Seattle Crime Reports : Seattle Crime Blog : Seattle, Washington

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News today of further progress in cleaning up Seattle's seedy underbelly:

Seattle city workers expected to have a greenbelt on the west slope of Queen Anne Hill cleared of homeless encampments within a day. They found more stuff than they expected. [...] Within the first few hours of the city-mandated cleanup on Wednesday, crews filled a garbage truck with 4 ½ tons of debris before starting on a second truck.

Combatting homelessness in a city where it is practically encouraged requires an iron fist approach. We may not be taking as many steps in that direction as we could, but the swift action towards eliminating encampments that we've seen recently shows that city is making progress.

Of course, there are complaints...and they aren't just coming from urban idealist Tim Harris:

"Homeless sweeps are not the answer," said the Rev. David Bloom, co-chairman of the local Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness.

"There's no place for people to go, and they're just trying to survive," he said. "To wipe out these encampments when people don't have a place to go is ludicrous. It's not humane."

Having a "place to go" is by no means a guarantee in our country; that's something you have to earn by contributing in one way or another to the greater society (though how long it will take some of us to realize this remains to be seen). And making political decisions based on how "humane" their outcomes are is a surefire way to hinder urban progress.

There's a camp out at City Hall on June 8 aimed at protesting Seattle's approach to stopping homelessness. Let's hope some reason-minded folk take it upon themselves to make an appearance and show Mayor Nickels that not everyone in Seattle is ungrateful for the city's attempts to make our community livable. Hell, I may even drop by myself.

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We at SCB seem to always write about situations where emotion overtakes reason, perhaps because that weakness is prevalent even in a libertarian haven like Seattle. Today is no different, as the news media and blogosphere are alive with discussion over Seattle's aggressive new plan to eradicate homeless camps.

The basics of the plan, as seen in the P.I.:

• The city's Human Services Department drafted the protocol following criticism starting last summer of unannounced sweeps of encampments, which are considered public safety and health problems because of drinking, drug use, garbage, rats, fires and lack of toilets.
• The proposal says the city generally would give at least 48 hours notice before clearing a camp and would try to connect homeless people with services and shelters, though it could deny notice and referrals if it suspects "illegal activities" or a public health hazard.
• The city would store certain personal items, such as prescription drugs or identification cards, for retrieval for up to 60 days.
• The protocol would cover all city property and departments. The city would respond to complaints or upon finding an encampment, and could deputize noncity employees to carry out the rules.

Sounds fair to us. But this has been a point of contention here for some time now. Last week SLOG published a post encouraging readers to attend a public forum on the matter, which occurred at Seattle Center last night. We couldn't go...but Tim Harris of Real Change, who has been extremely critical of the plan at his blog, has posted his take on the evening's events.

Not surprisingly, only one courageous voice - that of local blogger Craig Thompson, whose humorous spat with Harris is certainly worth reading - stood up in support of the plan. Take it away, Tim:

Only one person had spoken in favor of the Mayor's policy, and it was nutbar guerrilla columnist Craig Thompson, spinning his tales of criminality, murder, and the infiltration of the heroin trade into Seattle's homeless encampments, and how we need to destroy people's camps in order to save them from this certain menace.

Harris' anger towards Thompson seems to stem from the latter's moving editorial recently published in the P.I., which details the "criminality, murder and infiltration of the heroin trade" that Harris so casually dismisses. But Thompson has hit the nail on the head: while perhaps homeless people are not to blame or be persecuted for their living circumstances, the situations that inevitably arise as a result of their congregation in illegal camps have negative outcomes (both for the homeless folks trying to survive and the rest of Seattle):

The camp attracts drugs. It may start out a non-violent place but it will not stay one. Nearly all homeless camps I've stood in have signs of drug use -- crack pipes, syringes. They contain weapons, usually knives. [...] If sweeps end, camps will be as violent as they were in the Jungle in 2003, but on Queen Anne, the slopes of West Seattle and Magnolia, in Ballard and Ravenna Park. Criminals linked to hardcore drugs will take over -- this is already happening along Dearborn, around Chinatown, downtown uphill from 5th Avenue.

We feel bad for Tim Harris. So caught up in idealism and the false sense of moral superiority that some of us get from "helping" the oppressed, Harris seems unwilling - or perhaps unable - to accept the painfully obvious truth. No wonder he didn't take Thompson up on the offer of  a guided tour through "The Jungle."

Maybe we're just heartless bastards here at SCB, but we think the mayor's plan makes perfect sense. And for once, it seems like someone else in the local community agrees with us.