Before a Storm on the Joe Rodota Trail

We received a lovely set of donations from individuals, and our nonprofit, SAVS, was able to shop today for the unsheltered people living on the Joe Rodota Trail. We went after exploring in detail with camp residents what to buy.

It was a strange experience. Mostly, it was what it would’ve been like as a kid being given a thousand dollars and told to empty a toy store in 15 minutes. I wanted to live stream to everyone I know and let them watch me thump tarps into the shopping cart, get people applauding.

But the other emotion that dominated the shopping experience was worry. I’d spoken to many people about what to buy, so although I knew I would miss some important things, most of the items were easy. But how could SAVS distribute things fairly? We were having to say no to so many needs, and make sure we say no to the right ones. We cannot get enough for everyone, so there is a sifting and choosing process with vital donations that isn’t necessarily easy. Don’t give too much to your friends, even if you know they need it, because nepotism sucks sucks sucks. Some tents look awful but they’re fantastic in the rain, others look fantastic and are awful in the rain; so what do you do when someone asks you for a 50 dollar tarp when the one they have looks fine? What side do you start giving away on? It’s all enough to make you want to take two xanex and start tomorrow, after the flood, when you can plan better.

Because we have to focus on a coming major rainstorm, I also worried because I couldn’t buy enough plastic tent covers and tarps without digging into other needs. Happily, Home Depot gave us a 27% discount, and we were able to fulfill roughly half the demand in a quarter-mile highly populated section of the Trail- much better than I though we would. We also were able to work as a team to assess need so that the 25% or so of the camp we were able to cover included many of the particularly needy.

With 3-4 inches of rain expected in a 36 hour period, I expect the Joe Rodota Trail to be a complete mess tomorrow this time. I tried to warn as many people as I could, as bluntly as I could, that they would need to move or their tent would be flooded. There are several hurdles in being this kind of herald in this particular place, without a government worker beside you, clad in something impressively orange. Some can’t understand your words or language, some can’t remember what you said ten minutes later, some are sleeping, some are gone, some “have been through this a hundred times.” Some need to deal with it just before it becomes their throbbing, screaming-siren emergency. The main overall tack is to be pleasant and very blunt, and name deadlines if you have them (which we do.) Thankfully, some were able to instantly understand how those swales they live in will gather to themselves a great deal of that 3-4 inches of rainfall in 36 hours. About ten of the 40 or so worst potential tragedies seemed committed to moving their abode, though it is almost always a large task. That felt like a minor victory.

It angers me to realize that even the most alert and productive people there did not know that Santa Rosa has had advisory flash flood warnings for tomorrow for a day now. Some hopped to it as soon as I told them. Why is it up to SAVs, a random charity group, to pass such vital information on? The city and county are perfectly aware of the weather and the flash flood advisory- why isn’t there someone in their homelessness and/or Parks and/or Police or other public safety entity tasked with preventing a large encampment from suffering a largely unnecessary crisis through lack of basic knowledge? Why didn’t a jeep come through three times today with a bullhorn and attitude and advice? Where is the sump pump crew? This is a potential emergency that could ruin the lives of 100 people or more! People are residing where it is common in the winter to have 12 inches of standing water, sometimes much more than 12 inches of water. Did no one warn of this? If they did, where is the implied mitigants to this coming heartache and disaster? For we are sure it will be a disaster, we just don’t know how universal it will be for the residents.

The heartbreaker for me, the back end of my worry at the store, came when people asked if we could pay for a few 2X4′s or 4X4′s and I had to say no. No, you can’t have ten bucks worth of wood today, which could hoist you above the flood waters. I decided to focus on tarps and other basics. Only one fellow had mentioned wood; I blew him off. Later, as I toured the camp and gave out tarps and plastic, I saw how much good just $100 of wood would’ve been for 10 families, so I’ll try to get some for the morning.

