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Fight Criminalization - Support WRAP this Spring!

WRAP is raising $10,000 in May and June to fight the criminalization of people who are houseless-can you help? Donate here today and look for a letter from WRAP in the mail soon-you can check out WRAP's 2018 goals for fighting criminalization. We can't do this without you-thank you for your generous support!

"Sacramento Homeless Organizing Community (SHOC) joined this Lawsuit along with Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness (SRCEH) and James (Faygo) Clark."

"We all have a right to ask for help". Video

Sacramento hit with federal lawsuit seeking to overturn city's panhandling ordinance

BY SAM STANTON AND RYAN LILLIS - The Sacramento Bee

Homeless advocates have filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city of Sacramento, alleging that a panhandling ordinance adopted in November violates the free speech rights of citizens asking for handouts.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court late Tuesday on behalf of well-known homeless activist James Lee "Faygo" Clark, seeks preliminary and permanent injunctions against enforcing the ordinance, which bans soliciting within 30 feet of ATMs or banks, at driveway entrances to businesses or near bus stops.

The suit was filed on behalf of Clark and the Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California and Legal Services of Northern California.

The 12-page complaint calls the ordinance a clear violation of the First
Amendment right to free speech and one that "is taking away one of the few legal and safe means for homeless individuals to obtain money for necessities."

"The ordinance effectively bans a wide range of protected speech in large swaths of the city," the suit says. "In addition, although it is styled as an aggressive and intrusive solicitation ordinance, the law criminalizes purely passive activity such as sitting peacefully on the sidewalk with a sign or a donation cup."

City officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The lawsuit comes as the city and other regional governments find themselves casting about for solutions to the homeless crisis they face. At Sacramento City Hall, homeless people sleep nightly under the eaves of the building and have been the subject of efforts by city officials to extend services and housing to them, including a $108 million partnership with the county that has been led by Mayor Darrell Steinberg.

But efforts to deal with the region’s homeless population have included ordinances aimed at limiting where homeless people may panhandle or live.

Measures in Sutter County and Yuba City that prohibited camping in public spots such as in cars or along the Feather River prompted a civil rights suit filed in Sacramento federal court in March, and resulted in in a preliminary injunction last week that prohibits enforcement of the ordinance or seizure of homeless citizens property.

The Sacramento ordinance was adopted unanimously by the council following complaints from business and tourism groups about aggressive panhandling, and it has been controversial from the start. The night of its adoption on Nov. 14, 2017, four people were removed from the council chambers for raising their voices during the debate.

Under the ordinance, first-time offenders can be cited for an infraction and fined, and individuals who violate it more than twice can face up to six months in jail and a fine of $500 to $1,000.

The lawsuit describes Clark as a homeless man who routinely solicits handouts of food or money in Sacramento, sometimes along 21st Street, where he sits with his dog and two signs asking for money, with a cup for donations set between them.

He also stands on the sidewalk at the Sacramento Natural Foods Co-op at 28th and R streets, seeking donations of healthy food or cash, the suit says.

"Mr. Clark selects his locations based on his experience of where he is most successful obtaining donations," the suit says, noting that his chosen spot near the Co-op puts him within 30 feet of a Regional Transit bus stop and the co-op's driveways, both violations of the ordinance.

Read Full lawsuit SRCEH v. City of Sacramento Filed Complaint here >>>>

COMMAND CENTER: POLICE RESPONSE TO HOMELESSNESS - Coalition on Homelessness San Francisco

By Kelley Cutler

The cold winter winds whipped under the freeway overpass and a piece of paper tied to a green tent with a rubber band flapped in the wind. In big bold lettering the message on the paper read: "RESOLUTION DAY: TUES. FEB. 27th, 2018" "NOTICE TO VACATE"... "Persons who refuse to vacate the area may be subject to citation and/or arrest." The part right before that says the City will conduct a clean-up of the area... "including the removal of all individuals". Damn that's rough... reminds me of the movie 'Soylent Green'!

About a month ago this encampment tucked away under the freeway in an industrial area made it to the top of the City's list to be "resolved". City outreach workers have been getting folks into Navigation Centers, but more people have been showing up in need of shelter. Getting a bed is dependent on beds becoming available (mostly people being discharged back to the street to make beds available for this complaint driven system).

On the morning of this resolution a resident of the encampment was awoken by law enforcement at 7 am and told she needed to pack up and vacate. She went to wake up and inform her neighbors of the eviction that was upon them. When she returned to where she had slept the night before she found that her tent and all of her belongings were gone. City workers had tossed her possessions on the back of a flatbed truck to be disposed of. She got lucky and pulled her belongings off the truck before they were lost for good.

