SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A federal judge has temporarily banned San Francisco from clearing homeless encampments, saying the city violated its own policies by failing to offer other shelter.
Magistrate Judge Donna M. Ryu in U.S. District Court in Oakland granted an emergency order Friday night that bars the city from taking away tents and confiscating the belongings of encampment dwellers, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
The move came in a lawsuit filed on behalf of homeless plaintiffs that sought to stop San Francisco from dismantling homeless encampments until it has thousands of additional shelter beds.
Ryu cited evidence presented by the plaintiffs that the city regularly and illegally failed to offer shelter to inhabitants before clearing the encampments and improperly seized or threw out their belongings, including cellphones, medication, identification and even prosthetic limbs.
The city’s arguments in its defense were “wholly unconvincing,” the judge said.
In a statement, Mayor London Breed decried the emergency order.
“Mayors cannot run cities this way,” she said. “We already have too 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 bring people indoors and keeps our neighborhoods safe and clean for our residents.”
Breed said many people encountered during the cleanups “are refusing services or are already housed” and some use the encampments for “drug dealing, human trafficking and other illegal activities.”
City attorneys have said its policies balance the rights of homeless people with a need to maintain clean and safe public spaces. In court documents, they said homeless people get plenty of notice of upcoming cleanings, receive offers of help and shelter and are asked to leave an encampment only after declining an offer to stay elsewhere.
But the judge pointed to evidence provided by the Coalition on Homelessness and seven plaintiffs, containing academic analysis and detailed eyewitness accounts of numerous sweeps in the past three years that show homeless people were deprived of personal items and pushed out with nowhere to go.
“The policy isn’t the problem,” Ryu said in a virtual hearing Thursday. “The question is how is that policy being executed.”
There are an estimated 7,800 homeless people in San Francisco and the city has acknowledged that it is short thousands of available temporary or permanent beds.
There were 34 beds available as of Friday, said Zal K. Shroff, senior attorney with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, one of several legal organizations representing the coalition.
The lawsuit is among several pending in Western states where visible homelessness has grown amid a shortage of shelter beds and affordable housing.
Last week, a federal judge issued an emergency injunction to stop the city of Phoenix from conducting sweeps of a large homeless encampment downtown, in response to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Arizona. Authorities cannot enforce camping bans on anyone unable to obtain a shelter bed and can only seize property that is illegal or a threat.
The ACLU of New Mexico and others sued the city of Albuquerque this week, alleging officials are destroying encampments and criminalizing people for being homeless.
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“There are an estimated 7,800 homeless people in San Francisco and the city has acknowledged that it is short thousands of available temporary or permanent beds.”
And yet these Democrat Fools still support the multi-millions of homeless illegal immigrants that the Biden administration is encouraging, supporting and transporting around the country.
Truth is, these charity groups are hauling in millions in taxpayer dollars — your money — under government contracts to facilitate illegal immigration. It’s money laundering. Democratic politicians want to maximize illegal immigration, but they don’t want their fingerprints on it.
Sane individuals only come together to form governments to do Collectively ONLY that which they cannot accomplish as individuals,,like fight wars and police organized crime families. Only the socially insane form government collectives to accomplish collectively, that which God designed them to accomplish as successful individuals. Just remove from the laws the obligations to feed, cloth, house people who refuse to live up to their designated lives of responsibility and no appeals court can force them to provide what is no longer codified, and never should have been. Hunger motivates, and the motivation to LEAD lives, not follow, to thrive/ survive, is immediately killed when people designed to be human are socially turned into greedy pigs and follower sheep.
EVERY DAMN one of those so-called “Charity orgs” need to get hornswaggled, for their OUTRIGHT AIDING ILLEGAL invasion…
“If you built it they will come” apparently applies to both ball parks and derelict drug needle camping grounds. There is no constitutional law that cities must provide shelter to those who refuse to live American lives in SELF-government and accountability. When socialist sob sisters decided to pander to social dependency in the drugs of misplaced government charity, and codify it into laws, they opened a political pandora’s box of many evils that killed the very thing of HOPE, that was the last thing Pandora saw come out of her box of many evils released. It just flew away, just like any hope these Democrat government dependent people now only destroy by the millions, local or illegally imported.
I was born in SF and so was my father. They have ruined my city. “They” Pi$$ed on it and now they can’t swim out of it. The city council and Breed should be stood up against a wall and face a firing squad of excremental squalor until they drown in it—metaphorically speaking—as I don’t want to be barred from this site although I rarely comment. The whole city is unlike horrible Market St. or the Tenderloin, for those who don’t live in the San Francisco Bay Area and don’t realize that. Unfortunately, the good citizens who actually work for a living and raise families here, rarely go to these areas unless it’s to drive through them for some disgusting head-shaking entertainment. Or when an out-of-town guest wants to see it and experience open mouth awe taking photos for the folks back home. And lets not forget the small business owners who sweep neeles and feces off their doorsteps first thing in the morning.
the globalist plan was probably to FORCE them all to get vaxed and DIE
WHICH makes me wonder. WE saw thousands of MEDICAL Workers, military and OTHer folk, who got FIRED for refusing to take the shots.
BUT DID THEY EVER go through ANY HOMELESS encampment to make THEM GET it?/
Wait, what “homeless problem”? Don’t we have a Democrat (p)Resident?
I think too many people in government are being blinded by “wokeness.” The bottom line is that no one should be allowed to squat on public land — be it a sidewalk, park, or underpass. It leads to squalid conditions, crime, drug abuse, and a depraved underclass that preys on others. Our government should give them what they need — shelter, healthcare, food, medication, counselling, etc. But for government officials to allow encampments on public property is a dereliction of duty, which is to serve/protect the public safety and welfare.
BUT when you see how much money we’ve tossed at this “homeless problem”, over the past 80+ years, it makes me wonder, JUST WHEN IS Enough enough???
Why should the GOVERNMENT give them anything? Jesus said WE are supposed to take care of the poor, the widows, and the orphans. The problem started when too many people didn’t want to get their hands dirty, so they paid the government to do it. It was a recipe for disaster from day one. Now we have homeless people DEMANDING their RIGHTS to food, shelter, medical care, a place for their tent, and to poop on the sidewalk. Someone needs to remind them that their RIGHTS are limited to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Everything else you work for.
I think the city should make as much room for the homeless as possible on and around the property and resident’s of Magistrate Judge Donna M. Ryu. Than let see how fast she changes her opinion.
AND at the homes of EVERY elected official!
If we had left caring for the poor in the hands of local churches and charities, instead of farming it out to the government – where there is no compassion, no real care for the people, and no sense of responsibility for how money is spent – we wouldn’t have tens of thousands of homeless in every city in the country. We also wouldn’t be on the third or fourth generation of professional welfare recipients who have learned how to game the system. In the 1960’s with the introduction of the welfare state, LBJ famously said he would “have the poor (not the word he used!) voting Democrat for the next 50 years.” It worked better than he ever imagined.
More like 4th or 5th generation of professional welfare leeches..