People get confused about investing in safe, healthy tent homes. Think of the power you have in the lives of human beings! To be able to radically transform the lives of suffering people with 5 or 10 dollars worth of wood. That is a super simple point that should be emphasized in our struggle to raise money and consciousness about the plight of the unsheltered. A little money, especially when thought of on a per-head basis (50 dollars, 100 hundred dollars), is a miracle worker for many.

Lots of people, perhaps even most people, though, are annoyed at the very notion of help because it “only encourages them.” These are the rock bottom gang, as in, “Let them hit rock bottom and they’ll do fine or get what they deserve, either of which is fine.” Let’s set this aside for our purposes here as an ironic, useful-only-in-spurts, worthy, but complex point. It’s the reservations about safe homes felt by those who want to help that are interesting. One flavor is, “We can do so much better! Why can’t we buy them things that will make a difference for a long time, that they can keep? Don’t buy tarps or plastic tent cover, which will be nearing uselessness in an average of 3-6 months- don’t buy batteries and tape and non-recyclable handwarmer crap!” The answer to their question is that in addition to basic needs that must be fulfilled (dryness/health), we certainly can buy those noble things that last and count- it just adds up to a lot of money. A nice snow suit, for instance, or a great tent- sure! Right after we ensure health and safety. Asking this question probably means that we’ve never had a disaster happen because we couldn’t afford 20 cent AAA batteries.

Another flavor is, “But they can’t stay where they are, so why would we work hard to make it comfortable for them to stay- doesn’t that only encourage them to dig in?” Sometimes this flavor throws in a budget argument about spending on this disaster place versus a place to come. Anyone can sympathize a little with this outlook while you watch someone build a robust cantilevered bridge/platform on the Joe Rodota Trail, where people shouldn’t be living. But the answer to this question in this particular case, and often, is quite simple: we should do it because making safe, healthy housing means exactly doing a robust platform and a dry, warm comfortable home atop it. If you go back and read this flavor’s question again, try to see that this is the very same question the rock bottom gang is asking, couched more pleasantly.

Another flavor is oh well. This is perhaps the most common. It’s part of liberalism’s unwritten rules that we must volunteer, so liberals need lots of excuses to not volunteer, far more than conservatives do. Here’s a faceful of the ones I hear: There’s a lot of pain in the world, Scott; We’re all doing what we can on all kinds of fronts; we’re facing a strong enemy, and it’s bullshit, just like the rest of everywhere I turn; we aren’t going to make shit for difference today; one day at a time; the need will always be there, and I have pressing personal interests and needs that are just as ethically defensible, just as vital; You have to leave a message with the government to do that, we can’t do that; we don’t have the money to make a difference right now.

The answer to all that is a combination of so what and no you don’t. Almost no one has more important things to do than be out in a village of destitute people, making sure perfectly valid humans don’t lose their health and possessions to a grave flood.

It’s good to have the residents be so much more visible. Most are very social beings, so the volunteer/donor hubbub both energizes and calms them (there are exceptions, but most who aren’t social are spread out further along the Trail.) There were donors and organizations streaming through the village all day and into the evening, out to help in various ways, then back to their homes and hearths. It is heartwarming. As an organizer, it’s a little odd because there were many more private parties than organizations (isn’t that cool?? And weird. Coolweird.) They say things that try to sound at least somewhat like, “I’m probably never coming back, I just had 150 dollars so we made tomales and we’re giving them out.” Most are latinx, typically in families, which makes me grin and want to genuflect like los catolicas in appreciation. It’s inspiring to see their lovely, delighted children handing out food and important whatnot. I watch their backs while they leave and wonder at the lives meandering through here, a mild and steady river of other humans so casually and practically generous, so unafraid and cheerful, despite all the bad press and prejudice and mess and inconvenience.

“Mama likes to give out free pizza every other Sunday at 11.”
“We’re just concerned citizens.”
“Would you like some free marijuana? Lots of people could use a little high right about now!”
“We’re giving away women’s purses.” [Seeing my interest in what they were doing, one of them leaned in and intoned to me, "To women."]

