On Friday, September 28, 2018, the city of Santa Rosa executed a surprise group eviction and whirlwind of destruction of trailers, RVs and 26 tents at Challenger Way. About a dozen police worked the streets with tow trucks, a flatbed, a hazmat truck, an ambulance, a fire engine, and a bulldozer. Activists were there in the aftermath until late in the night feeding the loose group of victims who had hovered or returned to what they had left. We gave out what tents and sleeping bags we could scramble up from local stores, gathering statements of the most gross violations of civil rights I have seen in Santa Rosa. I am shaken and teary still as i write this. Nothing in my experience, since San Francisco mayor Frank Kennedy tossed people’s carts and possessions into slowly moving trash trucks in 1992, compares to this.
Many lost everything. Vans, trailers, and RVs summarily towed away, whether the owner was there or not, whether someone saved worldly goods or not. The typical pattern for the tents was 1) ‘you have an hour’, 2) a return, then ‘you have five minutes’, 3) and then, ‘that’s it, go away or we’ll arrest you’, and what they couldn’t drag and pull and carry away at that moment was seized and destroyed before their eyes with a bulldozer, or by tossing it in a trash truck. HOST, the Catholic Charities team, came through just before the storm like they do, hiding the secret blitzkrieg of what was to come from everyone, in their endless catcall of ‘c’mon, let’s all go to Sam Jones shelter’, a place they almost all avoid, some under pain of death.
The first victim, who is particularly resented by police because of his lifestyle, and because he knows his rights, was stopped at 8:30 am just at the tail end of organizing his things, and was summarily arrested in front of his things for refusal to comply (he was told to leave the day before), and he was taken away. They used his arrest as an excuse to seize and destroy thousands of dollars of worldly goods arrayed on three trailers, ready to go. He said they even threw away what was in his pockets; when I asked him what he had in them. He had been in such a panic of preparation, cramming things into his pockets as he roamed around his place to organize and gather his piles, that he couldn’t tell me.
Throughout the day, others were mostly not arrested, just shoo’ed away at pain of arrest while their personal belongings were destroyed before their eyes. Several rushed back when they heard what was happening, one from going to the bathroom, and were too late, losing everything. A 72 year old grandmother endured laughter when she returned: she had missed what we caught on video, as her tent was dragged across the street and destroyed; she came back to all her goods filthy and scattered across the street, with her brand new tent cut up and tossed. One couple was following orders to get out, had their stuff in neat piles, and lost everything they had while they were arranging a preliminary pile off site, despite leaving a friend to guard it all: laptops, all their clothes and coats and blankets, all their papers. I left them on the side of the road to gather other statements, and they disappeared as the sun set. Where did they go to, with nothing? Three elders who are very sick wandered off into the night, lost to us; they’re so delicate that any of them could die in even modestly cold and windy weather like last night. Where on earth could they have gone to?
Here in the next day, where are my friends now? Were the cops out in force in the night? Did our friends get blankets?
Are they alone out there?
A few, including a few nicer-looking RVs in a row, were left alone, as if Moses had parted the waters, we think because some individual policeman decided to be nice, or because a positive interaction had occurred at some point with them- we don’t know. Think about that: justice was only available with the casual, informal word of a twenty-something cop. The rest suffered at their hands, the less busy ones standing around, casually talking and laughing.
Before some of the victims disappeared, we scrambled our team of activists to get statements, and got perhaps 17. We had three lawyers working furiously on site along with us. These officials and administrators have gone beyond the pale to blatant attacks on the helpless, in the name of optics for the neighbors, in the name of the landlord of the government offices across the street, in the name of ghost stories about leaky RVs.
We will descend on them on Tuesday at city council, at 5 PM. (The county isn’t meeting this week) We will show them what we know about this vengeance done in our name. We will organize other actions. We will read our friend’s statements to them, to the press, to the public, to federal and state and county judges, representatives, and administrators. These Santa Rosa officials and administration chose to do this on the day after the Commission on Human Rights publicized a condemnation of the city and county for neglecting housing for the unsheltered. Ignoring the basic needs of the unsheltered wasn’t enough for these troops; keeping our friends from bathroom and trash services wasn’t enough. They needed to punish our friends for being poor, and casually, wantonly violate their civil rights, all day long, because someone a little higher than them told them they could.
Our friends are gone, as they always are after these scatterings. We get their phone numbers as we can, the phone numbers of relatives; we ask their friends where they are, where they’re going, where they think they might have gone. But we lose them to the winds, to the deadly trails, where they can be hounded more easily as individuals, where not just the police can plunder them. We don’t know when or if we will see them again.
On their way out, two middle-aged lady refugees with nothing remaining eerily told me the same thing separately, with the same vehemence, and almost the same wording: I hate cops now. I didn’t feel this way before, but now I truly hate cops.
I’m deeply ashamed of my government today.
