In the wake of the ruling from a federal judge this past Friday, San Francisco will not be able to clear out the large number of homeless encampments scattered around the city because it has not yet offered proper shelter to the inhabitants of the encampments.
Officials from the city have been carrying out sweeps in which it confiscated the tents and other belongings of the homeless population living in a number of tent cities until Magistrate Judge Donna Ryu in the U.S. District Court in Oakland instituted an emergency order effectively banning the process from taking place, explained a report from the San Francisco Chronicle. The order was issued in the wake of a group of homeless plaintiffs slamming the city with a lawsuit about the practice taking place.
“Mayors cannot run cities this way,” exclaimed Mayor London breed. “We already have too few tools to deal with the mental illness we see on our streets. Now we are being told not to use another tool that helps bring people indoors and keeps our neighborhoods safe and clean for our residents.”
Ryu stated that the currently established laws for the city explain that it needs to offer shelter to these homeless people prior to stepping in to break up and clear out encampments, but in order to do so the city would be forced to set up multiple thousands of additional beds within shelters to meet the needed quota. Evidence was highlighted by Ryu that explained that the city routinely failed to make the offer of shelter prior to dismantling and clearing out these encampments while improperly taking or disposing of the belongings of the people living there, including items such as cellphones, medication, identification, and even prosthetic limbs.
"the stench from the bench is making me clench!" IT'S THE ACLU vermin who block cities from clearing homeless cesspools from our streets. ARREST THE ACLU lawyers as domestic terrorists. https://t.co/Aqf46aN9RY
— Michael Savage (@ASavageNation) December 24, 2022
Breed explained that a large number of the homeless people that had their encampments become the target of these cleanup efforts first refused assistance from the city. She stated that a number of them even own homes, but utilize the camps for “drug dealing, human trafficking, and other illegal activities.”
Legal representation for the city claimed that the homeless people were given fair notice of when the camps are slated for clearing, are given offers of assistance, and are only made to leave if they choose to not go along with the offered alternative housing. San Francisco has roughly 7,800 homeless people and the officials for the city have expressed acknowledgment that it does not have the needed number of shelters to effectively accommodate the total number of homeless.