They’re very happy to help, but you can see their reluctance to get involved in the day-to-day of it all. There are emergencies involved, you see- the flat world ends there, it all falls off into dark and horror. It’s easiest to come to the edge of the precipice, drop it in, and go home. I introduce SAVS and, because they are mostly good liberals, I can see them instantly forming mental excuses to not help in any other way from giving out their hot dogs. For many of them, introducing myself is a little like seeing Chucky shuffle their way.

As individuals- especially as at least somewhat saintly individual donors to a tent encampment- we should be generous about the value of their gifts. Only government workers should be made guilty for not helping more. But that can’t change the fact of a dire lack of Sonoma county interest and basic care of their indigent. It doesn’t change that there should be roughly 10 times the people doing what SAVS does on the Trail, addressing basic life services. We’re not particularly community-minded in Sonoma county with the unsleltered yet, despite our riches and leisure time. And we’re not well-informed. Both those things will have to change, and it’s our job to change them.

The residents aren’t confused at all about how to spend money on them. There’s mostly one flavor of resident, and they want a safe, dry, healthy home. Their question is, “Can you help this warmer, dryer, and safer here, or show me somewhere better?”

Two Zeppelins Refueling

Tucker Carlson was clearer than he’s been about his views. 

Mr. Carlson is watched daily by 3 million deeply conservative families and individuals. He’s part of a three-hour nightly hammering of popular conservative talk shows. Roughly 82% of those viewers have been supportive of President Trump; the rest endure Trumpism respectfully, though with occasional strained politeness and disgust. Viewers include most of the decision makers and strategists of the party. Carlson longs for his isolationalist/nationalist, ruralhero, Right-Libertarian America, along with about 4% of the rest of conservatives. They love what Trump was trying to do, want even more, and they’re irritated about poor execution.

They’re tolerated because they don’t actively oppose Trump, a rare group that I’d guess at under 1% of conservatives. Never and Ever Trump may agree to keep him there, because he takes exactly zero time each show to castigate Mr. Trump for anything serious. In fact, he goes out of his way to beg the world to listen to his President, so that he is viewed as a great supporter of the President. Dances like this between sides of the party will become a bit strained, the music a little frenetic.

Two zeppelins bump oddly during a fuel transfer. We see a puff of smoke. They start to spin, connected. Most of us watching cheer, a bit unbelieving. Some watch and rage, or clutch at their children or a lover, hoping one or the other doesn’t burn and fall, that at least one is left.

Retaking of Camp Remembrance Fails: More Destruction of All Worldly Possessions

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

NOVEMBER 29, 2018

SANTA ROSA CA

CONTACT: KATHLEEN FINIGAN, HOMELESS ACTION! (707)480-6201

  

HOMELESS RETAKING OF CAMPSITE IN ROSELAND FAILS

Threatened with Multiple Serious Charges, Sent into Storm; Belongings under 101 Overpasses Later Destroyed

The attempted retaking of Camp Remembrance in the Roseland neighborhood of Santa Rosa, CA by a group of about 30 homeless people ended after three days.  On Tuesday afternoon, nine police, many park rangers, and other county and agency officials stood over campers for hours as they disassembled their shelters and hauled loads of their things away. Most moved to a nearby library and waited under the eaves, discussing where to go and hoping the weather would change. Some eventually made their way back to the 101 overpasses downtown, hoping to pass part of the winter there, like last year.

The Camp Remembrance property is owned by the county, who claims they cleared the camp to begin construction. Yet two nearby businesses that also have to be closed still operate as usual, and both plan to stay open an estimated six months longer. Steve Singleton, a leader of the effort, said, “They told us they would throw the book at us, that we’d get all kinds of charges if we stayed. We didn’t mind trespassing charges, but we can’t go to jail for a long time.” Others agreed.

