Whereas, Sniggling Happens

I just spent way too much of my life rooting through 7 recently released city documents concerning "Unauthorized Camping on City Property" looking for the pony they promised, and all I found was manure.

Greg J Nickels has done it again. Another fine act of propaganda backing up a policy of cruelty serving greed.

If you've been overseas for fifteen months and just got back, here's a refresher. Sometime a year or more ago (nobody's quite sure when) Greg Nickels decided the old protocols for clearing homeless people off city land weren't good enough. So he instituted new protocols without telling the public that hired him and pays him, and without telling the city council that has a duty to oversee city affairs. When the public found out, it was only because reports of excessive sweeps prompted resort to the Freedom of Information Act, not because Greg Nickels was suddenly struck by a sense of duty. The information had to be forced from his administration, and details are still missing, and we've got no apologies yet for the trouble of squeezing what little we got out of them.

So anyway, people found out what the new protocols were and a lots got angry, and demanded answers. So Greg Nickels arranged for them to vent at city department heads. People packed a big room at the Seattle Center and one after another stood up and voiced outrage at the homeless sweeps procedures. Nickels himself didn't have the decency to be there. No apology for that either.

It was part of a belated "comment period." The comment period ended almost as soon as it began, time passed, and now, New and Improved Homeless Harassment!

It's "better" because it takes longer! That's the whole improvement. It's like "Please don't run me over with that truck!" "How about if I take three times as long to run you over with this truck?" "Oh yes!! Thank you, kind sir."

NO THANK YOU!! The whole new protocol starts out with a bunch of Whereas-s that put out the same lie that the old protocols put out. The city is doing enough to end homelessness to justify cracking down on campers. IT IS NOT.

The big propaganda: The city will add 20 new shelter beds right away.

Brilliant. That's a whole 1.7% increase in shelter beds, in Seattle. The King County Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness, which the city has bragged endlessly about signing on with, requires King County's shelter bed count frozen at 2006 numbers, so I suppose those 20 beds will have to come from Renton or Burien. Meanwhile, January's One Night Count found over 2600 people sleeping outside. If they all had to use the city's generous new shelter beds, they'd each get to lie down 11 minutes every day.

You'll be hearing about the city's new definition of encampment that comes along with its New and Improved Homeless Harassment. That's because it defines a homeless encampment using such exacting legalistic language as "identifiable area" and camps being within "approximately" 300 feet.

I can't resist sniggling like the nerdy mathematician I am and pointing out that any one pair of nearby campers in Seattle, combined with any other one pair of nearby campers anywhere else in Seattle, would meet the city's idiotic definition of an encampment, because the rule only says each camper has to be close to one other in the group, not close to all in the group, and Seattle itself is an identifiable area. (So's planet Earth.) And, oh yes, two pair makes four, which is more than three.

This says it all: The Human Services Department ("Investing in People") has provided directions to the Westbridge storage facility, where those homeless people will have to go to retrieve their confiscated belongings. The protocol specifically excludes car campers from the procedures it lists. But the directions are solely for drivers.

What a failure to imagine the real lives and hardships of the people they are abusing.