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Do sweeps of homeless encampments work? Or, as one aid worker put it, do they mostly scatter vulnerable people in “diaspora of misery”?
The answer increasingly appears to be “yes.” To both questions.
Two years ago, Seattle went through a difficult reckoning. Camps of tents and makeshift shelters filling sidewalks, parks and greenbelts had grown exponentially. So had the level of violent crime associated with them.
As one City Council member put it in the violent spring of 2022: “It was easy to say ‘oh, leave the poor encampments alone,’ when there weren’t very many of them. And when they weren’t leading to this.”
By March 2022, 40 percent of the police homicide unit’s caseload was related to killings at homeless encampments. The camps were seeing an average of almost four “shots fired” incidents per week.
This past week, the city reported great news. In the first three months of 2024, encampment shootings had dropped to just one per week.
What happened in the past two years to accomplish this was, love them or hate them, sweeps. Nobody in power likes to call them that — the official jargon is “resolving priority encampments.” But in the end, workers for the city’s “Unified Care Team” tell everybody to move out and then clear the site.
Bruce Drager, of a volunteer group called Greenlake Homeless Advocates, calls them “Bruce Harrell’s sweeps of impunity,” after the Seattle mayor.
Drager has been going around for a few years helping people navigate encampment removals. He gets to know them well enough to compile complete lists of the residents, documenting what happens to them afterward.
He says a small number of removals work out OK for the residents. Mainly, when social workers spend weeks or months doing outreach and offering everybody housing.
But many are done quicker, at camps where there is judged to be an imminent safety hazard. Then, offers of shelter are made only “whenever possible.”
The city says there aren’t enough shelter beds. It’s a triage situation, Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington said. At some camps, the crime concern can outweigh the push to shelter people.
As a result, homeless people often get scattered, as Drager has documented in a series of after-action reports. “These displaced individuals, many times, end up migrating to other established homeless encampments where they are commonly rejected as invaders and forced to move on to more remote and perilous locations,” he says.
The city acknowledges this, in so many numbers. City Council President Sara Nelson said, “Only about 15 percent take the shelter.”
So the sweeps are dislocating. At the same time, there’s little question the city is successfully disrupting the use of camps as fencing grounds for stolen goods, as chop shops for cars or as drug dealing centers.
In the first quarter of 2022, there were 40 shootings in the camps, leading the then-chairman of the city’s homelessness committee, Andrew Lewis, to dub them lawless “magnets of crime.” This first quarter, that figure was down to 15.
The sweeps are doing a poor job of lifting people up off the streets. The same sweeps are doing a great job to bring down crime. In so doing, they likely are making life less violent, on balance, for homeless people still living in camps.
But will “stop the sweeps” activists, including those still in public office, acknowledge that the sweeps have also clearly done some good?
Back in 2022, I asked Lewis why he had decided to risk progressive blowback to talk about how dangerous the camps are.
“I think we haven’t been entirely honest about the public safety impacts of this issue for some time,” Lewis said then. “It feels like Seattle is at a pivot point right now and can stand to hear these facts.”
It turned out he was right about that — at least about what a blind spot this has long been.
He was voted out of office last fall, the only Seattle City Council incumbent to lose at the ballot box.
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