positively identify the owner of a specific group of possessions
- Positively identify a claimaint as being the person who owns a specific group of possessions
Every one of those points would need to be in place, and I have serious doubts that any of those are in place.
Yeah there’s no way that’s happening. It’s going straight to a landfill.
Cities Say They
StoreSteal PropertyTakenFrom Homeless Encampments. People Rarely Get Their Things Back.It’s nice that some cities have systems where they actually try to store some people’s belongings. Most cities just throw everything in the garbage when they sweep an encampment.