The day before the 'resolution' I spoke to a woman who was working with City outreach workers to get into the Navigation Center. I checked in with her during this mornings 'resolution' to make sure she was still getting a bed and she said she was waiting for the bed to become available, but that the HOT worker was helping her, and she was hopeful. When I got back to the office I received a distressed call from her... DPW workers threw her wheelchair into the crusher truck and demolished it. She said, "I need my wheelchair to get around!"

The Navigation Center is part of a complaint based system. People can't just sign up on a list to get a bed there, hence the reason some might be drawn to an area getting resolved. There is a myth that people are "service resistant", but the reality is that resources are extremely limited. The City has between 1,000 to 1,500 people waiting on the single adult shelter waitlist for a temporary bed. The 'average' wait for a family/child is 111 days.

In a recent SF Examiner story Jeff Kositsky, the director of the City's homeless department explained, "He said that there are 21,000 homeless persons annually in San Francisco, of which 8,000 are newly homeless. Annually, he said The City is "only helping 2,000 people exit homelessness. That's a big part of the challenge." He added, "Even though we have 7,400 units of permanent supportive housing, only 800 units become available in any given year.""

How the system works is that when an encampment gets enough complaints the City will do a "resolution". City outreach workers go out and work with folks to get them into shelter, connected to resources, treatment or a one way bus ticket out of town. Once a location has been "resolved" this location is now off limits. But let's be honest and look at the whole picture. Nothing is resolved if the person is then discharged back to the street.

Once an area is "resolved" it then becomes a law enforcement issue to make sure people don't go back there and "re-encamp. When they get discharged back to the street, they can't go back to the "resolved" location. The question I repeatedly ask City officials is, "when the whole City is 'resolved', where are people supposed to go?"

On the national level, there is a movement away from using law enforcement to respond to street homelessness and encampments. However in San Francisco, police have been playing a dominant role in responding to our housing crisis. The newly created Healthy Streets Operation Center (HSOC) (aka. Command Center) is a collaborative effort between city departments created to respond and "resolve" homelessness related complaints. Key groups missing from this collaboration were non-profits, advocates and people experiencing homelessness.

Laura Guzman, former longtime Director of the Mission Neighborhood Resource Center in San Francisco stated, "No housing exits, access based on complaints rather than vulnerability, and shorter stays than even traditional shelters do not address our communities' needs, but only hide visible homelessness. Most importantly, there is no community oversight. SF has a Continuum of Care that is kept in the dark on its Board, the Local Homeless Coordinating Board is left without its authority on homeless policy."

The United States Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) recommends "To end homelessness for everyone, we must link people experiencing unsheltered homelessness, including people sleeping and living in encampments, with permanent housing opportunities matched with the right level of services to ensure that those housing opportunities are stable and successful." They stressed the importance of diverse collaboration to create effective strategies and approaches to ending homelessness.

Julie Leadbetter, former director of the Navigation Center stated, "Navigation Centers have become a way to "legalize" sweeps. That's why they want short stays, so they can force people to leave the streets by following USICH guidance that shelter or services must be offered. So in order to sweep, they make shelters to sweep to, then put them back out, to sweep them again. This is a costly investment in homeless management."

On June 29th, 2017 the City began their strategic effort of addressing encampments and placing the people living in encampments in the Mission district into Navigation Centers. They called this operation the Mission District Homeless Outreach Program (MDHOP). The goal was for SFPD, the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, City outreach workers (SFHOT), Department of Public Health (DPH) and the Department of Public Works (DPW) to meet everyday at 8 am five days a week to strategize which location to focus their attention to clear encampments. No non-profit homeless service providers, advocates or people experiencing homelessness were included in this effort.

Since June 2017, the amount of tents in the Mission has gone from 256 down to about 60 tents. Based on the results of the MDHOP, Mayor Lee made the decision to replicate that model in Central Market and the Civic Center calling it "harm reduction" and having targeted mental health and drug addiction outreach since tents aren't as prevalent of an issue in this location. They created a Unified Command System (UCS), which is a command system that's a national model on staying organized for emergencies, for the City on homelessness. This command system is located at the Department of Emergency Management.

In January of 2018 the City created the Healthy Streets Operation Center (HSOC). This coordinated effort involves the police, public works, public health, the homeless department and the city's 311 system, as well as the city controller, city administrator and the Mayor's Office of Housing. Again, there is no non-profit homeless service providers, advocates or people experiencing homelessness part of this effort.