Singleton has PTSD, and shouldn’t go into shelters; others have severe anxiety, bipolar disease, or refuse to go into Sam Jones shelter because of bad experiences. Homeless Action! estimates that about 40% of those on the streets should not be in warehouse-type shelters because of physical and/or mental disabilities. Police insist instead that everyone should go into a shelter– which is the tenuous legal position the​ city and county are taking in the federal lawsuit filed against them by local homeless people earlier this year. One police manager told a camper he could get “an upper bunk” at the shelter to take care of his mental condition, or he could ask for a “partition.”

Jennielynn Holmes of Catholic Charities said there was space at Sam Jones shelter for all the campers who wanted to go there, but some who went were rejected.  Rose, a 72 year old Native American woman, got to the shelter, but was told she would have to go across town the next day to the Catholic Charities intake office to apply for admission. Rose, crying and angry, got help from her daughter to push and drag the bin containing her belongings to under Highway 101 at College Avenue for the night.

In public statements, county officials accused activists of fomenting the campers’ action, but activists found out about it after the move had already started. Some volunteers drove back from Paradise, CA, where Homeless Action! Members were helping with fire refuges, to help with the police and the support needed during sweeps.  Homeless Action! co-founder Adrienne Lauby said, ”The county doesn’t want the public to know that desperate, angry homeless people planned and did this all by themselves, just like they’ve done in Oakland and San Jose. The truth doesn’t jive with their constant lie that all their homelessness problems are caused by a small group of crazy activists.”

The day after the sweep, Rose left her purse, camping gear, clothes, personal identification and papers, and jewelry in her bin, stored neatly off the walkway under the 101 overpass, while she ate and did chores. At about 1 PM, witnesses saw city police seize everything she owned and take it away in a truck. Steve Singleton lost all his possessions while he was gone in the same way, as did several others. Sergeant Jonathan Wolf of downtown homeless enforcement did not return calls as of the next morning asking for information. Police administration said later in the afternoon after the seizure that they had no record that the city seized and destroyed anyone’s belongings, and they didn’t know where anything was or if anything could be saved. Campers searched with little hope in nearby dumpsters, in the slim hope they might contain their things.

“What else can they do to me?”, asked Singleton. ”Just send us someplace  you won’t steal our things, where you won’t cite or arrest us just for being alive.”

Contact: Kathleen Finigan  (707)480-6201

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Explanation and Note to Jonathan Wolf

A friend of mine, Jonathan Wolf, just turned on me. Attacked my character, accused and intimated I was engaging in conspiracy and immoral acts, and was in general barky and babyish. If we had done a logic dance-off at any point, first graders would’ve laughed at the way he was thinking. Right after we hadn’t seen each other in awhile, he told me I had 3 minutes before I was going to be messed with majorly. He caught me by surprise. I was like OK OK, YO– so that doesn’t work for me. So he gives me 10 minutes. Then he gives me 3 again. Then 30, In two plus hours, I was castigated, accused, and had to endure an assertive rudeness. All while I was forced to do a lot of hard work. In the rain, which came down in pails. At the time, I tried to restrict myself to comments about how rude he was being; I lost it a little here and there, mostly about the rudeness itself. 

With most friends, that means a pause in their usual routine of hanging out and playing pool. But our friendship began from our work relationship at encampments that he’s scattering. He is the police officer in charge on site; I represent the campers and their needs.

If it goes well with Jonathan, we are clear and helpful for the suffering people we impose upon. They get the time they need to move, and the police help with the this-and-that people need, like storage and transportation and phone calls. Other government agencies are involved healthily. If it goes poorly, as it did yesterday, many ill events can occur for others.

So when he turned on me yesterday, it hurt my feelings, and scared me for my friends. It wasn’t just toward me; Jonathan Wolf turned his back on others he formerly treated with dignity and respect.

I want my friend Jonathan Wolf back: his politeness, his politesse, his clarity and consistency. I don’t care what he’s done. It’s true that he destroyed all worldly goods of at least 4 people, and destroyed many other’s people goods partially on September 28, 2018. I’m sorry that I was obligated to say to you in public that we hold the police severally and individually liable when such acts are perpetrated, and I’m sorry that I have to repeat it occasionally. You don’t have to take it so seriously. As you said, people “threaten” you like that all the time. Why let it affect our relationship? I didn’t mean anything by it; we just need you to stop that blatant disrespect for private property and due process, whether or not your bosses have figured out how stupid and dishonest it is.

We have a good relationship still, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t take the things you told me yesterday seriously. Governments and their idiots come and go. I know you to be a good man, and temperate.

For the sake of the poor whom we both serve, please accord us the dignity and respect our humanity deserves. We will be better able to get the basic life services we need, and you will do your master’s bidding with far more safety and far less pain. Yesterday, we were the enemy; while we worked, scattered from unused public land, you and yours stood a few yards distant for hours, in clumps, catching up and relaxing. Tomorrow, be our friend again; help us again.

The Decimation of Challenger Way

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.

Sonoma County’s Encampment Secrecies: An Abuse of Democracy

We received informal word on Tuesday, 5/8/18, from low-level people in and around government, that the approximately 70 homeless people on the Joe Rodota Trail will not be evicted in the near-term. We have no idea how solid this information is, not do we know what “near-term” means. Maybe we have a week or two, or a month. Maybe more.
This is how Sonoma county often works. They have put up undated eviction notices on the Joe Rodota Trail, but assure us via carefully planned innuendo they don’t mean it. It lets them make cruel, expedient policy decisions, and then either act on them when public attention wavers, or change policy in reaction to media attention. It’s a lawyer-infected approach that relies completely on backroom conversations kept secret from the public. Even officials sympathetic to our cause are pressured to be silent on policy discussions and direction, in the name of legal liability. They have perfected this approach since the slaughter of Andy Lopez by Deputy Erick Gelhaus in 2014 created tens of millions of dollars of liability for the county.
We have over 5 months of official silence on encampments by the county and Santa Rosa in all public meetings of our leaders. A half-dozen major evictions have occurred during that time, without a word in official public meetings that even acknowledges they occurred. During that time,  many, many furious discussions and many cruelties toward hundreds of people have been managed outside the public eye, all accomplished via this technique of avoiding legal liability.
Our officials mock the notion of democracy. We wait in vain so far for a single public official to stand and proclaims it as such.
As of late 2017, the encampment problem was no longer managed by the county supervisors or city council members, but by a small cadre of government lawyers and  consultant lawyers who meet in closed (secret) session with officials to get permission for their actions. Because of the occasional timeliness requirements, and inconvenience to busy, uninformed leaders, this practice has led over time to the odd need for us to work through these lawyers on the smallest of details, cutting leadership out entirely. We resent this mockery of democracy greatly, and are desperate to have these negotiations with our leaders directly, via agendized public discussion, the way intended by America’s system of government.
We are working exclusively with a county lawyer now to negotiate a portapotty for the 70 people on the Joe Rodota Trail, because no official in government we’ve contacted– county, parks, or city– has the courage or sense on their own to protect the park, the public, or the constitutional rights of those with no other legal place to live.
Did you get that? We’re asking a lawyer if volunteers can pay for a portapotty for 70 people with nowhere else to go.

A Sensible Place to Stand

The people seem resigned and uninterested in their eviction from the Joe Rodota Trail, which starts as early as tomorrow at 2:30. The life in community is infinitely better than being scattered, and they will squeeze every hour from it they can. I’m curious how the police will handle that attitude. I’m sure the paddywagon and the sheer breadth of agencies involved in yesterday’s raid in south Santa Rosa were supposed to impress. Yet I don’t know anyone on the trail who has moved anything away, excepting only a few sneaks who have been at it a little. If we’d've harangued and banged on a can all up and down the trail, I don’t think it would’ve made a difference.

However, I have heard many talking and asking about where to go. 25 years of looking at homelessness, the questions still floor me: that a day from now can be so unknown, with worldly goods, relationships, and health turned into matters of chance. I tell them this week that I don’t know any place to go; that we may not have any trucks, depending on how many people show up and contribute to help. 

If situations escalate, our officials may behave so erroneously that one must drape bodies across things, and impede their police’s intent. We part ways respectfully with their police management then, in view of our difference in interests, and meet as enemies who know and respect one another.  We can keep communicating about some aspects of it, if safety or risk is involved.

The philosopher and social scientist Michael Nagler teaches that the point in a conflict when one engages in civil disobedience is a personal thing, but we can often recognize together how the madness has continued too long to stand aside. The first part of that lesson, the personal nature of the decision, has resonated with me for weeks. I’ve taken a tide that lapped at my feet a scant hour ago. I am moved to act, and to urge others to. 

The second part of Michael’s lesson is that we can see our way to being moved often at roughly the same time, and act together seemingly all at once. We’re not talking about a great many of us gained to the fight, per se; having 12 instead of 6 opens up all kinds of avenues in many situations. We can see our way together to an act of defense in these cruel evictions. When volunteers become close to our friends, and learn of their lives, we feel together with them the human costs of bad ideas reigning supreme in encampment policy. We can easily link arms with our sons and daughters and aunties, and find a sensible place to stand.

Evicting Homeless Disabled People- Yesterday and Tomorrow

Sonoma County’s Sheriff’s Office came in strong at an old encampment yesterday. It had doubled in size after our eviction at Last Chance village. The eviction occurred after I believe every single soul who had just moved to the encampment had left, and did their best to remove their things responsibly.
The deputies knew they had left- had cruised the site early that morning. Even so, the event was worth a paddywagon, I believe six deputy cruisers eventually, a CHP, and a ranger of some sort. Later, a fire truck and an ambulance,
It was getting warm by then. I thought they might’ve let a few bicycle snack vendors know, to get them popsicles and pork rinds. A little media-sized parade, in garish, loud colors. I wasn’t on site, but I understand and can see from the video that it was a claim-the-territory tour, a false eviction (so far), a murky arrest, and an arguably predictable injury.
The old-timers on that site had kindly allowed the newcomers to try their hand there, knowing it might yield a raid.That kind allowance was made five days ago.
The Sheriff should plan and allocate that common ambulance to the site of evictions in advance, now that it’s been called for with about half the major evictions. Get it out there– no mistakes. Then, as you do Sonoma County budgeting this summer, remember the pictures we’ll show you, remember how much it cost to keep those boots on the ground, that helo in the air, your managers juggling agencies and vehicles and ancillary services at your behest. Note and financially evaluate how easy it was to re-prioritize that helo, and those boots, and those suddenly-needed services to that site, all well above patrol and normal labor and standby needs for real emergencies.
One law enforcement person was explicit in his intention to take advantage of the scattering by questioning people in the areas of the evictions. Eight or more of the Last Chance alumni have been arrested so far, out of the perhaps 70 there at the end of the encampment.
Heartless and expensive, with no respect for human dignity. Sonoma County treats its dogs better than this. The county’s lawyers churn, and despair of justifying this fool of a Sheriff’s Office, young men on a romp. Mark Essick, as the head of Sheriff Operations, is responsible for yesterday’s eviction. He is currently favored to win the Sheriff’s election.
We hope that cost will teach the county what mercy should. I hope they learn the lesson over the coming month, so budgeting season is fruitful. County staff should prepare the coming year’s homelessness budget by listing the fully allocated expense of each anticipated event like this. Assume a dose of known unknowns, and unknown unknowns, mostly in law, health, and emergency-related expenses, and add them. Add the environmental costs of fecal and urine and garbage pollution in random waterways and byways in Sonoma County, and the medical costs associated with unnecessary poor sanitation. Finally, add the unknown costspeople being chained to and across things.
The accountants will neglect the social costs to disparate neighborhoods, as usual; neglect the distraction and embarrassment of leadership. Mostly, they will neglect the untellable cost the Sheriff’s Office creates in the lives of my friends, their families, and their charities. My friends are bandied about like betting sticks. All of them had a challenge to live acceptably in Last Chance village– now, their lives are a nightmare. Some of my friends have been evicted two more times after the Last Chance eviction a week ago. Some have been arrested, to my knowledge on bullshit or minor charges.  These are people who have families, friends, things, hobbies, trash, and bathroom needs. Their lives press in from all sides. Close as I am to see it, their pain and the effects of that pain in their lives is a clear and deep cost to them and those who love them.
Accountants may neglect that cost; we cannot, and neither may our elected officials. The stories are pathetic or worse. The man who missed a shelter bed, who didn’t have two dollars to charge his phone on a neighbor’s gas charger, so he couldn’t find out if he’d been left a message that he had a bed (he had; he missed it.) The woman who throws herself between fighting friends, knowing that neither will hit a woman. The man who struggles to lurch his small family from squat to squat while working– too proud to accept help, then forced to accept help, then leaving things behind. The former counselors, the PTSD, the surges of community anxiety that flows over into their lives, the lives of their marriages. The elderly, mentally ill, or the anxious, who can’t get simple attentions or basic shelter, but can be corked off on occasional ambulance rides during a personal mayhem, initiated for them by government action.
——-
Now, the campground on the Joe Rodota Trail immediately behind Last Chance is bigger than Last Chance was at the end. It’s a worse nightmare in about seventy ways, though people are being remarkably clean. No bathrooms offered by public health or anyone else, public or private, for all those people, going on a week. An eviction notice has gone up, and they intend to come in after Friday at 2:30 PM. Yesterday, there were 42 tents, probably about 80 people there. They took months to plan and negotiate the Last Chance eviction; this bigger eviction was ordered two days ago, and it starts tomorrow.
Stop this madness.

