Fighting Sweeps by Building Community.

Everyone is familiar with a sweep, be it by definition, bearing witness to somebody being displaced or even coming across a familiar place and noticing people who used to live there are suddenly gone. Sweeps happen every day in our communities. Yet despite new policies, rhetoric and media portrayals of sweeps and city government’s asinine excuses for doing them (i.e. Health or Drug issues), the underlying reality of what sweeps are and the impact they have on people’s lives stays the same. Sweeps are dehumanizing, violent and in no way connected to services or housing at all, they are simply criminalizing people who can’t afford a decent place to live. So, we fight back against them.

Community-based outreach will always be the principal factor in identifying the priorities & direction of campaigns for both WRAP & our members. WRAP member orgs have been fighting sweeps locally from day one. In 2019 when we launched our House Keys Not Sweeps Campaign, we knew we had to fight hard and rep what’s real, so we also launched a WRAP-wide sweeps street outreach initiative. Through documentation, discussion and constant feedback, the campaign reflects the impacts of sweeps that are intentionally overlooked and receive little to no coverage. 

As of today, 300 outreach forms have been compiled by organizers going into the community and documenting people’s experiences. This outreach reflects the communities of six cities, and the universal trends among them affirm what has been clear from the beginning: sweeps displace people from their community, much like Anti-Okie and Sundown Town Laws were back in their day. People have a right to exist! People have a right to decency and respect! 

People’s lives get violently and abruptly interrupted. They’re treated at best as some nuisance, but (typically) at worst as some pest that must be rid of. The number one reason people were given for why a sweep was happening was simply no reason at all. When it came to their personal property, a staggering 85% weren’t offered a place to store their belongings, and 74% had their personal property trashed. 

Sweeps do not solve homelessness, they simply push people further into the outskirts of the public eye. And the truly scary thing is we are seeing more and more sweeps as the numbers of unhoused people keep growing under the Big Fascist Bill (HB 1). 

In our outreach, 78% of the agencies that conducted the sweeps were police usually threatening arrest, citations, warrant checks & being verbally abusive. Sweeps are an extension of the criminalization unhoused communities face simply for being unhoused. 

The widespread misconception that homeless people continue to refuse services gets called out for the BS it is when 88% of people were not offered any type of service at all. Displacing people from where they are living, under false pretense and in a violent manner, disregards a person’s humanity. It is at this point now that when asked what is important for the community to understand about sweeps, the number one answer was simply “we are human.” 

Sweeps were never meant to be a viable solution to addressing homelessness. As the federal government decimated funding for public housing, they absolved themselves of responsibility by decentralizing the efforts to states and cities. 

When homelessness emerged in the early 80’s it was mislabeled as a short-term, one-time crisis. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) began to prop up emergency shelters to address this “disaster.” This calamity was not going to be solved with a single rollout of shelters: they couldn’t guarantee a bed for everyone, due to bureaucratic labyrinths and the often racist/anti-immigrant intake criteria to qualify for eligibility people were forced to navigate. 

This hollow thinking of, “If a bed, cot or mat in a shelter was being offered then people had no reason to be in the streets,” is the basis for pushing people around and, in turn, criminalizing them. Sweeps are rampant and a first-choice punishment, making criminalization a tenet of the strategy to address the housing crisis in this country. 

As homelessness continues to expand, so do the opportunities for financial and political gain. Businesses & city officials alike utilize local law enforcement to enforce the hostile removal of unhoused individuals from public spaces. Other extensions of law enforcement are private security and sanitation firms, who have secured contracts and deals that easily line their pockets off the continued dehumanization of poor people. 

Access to legal counsel and legal resources remain an additional barrier that prevents unhoused communities from breaking free of the criminalization they face. In spite of the fact that 78% of sweeps are carried out by pigs and 95% say they’re unable to access legal support, community organizers have taken it upon themselves to think creatively about how to bridge the gap between what is needed and what is available. For 20 years, organizers at Los Angeles Community Action Network (LACAN) in Skid Row have partnered with lawyers to fight criminalization there. WRAP and our friends at the National Homelessness Law Center created a manual for Legal Defense Clinics, an initiative that re-orients lawyers to form relationships with local organizers to better provide legal counsel. Groups in San Jose & Sacramento have already adopted similar models. In Seattle, organizers have developed relationships with law students to develop a method of tracking property loss which has resulted in campaigns against the police department for property destruction of unhoused communities. 

Our efforts to ensure people’s right to exist in public spaces is still faced with a fixed system that is not interested in undoing itself. There is no viable solution being offered for housing, instead 73% were given stay away orders from the neighborhood. There is no easy access to legal counsel or resources. Temporary solutions like shelters do not get to the root of the underlying issues of homelessness and poverty. Shelters come with their own issues, such as a total lack of privacy, not allowing pets, inaccessibility to disabled individuals, and arbitrary and punitive exits just to name a few. These short term “solutions” fail time and time again, yet it is unhoused people who have to face the consequences of a broken system through criminalization & displacement. 

Criminal penalties are vast & widespread. All the components to make homelessness a vicious cycle are alive and well! 

The issue of homelessness is a man-made farce. It is easier for those in power to create grotesque caricatures of people who simply “don’t want to work” or who “refuse help” than to take accountability and solve the problem. Mainstream reporting on homelessness in this country is just an additional mechanism of disinformation meant to absolve the state of any accountability. This wack “journalism” is more interested in fueling the dehumanization of a community rather than uplifting its humanity. 

Targets on the backs of our communities have been magnified as a means to justify the intensified attacks we’re subjected to. We can not ignore the hostilities against poor, Black, Brown, immigrant, disabled, queer or any other intentionally marginalized community. We are left with no other viable choice but to band together and fight back as if our asses depend on it…cause they do! 

40 years of policy changes, punitive measures, and divestment from housing, food, healthcare and income support is proof that America’s neoliberal approach to fiscal and social policy is, by far, the number one reason homelessness continues to massively grow today. 

Sweeps won’t fix this, only a total re-evaluation of how our government cares for and respects all people being governed will. The alarm has been sounding off, and we must answer the call. The only way through the current fascistic hellscape is together!