Comments

1
The ACLU will not be happy until we have total anarchy.
3
When the city sweeps camps, they take everything that's there and don't always say how to pick it up. Even if they do, it might be at an inaccessible location, or only available to those who have photo ID (which might have been taken with the possessions). This seems completely unfair and an abuse of a very vulnerable population. Imagine if you only had a few belongings to your name, and then those were taken away. How could you possibly piece your life back together? Taking the belongings of the homeless is no way to make things better.
4
#1: the city needs to steal the belongings of the homeless just to avoid "anarchy"?
Why do they need to take the stuff? Isn't closing the camps enough?
It's not a crime just to BE houseless, y'know.

and #2: obviously we're not talking about giving drug paraphernalia back.
5
@3. So a Hooverville cleanup should be like an episode of Hoarders? Slowly acclimate the subject to the idea of getting rid of some of their worthless belongings, but totally at their own pace and comfort ability.

Let's be real. The vast majority of shit in a homeless encampment is trash, collected by vagrants, and discarded at random. Keep your ID in your pocket or if you can't afford pockets, your bindle.
6
@4: For public health and safety.
7
There couldn't possibly be any solution between total anarchy and throwing people's IDs and medications in the trash?
8
I imagine the "interesting legal question" here is the tents.

The tents count as necessary personal belongings, I would think. If the city can't remove them, though, then we've got de facto legalized squatting.

I find it a little odd that all of the recent efforts the WA ACLU has made to help the homeless have been variants on "let's legalize squatting." Can nobody in that organization come up with any other way to help the homeless? Has anyone asked them why they seem so fixated on this approach?
10
@9 There are lots of people who would love to be shipped to a treatment center that had housing, food, medication, and education. Such places don't exist! How would you pay for them? In reality, people get forced into a miserable nighttime shelter with bedbugs, or pushed on to the next remote, dangerous, cold place under a bridge. We can't pretend there are good alternatives and force the poor to pay the cost of our delusion.

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