Santa Rosa Police Action, 5/11/21

 Santa Rosa Police Action, 5/11/2021

When I arrived at 4^th street and Morgan about 7:30 am, there was a police car across the street from two tents and two piles of belongings. A little trash.   A police officer stood back a few feet from an elderly man asleep on the sidewalk beside his tent. I asked the officer what’s going to happen here?  He said he wasn’t sure.  From the other tent, a man poked his head out,   I asked him if he’d been told he could go to a shelter. His response:  “Yeah, right.  Sam Jones.  I ain’t goin to that *%&#^ place, adding a stream of invective and insisting he wasn’t leaving.  

 

Continuing on, I found Morgan Street cordoned off from 6^th street going north for about 4 blocks.  Lined up behind the barricade were 5 police cars, 4 city trucks, and a fork-lift.  Further down were 2 SAVS vans.  Later a flat-bed arrived with a dumpster.  About10 people were organizing their belongings.  The encampment residents I spoke to had been advised they could go to a shelter.  I said hello to two SAVS women who were talking to them as well.  Six Catholic Charity staff, 5 women and a man, were observing the pack-up from the cement drive beside the abandoned building next to 600 Morgan, both owned by Catholic Charities and surrounded by a chain link fence. 

 

A Press Democrat reporter remarked on the sign I was holding – (Where Can They Go?)  We discussed the number of officers and city trucks. I told him I thought that the City should be spending all the money this operation was costing on social workers, trash bins, and trash pick-up.  He agreed and said, porta potties and water too.  I said they should be providing these things at sanctioned sites and told him about the SAVS Village proposal and how it would cost far less than Los Guilicos or the Finley encampment.  

 

We discussed why the people packing up their things refused to go to a shelter. He said he understood -- the regimentation, the lack of freedom and how that contributed to undermining people’s dignity. We discussed the protracted problems of addiction and mental illness, how living on the streets exacerbated these issues, circling back to the need for social workers and mental health workers.

 

He said he had to leave as he was on a deadline and only had about 45 minutes to write up his article.  He hoped I wouldn’t be mad at him when I read his article.  Why, I asked, because you’re not going to include my perspective?  He said he had to present both sides.  I asked him if his editor controlled what he could write.  He said no, but the subject is ‘nuanced.’ I wondered about the implications of nuanced, if it’s turns out to be comparable to what Edward Said wrote about the phrase ‘complex situation’, how it “too often is a rhetorical signal given … when a grave and immoral complicity with injustice is about to be covered up.”  I guess we’ll see tomorrow.

 

A PD photographer was documenting the trash and the bulldozing into the dumpster.  I asked the reporter -- why are the photos always of the trash?  Why not the portray the humanity of these people, show images that convey the tragedy of packing their belongings into a shopping cart, their tired eyes and worn faces?   He said he saw my point.

 

When he left, I walked up to the Catholic Charities compound.  Two women who had been organizing and packing their things were sitting with their belongings near the abandoned building. I stood nearby, holding my sign.  One of the Catholic Charity women came over to me and said, you’re going to have to move, you’re on private property.  She was neither friendly nor apologetic. I hadn’t realized I wasn’t on the sidewalk.

Cynthia Poten