So the police in San Diego decided to confiscate anything that could protect houseless people from the rain. This right before a bad El Niño hit a few hours later.
Disgusting.
Courtesy of friends of Unspoken Politics, the San Diego Free Press:
You have to wonder what they were thinking in city hall. On Monday morning the police department conducted a sweep of sidewalk homeless encampments as a major winter storm bore down on San Diego.
The “environmental” staff showed up on 17th and Imperial around 5:30am – took anything unattended – just when people were waking up and had gone up to Neil Good Day Center to go to the bathroom. So their stuff was considered Discarded Debris.When activist David Ross got there around 8am – after stopping at the Bargain market to buy 100 large black trash bags, people were all huddled under the Imperial St bridge. They had lost everything.
. . .
It’s not like this weather forecast was any secret. None-the-less, in the hours leading up to the first round of torrential rail and hail, the San Diego Police Department were busy confiscating tarps, tents and other makeshift shelters erected by homeless people on the periphery of downtown.
The impending bad weather apparently wasn’t seen as an obstacle to enforcing bright green notices posted last week warning of “Cleanup and Property Removal.” The problem is/was that there was no place else for the humans targeted by this purge to go.
Unspoken Politics 