The command center is tasked with addressing the issue of dispatching appropriate responders to incidents related to homelessness. Up until now there have been two paths used for reporting incidents, 311 and SFPD's non-emergency line, but the two paths have not been in communication with each other. Now all the homeless related calls will be routed to the command center and they are dispatching calls to the appropriate responder from that location.

Dispatch protocol needs restructuring so that police aren't first responders to someone in need of help from a social service provider. It's not the role of law enforcement to be tasked with these things, but they have been put in this role. We need to quit kidding ourselves into believing that we can arrest our way out of this housing crisis or that anything is resolved by telling people to "move along".

There needs to be community involvement. There needs to be transparency. Law enforcement and City agencies cannot just do whatever the hell they want. The issue is not "visible homelessness", the issue is that people are forced to sleep on the streets because our government has failed to provide the basic human right to housing.

There is No Healing in Incarceration and Conservatorship: Community Says No to All Forms of Incarceration

by Coral Feign

For anyone who has spent time locked inside a cage, whether that is a jail or prison cell or the locked arms of the psychiatric system, it is clear that there can be no healing in incarceration. The current wave of expansion of the prison industrial complex has coupled mental health care with incarceration in a way that makes it seem impossible to untether the two. A clear example of this is Senator Weiner's SB 1045 legislation which would expand conservatorship to target mentally ill people and drug users and sweep them off the streets into incarceration. At WRAP, as a coalition of organizations that work with mentally ill street based people we can see that anytime spent locked up with your freedom and liberties stolen deeply deteriorates a person's mental, physical and spiritual health.

WHAT IS CONSERVATORSHIP?
Conservatorship is the process through which people are locked inside psychiatric institutions against their will. The process follows that a police officer or licensed clinician can order a 5150 temporary hold in a locked psychiatric institution if a person is "gravely disabled" and/or seen as being at harm to themselves or others. From there, a psych ward can hold a person for up to 72 hours more if they are still seen as a risk to themselves or others. If a clinician feels this person should be under conservatorship they request an investigation and if successful petition the court for a temporary or permanent conservatorship. Temporary conservatorships are 30 days but can be renewed indefinitely.

WHAT DOES SB 1045 DO?
SB 1045 expands the criteria of eligibility for conservatorship from gravely disabled to also include people who are chronically homeless and whom the state views as being incapable of caring for their own health and well-being due to mental illness or substance use. The evidence for this assessment is based on high-frequency emergency department use, high-frequency jail detention, or frequent detention to the 72-hour hold provision.

WHY IS THIS A PROBLEM?
The prison industrial complex is ever expanding. At its most insidious, it takes up words and ideas related to healing, treatment and justice and transforms them into arms of the prison system. Over the past few years we have seen expansion of mental health jails, added "services" in prison, court mandated treatment - all coercing people into what the state believes is best for them. For WRAP members, this conservatorship expansion simply means an increase in the criminalization of homelessness in the name of "public safety" or "public health" without truly addressing the core of issue housing. Homelessness is a housing issue first and foremost.

WHERE DOES THIS COME FROM?
The U.S. has a long history of dehumanizing, incarcerating and violating the rights of disabled people, mentally ill people, drug users and street-based people. The laws vary from the Ugly Laws geared towards removing physically disabled people from public space whose impacts ricochet into the contemporary quality of life ordinances which criminalize poverty. They also include patronizing and oppressive policies like those surrounding people deemed unfit to stand trial. In California, people deemed too ill to stand trial can be held in state hospital prison indefinitely. The conservatorship laws are just another example of removing people from public space and denying people their basic rights under the guise of support.

WHAT WE WANT INSTEAD
As WRAP is fighting the ways that homeless people are criminalized for existing - we know that there can be no healing or liberation in policing, imprisonment, courts and surveillance. There are brilliant ideas that organizers who identify as mentally ill, who use drugs and are street based have come up with to maneuver these problems.

These include:

● Accessible, affordable and attainable long-term and permanent housing for street-based people.

● Expansion of peer-based community organizations that are not run by the police, sheriff's department and allow for people to leave.

● Expansion of drug treatment centers with a harm reduction philosophy and a low threshold entry point.

● Access to non-punitive, non-judgmental, non-patronizing case management, intensive therapy, access to psychiatric medications if a person chooses to medicate in that way.

● Access to education about the use and impact of psychiatric medications.

● Access to 24-hour crisis centers that are not run by the police, sheriffs and allow for people to leave.

● Creation of spaces to deal with harm outside of the criminal legal system including transformative justice, restorative justice, community accountability, conflict mediation, Indigenous justice.

● Access to health care that is voluntary and honors a person's dignity and self-determination.

● Creation of hygiene centers which include restrooms, places to wash your clothes and things and access to clean drinking water.

● Access to space to be with community outside of the watchful eye of the police.

● Self-determined encampments that are free from police sweeps and harassment.

● Prison reentry services that are non-punitive and run by formerly incarcerated people.

● Safer injection sites for people who use intravenous drugs.

● Safer spaces for people who use crystal meth or other uppers.

● Guaranteed minimum income for all people.

● An end to ICE and immigration raids.

● Training of street-based people in overdose prevention methods like narcan.

● Access to clean drug paraphernalia and safer sex materials.

● Access to nature for street-based people including an expansion in the public park systems without time constraints or police presence.

● Decriminalization of drug use.

● Decriminalization of quality of life ordinances.

● Decriminalization of sex work.

Homeless Moms Ask City for Support - Coalition on Homelessness San Francisco

Three days before Mother's Day, unhoused families gathered on the steps of City Hall to tell their stories.

Homeless mothers in San Francisco already have the perfect Mother's Day gift in mind: a safe place for their families to sleep. On Thursday, May 10, homeless mothers and their families gathered at City Hall to demand more affordable housing from the Mayor with support from the Coalition on Homelessness.

The Coalition proposed $14 million dollars in 2018-2019 and an additional $15 million dollars in 2019-2020 that would fund 400 new housing subsidies and improve the emergency services system for people living on the streets.

The event, which took place a few days before Mother's Day, was an important reminder that a large number of San Francisco mothers experience homelessness. In fact, national data shows that households with single moms or children under six are most likely to face homelessness according to the 2017 San Francisco Homelessness Count and Survey.

Read Full Article >>>>>

It's that time again and I'm hoping to see you at our annual "Freedom Now" Awards and Celebration, which is shaping up to be a historic gathering. It's happening on June 16th 2018, from 5:00 p.m.-8:00 p.m. at: 838 E. 6th Street, CA 90021-our permanent home!

"Freedom Now" is much more than the book we released in 2012, much more than our annual celebration, it's the idea that fuels our vision, strategies, and determination to win. Click HERE to view the sponsorship package.

Our 2018 Honorees will continue the tradition of bringing together the most powerful artists, social action academics, activists, and thought leaders to celebrate LA CAN's work. We will honor Professor Kelly Lytle Hernandez & UCLA Million Dollar Hoods Project; Artivist, Mike De La Rocha (Revolve Impact); internationally celebrated, political recording artist, Mandeep Sethi (SETI X); dynamic civil rights attorney, Shayla Myers (Legal Aid Foundation Los Angeles); educator, filmmaker and 'Father of Leimert Park' Ben Caldwell and, the American Institute of Architects (AIA).

Read Los Angeles Community Action Network
(LACAN) Full Invitation Click Here >>>>>>

Join the Poor People's Campaign Monday, May 14th: A National Call for Moral Revival will launch 40 Days of Nonviolent Direct Action.

Martin Luther King was assassinated as he was planning the Poor People's Campaign. The work never ended and is back in force now as the Poor People's Campaign gets ready for 40 days of actions beginning on Monday, May 14th. This campaign continues to address the triple evils of racism, poverty, and militarism that King spoke so forcefully about, and adds the evil of ecological devastation.

There will be actions in Washington, DC and 40 state capitols every Monday and webinars on every Teaching Tuesday. Please consider getting involved if you are not already involved and sharing with your community, colleagues, networks.

For information at the national level contact info@poorpeoplescampaign.org
At the state level-(yourstate)@poorpeoplescampaign.org
Find an event near you-https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/index.php/events/


Join us in Oregon or California to ensure your elected leaders hear our message loud and clear.



We're building powerful organizing committees in states all across the country, including yours. Click on your state to join us as poor people, moral leaders and advocates build a revolution of values that will save our country's soul.

Find an event near you and RSVP today.

Some resources:
https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/index.php/poor-peoples-campaign-1968/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ph8IxbAYsU
Poor People's Campaign Study Materials - https://kairoscenter.org/study/
"Transforming Jericho Road": Rev. Dr. M. L. King Jr.'s Critique of Charity - https://kairoscenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Wessel-McCoy-PPC-History-Intro.pdf