Yesterday, we tried to help an unhoused woman get into an emergency winter shelter. Here’s what happened.🧵 Rain is incredibly dangerous for people living on the street. More people die of the cold in Los Angeles than in New york and San Francisco combined. People can develop hypothermia in temperatures as high as 50 degrees— even higher if they’re in wet clothing.

Talking to unhoused people, you hear stories all the time about the ways that LAPD officers casually disrespect and dehumanize them. Threats, harassment, and even violence are normal. This email from a Senior Lead Officer is what the LAPD actually thinks about unhoused people. "Everyone will be arrested and all their belongings will be taken away by sanitation."

When all of someone's belongings are taken away, they lose their medications, the legal documents they need to access services, blankets, tents, food, and irreplacable sentimental items.

The phrase "service resistant," used to describe unhoused people who are reluctant to accept certain services, is a way to offload blame for poor systemic decisions onto individual people.

There's a reason councilmembers and their staffers love this phrase. When you directly engage our unhoused neighbors and talk about that reluctance to accept a particular offer of shelter, it becomes impossible to sustain the "service resistance" framework.

In the middle of a horrible and terrifying COVID spike, LA just cancelled all of its Dec 1 appointments at Union Station (one of the only transit-accessible facilities) with less than 24hrs notice because of A FILM SHOOT!! @MayorOfLA @metrolosangeles @lapublichealth WTF???!!??? Damn this blew up. Peep our soundcloud:

https://twitter.com/KtownforAll/status/1333606400828719107?s=20

Thread.
What’s 41.18(d)? It’s a City of LA ordinance that makes it illegal to sit, sleep, and lie down on the sidewalk in LA.

Q: Isn’t 41.18 unconstitutional?
A: Yes! Martin v Boise decided that a total ban on sitting, sleeping, and lying down is unconstitutional ...because it violates the 8th amendment (cruel and unusual punishment). BUT cities can still impose restrictions in other ways, like restricting people from sleeping under freeway overpasses, for example. Since 41.18 is unconstitutional, LA does not enforce it.

We appreciate the voices on the city council who spoke up in opposition to yesterday's homeless criminalization motion. It has been a long fight to get councilmembers to acknowledge the harm caused by over-policing houseless people. They questioned the urgency of this motion, and why that same urgency hasn't been present in efforts to house people. They acknowledged that arrests and sweeps make it harder for people to connect to the few services we do have available.

For today, we won!

The majority of council did not support the motion and sent it back to committee. This fight will come back, but public pressure stopped the council from moving forward today. Jamming this through in just a few days during a busy election season failed. As the meeting closed, they moved to continue this discussion on November 24th, so this fight is far from over. We need to keep the pressure on council, because they will try this again in 4 weeks.

Today, City Council will discuss a measure creating a partnership with St. Vincent’s Medical Center to provide services to low-income and unhoused Angelenos. This feels like a great measure and we support expanded services, but we can't ignore the troubling connections behind it. St. Vincent is owned by LA Times owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong who bought it in 2018. As it went bankrupt in 2020, the LA Times provided significant coverage of the hospital’s closure, including a column by Lopez calling on the City to turn the facility into homeless housing. 2/9

Good morning - we're here at the Convening on the Justice Guarantee in San Francisco, hosted by @Justice_Collab and organized by @ChatfieldKate.

Very excited for a day discussing criminalization, housing, and structural racism in the justice system. Stay tuned for highlights! The convening is at Manny's, which offers a nicely curated collection of books in addition to some excellent grub.

Our members have been calling @MitchOFarrell's office and asking important questions about the upcoming sweeps at Echo Park. We've learned that CD13 shelters are currently at capacity. Police are about to remove dozens of people from the area with no plan as to where they'll go. When members spoke to staffers, they gave confusing and contradictory information about where to direct people. Suggested shelters were far away and inaccessible to people in the Echo Park area.