Letter on Sonoma County Homeless Evictions to Supervisor Hopkins

Below is a letter to an allied supervisor in Sonoma County, and an administrator in charge of much of the count’s real estate. It was sent almost two weeks ago, when there was still over three weeks before the still-planned eviction of about 120 tent villagers in Roseland. Two dozen or so have been spoken for as having a shelter or other bed. I have not received a response in this request to address that 75% or so not getting a shelter bed or other bed. To my knowledge, none of us have received any insight into the government’s perspective on these remaining of their subjects since then.

 

Dear Supervisor Hopkins and Ms. Van Vliet,

We’ve provided you a list of problems that camp residents told us they have with using shelter services, edited only for clarity; some of their related complaints are at the bottom. The list gives a sense of the breadth of their perceived obstacles and problems, but also hints at places we might improve the process for some of the residents, and conversations we need to have.

Good Progress

At our meeting with the City’s nonprofit working to transition villagers, we all agreed to attempt to work together well, to see this effort through as best we can for the villagers. Jennielynn Holmes has agreed in principle that the HOST team will work more actively with Homeless Action! and the other support crew and activists, to ensure the best chance of cooperation with residents, and so we can get shelter capacity used as much as practicable. Seven of us who are experienced with village residents have volunteered to provide go-between or any other support we can; we’ve proposed pairing up with HOST team members to work together effectively, particularly within the village itself. Other volunteers have committed to helping with transportation, packing, and any other needs as residents are placed. CC and HA! will discuss and arrange our partnership in our weekly meeting.

An Illegal Presence

Surely all of us– government, activists, volunteers, residents and their families– are frustrated and sad that shelter and very temporary housing are all that are realistically available for 80-90% of village residents. It’s no doubt crazy-making for all of us that, even if we could convince many residents to go to the shelter, we only have beds for a minority. As usual, there isn’t enough money to go around for high-cost, permanent housing; our at-risk must again be passed over for more persuasive claims.

