Over the past couple of years, the insane Democrats who run the city have allowed camps of homeless people to spring up all over the city, some of which extend entire city blocks and most of which are filthy, smelly and massive threats to public health – not to mention business killers.
But apparently, the encampments have now become too large even by Democratic standards, so now the city's liberals want them culled somewhat. Only, a federal judge isn't signing off on it and, in fact, is preventing Mayor London Breed's administration from clearing the camps off of sidewalks and out of parks.
The Associated Press reported:
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 judge said that the city's arguments were "wholly unconvincing."
Breed blasted the emergency order in a statement.
"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."
She added that many people encountered by city officials during the cleanups "are refusing services or are already housed,” and some people are using the encampments for “drug dealing, human trafficking, and other illegal activities.”
Attorneys for San Francisco claim that the city's policies seek to balance the rights of homeless persons with the city's newfound desire to finally begin cleaning things up and protecting residents while keeping public spaces safe. They argued in court documents that homeless people have been given plenty of notice that clean-ups are coming while at the same time being extended offers of assistance and shelter. They are asked to leave encampments only after they decline offers to stay somewhere else.
However, as the AP reported, "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 during a virtual hearing last week. "The question is how is that policy being executed."
San Francisco has an estimated 7,800 homeless people, a population that has continued to grow over the past several years thanks to policies that not only enabled mass homelessness but also appeared to encourage it. California itself is the "homeless capital" of the country.
But the problem is, the same Democrat-leaning groups who applauded the homelessness are now suing to allow it to continue, including the ACLU, which argued in a case in New Mexico that cities essentially have no right to dismantle homeless camps, no matter where they spring up, because homeless people have more rights than taxpayers who pay for streets to be clean and as free of crime as possible.
All of this is of far-left Democratic Party making. Had they not encouraged so much homelessness, to begin with, they wouldn't be getting a huge dose of karma right about now from a federal judge.
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