Recent crackdowns against the homeless are (understandably, IMO) occurring due to the mounting chaos that increasing homelessness is bringing to West Coast cities. Along with living in San Diego, I routinely work in the West Coast’s largest cities – Seattle, Portland, Bay Area, LA – seeing first hand where homelessness is most prevalent.
Speaking for San Diego, SD’s first responders have done a much better job of staying on top of their homeless population in terms of accounting for the day-to-day lives of their homeless population. SDPD’s strategy is to keep the homeless on their toes.
The city does this by posting flyers at sidewalk encampments which give notice to the PDs planned shakedown of their encampments of usually 5 – 15 tents. They next morning a caravan of first responders arrive that includes:
1) Armed police officers to oversee the uprooting of tents, confiscate illegal weapons/drugs, and arrest certain individuals for active arrest warrants, mostly drug related.
2) Social workers (some unarmed, badged police officers) who are both familiar with the downtown homeless on a first name basis and who are looking for specific homeless individuals who have fallen off the city's radar, usually women who are forcibly drugged into sidewalk prostitution by downtown pimps.
3) Paramedics to address the common health ailments, namely foot and dental sores.
4) City-contracted crews of cleanup specialists who arrive with flatbeds to haul away trash and pressure-wash the sidewalks once the tents are removed.
Quite often a 1) volunteer veterinarian is along to assess the dogs homeless keep as pets and 2) homeless advocates attend as well, specifically Amie Zamudio and Michael McConnell whom the article interviews. McConnell is correct to describe the process as “Whac-A-Mole” because once the property of the homeless is cleared and handed back to the homeless – tents, shopping carts, furniture – the homeless are free to set up along another downtown sidewalk until the process begins in another 3 to 4 weeks. (McConnell mostly attends these shakedowns to keep the police from throwing away property of homeless he personally knows.)
The city does this because their shakedowns prevent large portions of downtown sidewalks from becoming permanent encampments as allowed in Seattle, Portland, LA, and the Bay Area where their permanent encampments descend into major public health hazards of forced prostitution, overdoses, and vermin infestations. Though there are 1200 – 2000 homeless living in downtown, San Diego has largely avoided the chaos of its fellow West Coast cities through its proactive policing of downtown encampments.
I personally view this as an effective, organized, lesser-of-evils approach that allows the city to disrupt the heroin/meth trade, extract women forced into prostitution, steer homeless individuals to helpful resources, and keep the sidewalks from turning into a public health hazards. Part of San Diego’s motive is to do enough to avoid lawsuits brought on by two fronts: 1) the downtown business association suing the city on behalf of business owners whose cash flows they claim are disrupted by homeless camping in front of their storefronts AND 2) the apartment towers who residences have broken leases to leave the downtown, citing the block-by-block homeless presence.
Though street level drug abuse is still visible and downtown was hit hard by the Fentanyl crisis that picked up in 2022, San Diego was never unwise enough to legalize hard drugs like Portland did, and is now recriminalizing:
