A June report from the county’s independent judicial arm urges local government to reallocate law enforcement resources to social services.
On
July 13, about 10 police officers participated in the arrest of a member of the
Santa Cruz, California, homeless community. Marty Mirabel, known as Pirate, was
protecting his friend’s vehicular home from being towed in a public lot,
according to his bail fundraiser.
Four
officers subdued and handcuffed him on the ground, and five others formed a
protective semi-circle as they repeatedly told the videographer, local activist
Keith McHenry, to back away from the scene. Onlookers shouted “Fuck 12”—a slang
term for police and law enforcement—and “Freedom!” over the racket from the tow
truck. Pirate was charged with obstructing an officer, writing a bad check, and
resisting arrest, according to a public arrest report. He was released on a
$25,000 bond on July 19.
On
July 17, Santa Cruz residents rallied for Pirate’s freedom and for defunding
the city’s police, in line with protest movements across the country following
the police killing of George Floyd in May in Minneapolis. Days later, roughly
30 protesters gathered outside City Councilmember Cynthia Mathews’s house and
downtown near Police Chief Andrew Mills’s home. McHenry told The Appeal that
activists gathered at Mathews’s house “for supporting the confiscation of
vehicle homes of people, forcing them to seek shelter in doorways and parks.”
Mathews did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“This
will continue until services for the unhoused community are available, and
criminalization of our struggling community members stops,” Alicia Kuhl, president
of Santa Cruz Chapter of the California Homeless Union, wrote on July 21 on
Facebook in response to the demonstration. “That includes the towing of peoples
homes. They towed away 3 that we know of last week.” She added, “If we don’t
get some peace, you won’t either.”
Their
protests follow not only the arrest of Pirate but also multiple raids of
homeless encampments during the COVID-19 pandemic. In one video, a resident of
a sidewalk camp said police handcuffed her and other residents, drove them away
from their newly purchased belongings and dropped them off in a parking lot.
They walked back to their camp, but police had cleared it.
Santa
Cruz police continue to arrest people in the homeless community, which numbered
over 2,000, according to a 2019 Point In Time survey. In June, the Santa Cruz
County Civil Grand Jury, an independent body that publishes investigative
findings and recommendations to improve governmental operations, published a
report criticizing the county’s strategy of criminalizing mental health issues,
substance use disorders, and homelessness.
The
grand jury recommends allocating resources away from arresting homeless people
and toward social work, mental health services, and housing. It also proposes a
24-hour response unit for non-emergency calls staffed with medical and
experienced crisis workers that would function similarly to the Crisis
Assistance Helping Out On The Streets (CAHOOTS) in Springfield and Eugene,
Oregon.
CAHOOTS,
a project born out of the White Bird Clinic—a grassroots, sliding scale, social
justice-oriented community health center—responds to about 20 percent of local
911 calls free of charge and offers an independent crisis hotline. Medics and
crisis workers provide crisis counseling, suicide prevention, substance use
services, conflict resolution, housing crisis services, resource connection and
referrals, first aid, and transportation to services. According to the grand
jury report, CAHOOTS saves the county an estimated $15 million a year through
emergency response diversion and picking up calls otherwise handled by more
expensive law enforcement and EMS teams. Portland, Oregon, and Denver are in
the early stages of similar pilot programs.
Civil
grand juries, however, do not have the power to implement policy or programs.
Their power “rests in their ability to move the public to insist that the
agencies act on the issues revealed by the investigations,” according to the
county.
Although
the Santa Cruz City Council must respond to the report’s recommendations,
anecdotal evidence from former grand jurors across the country suggest the
majority of these recommendations are often ignored. For example, the Santa
Cruz grand jury has expressed concerns surrounding overcrowding at the Main
Jail in every report since 2000.
In
June, the City Council applied for a $3.4 million grant from the state for
emergency housing, navigation centers, rental assistance, and housing projects.
But, as the grand jury noted, the Homeless Action Partnership, responsible for
reducing homelessness in the county, is not “organizationally equipped” to
fulfill its mission.
Santa
Cruz officials and police claim to have helped the homeless population with
services such as “triage centers” and no-tow “safe spaces” for vehicular homes.
But locals say that’s not playing out in reality.
For
one, people who live in their cars cannot afford registration, which results in
the towing of their vehicle, they said. Police towed a Santa Cruz Homeless
Union donation van on July 15 because the organization hadn’t yet completed the
registration process, according to Kuhl. And in early April, local foster youth
advocate Chad Platt told The Appeal that the city was misrepresenting facts
about triage centers. “To say that there are triage centers located all around
Santa Cruz County is such a lie. There’s nothing set up,” he said.
In
mid-March, Governor Gavin Newsom announced the launch of Project Roomkey, a
statewide initiative in response to COVID-19 to put a small percentage of
people without homes into hotels and motels. Santa Cruz county set up at least
one crowded, patrolled outdoor tent city and tents inside the Veterans Memorial
Building. Following calls for motel vouchers from advocates, the city reported
that it had contracted with three hotels with 117 rooms through Project Roomkey
in early May.
On
July 1, as the pandemic continued, Newsom signed an executive order extending
statewide eviction moratoriums to Sept. 30. But McHenry, the activist, said
some landlords in Santa Cruz are not abiding by the law. “I feed the evicted
and can tell you the crisis is already extreme even under the city and states
temporary eviction moratoriums,” McHenry wrote in a statement on Facebook.
“I
don’t believe one landlord has been prosecuted for violating this moratorium
even though I meet freshly evicted tenants at our meals several times a week,”
he continued.
Some
cities, like Los Angeles and Dallas, are offering tenants some form of rent
relief. But many lower-income and marginalized people in the U.S. are living in
uncertainty: In some states, more than half of renters are at risk of eviction.
At the federal level, the Senate’s latest proposed relief package, the Health,
Economic Assistance, Liability Protection, and Schools (HEALS) Act doesn’t
extend the federal eviction moratorium. Housing and public health advocates
fear that a collision of insurmountable crises is just around the corner.
The
Appeal
Ella Fassler
July 31, 2020
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