A federal judge has issued a temporary ban on San Francisco from clearing most homeless encampments amid an ongoing lawsuit against the city brought by advocacy groups seeking to stop police raids of homeless encampments.
Last week, Magistrate Judge Donna M. Ryu in the US District Court in Oakland questioned the tactics used by the city of San Francisco in cleaning up homeless encampments, suggesting that the city should not adheres to its own policies of providing shelter beds to people who are asked to vacate a public area.
In his decision, Ryu stated that the city failed to offer shelter to the homeless before clearing the encampments and confiscating their property.
The judge also found the city’s justification for taking enforcement action “totally unconvincing”, stating that the defendants failed to adequately challenge their evicting people without first providing them with shelter.
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Homeless people use illegal drugs at an encampment along Willow Street in the Tenderloin district of downtown San Francisco on February 24, 2022.
(Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Lawyers representing San Francisco argued that city policies balance the rights of the homeless with the need to keep public spaces clean and safe for all, according to court documents. They claimed that homeless people are given ample notice of upcoming cleanups, offered help, and only asked to leave a camp after refusing an offer to stay elsewhere.
The judge wrote that the defense relied on statements by city employees that “generally explain how the city typically conducts campground closures, without discussing any specific closures or providing supporting data or analysis of them.”
Ryu also identified evidence from the Coalition on homelessness and seven plaintiffs, including academic analysis and detailed eyewitness accounts of numerous raids over the past three years, showing that homeless people were forcibly removed from their encampments without have nowhere to go and were deprived of their personal belongings such as tents, cell phones, medicines, identification and prostheses.
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Homeless people are seen on the streets of the Tenderloin district in San Francisco.
(Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
“Politics is not the problem,” Ryu said during the virtual hearing. “The question is how that policy is being executed.”
Democratic San Francisco Mayor London Breed said Ryu’s injunction affects his ability to address the city’s homeless crisis, according to The San Francisco Chronicle.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed listens at a press conference at City Hall on February 16, 2022.
(Gabrielle Lurie/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
Breed said a “vast majority” of homeless people evicted by city workers “refuse services or are already housed.” He also said that some are using the camps for “drug trafficking, human trafficking and other illegal activities.”
“Mayors can’t run cities this way,” he said. “We already have very 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 get people home and keeps our neighborhoods safe and clean for our residents.”
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Ryu’s injunction will remain in effect “as long as there are more homeless people in San Francisco than there are shelter beds available.”
Associated Press contributed to this report.