This was a bitter enough elixir for the villagers. It was especially hard for them when, at our status meeting on Monday, March 12, CDC and CC were once again anxious to gloss and spin those facts. The official response to the deep frustrations of the villagers was not believable plans in face of the hard realities. Right after articulating a hope of placing 10 or so of about 130 in permanent housing, we heard a familiar reiteration of how hard all work on their behalf; that a great deal of money is being spent; how the navigation center is pulling precious resources from elsewhere; how no stone is left unturned; and how every opportunity will be exploited.

I hope staff will soon realize how dissonant and surreal and maddening it feels, for villagers who have nothing to hear that roughly $2,000 per head will have been spent between late Feb and late April on their behalf. It was left to residents, after the familiar declamations, to highlight the truth: when temporary housing is gone in late April or May, it will again be illegal for our friends to stay anywhere more than an hour or two. It will be again be illegal to lay their head down to sleep. They will again need to find places during the day that they can hide every night. They will again carry all their belongings everywhere they go, or suffer them stolen or seized.

An Unprepared County

This sad chain of circumstance is why it was so upsetting when Ms. Van Vliet stated flatly that “the county” was “not prepared” to sanction villages. Supervisor Hopkins, we will all, activists and villagers, work unceasingly to “prepare” your Board to sanction our friends’ presence as lawful. This spring, we will demand, as creatively and loudly and uncomfortably as we can, that the Board gain the courage and sense to stop its cat-and-mouse machinations you described and decried in your recent open letter to Homeless Action! We demand that the Board face the county’s prima facie massive potential liability for personal losses and health costs incurred by our friends as a direct result of the Board’s careless, unconstitutional cruelty.

Well-run villages do not need to be perfect; they only need to be much better than other options, as they’ve proven to be in Portland and many other locales in the West. Sanctioned, modestly-funded villages will offer many significant improvements over the unplanned village in Roseland, and will dramatically reduce the county’s overall costs of homelessness:

lower public safety expenditures
fewer emergency service calls
far lower county liability/tort risk
consistent, high quality mental health services
highly efficient initiation, assessment and tracking by all service providers
far fewer assaults, thefts, and trespassing
far better insulation from gang activity and influence
far better job and volunteer pipeline management
far lower sanitation health risks
far lower environmental risks and costs

Most important, the synergistic benefits of living within supportive, organized communities like Last Chance Remembrance far outweigh the negatives of communal risks like STDs, skipped chores, and shouting matches. Sonoma county sanctioned villages will save lives, promote health, and allow a stable base for progress toward permanent homes and other needed, positive outcomes.

Supervisor Hopkins, Homeless Action! urges you, as the county’s champion of these destitute, to immediately publicly support the county’s first planned and funded set of small villages, where our friends can be free at last from a furtive, scattered, criminal existence. We stand ready to volunteer in hordes during workups, as organizers have done in Washington, Oregon, and in the bay area, and we will whole-heartedly support staff’s evaluation of prospective funding sources and uses, management protocols, and partners.

Kind regards,

J. Scott Wagner
Volunteer, Homeless Action!

Specialists in a Generalist World

This is a somewhat technical screed about the way the specialist AI and AGI fields ignore generalist-level philosophy and psychology as sources of necessary code. I hint a bit at the costs in mimicking intelligence. Intelligence is strongly associated with moral success, as well as many other positive outcomes. Elsewhere, I’ll make the point that moral and broader philosophic success aren’t necessarily antecedent to intelligence as people suppose, but is better thought of as often causing intelligence; that they must be built into any attempt at intelligence replication as a causal agent. I should also say that I have some acumen within general philosophy and psychology,  and some limited degree of acumen with neuroscience. I’ve been a CIO, large corporate software project manager, business analyst, database designer, and coder. I’m pretty worthless in scads of neural net technology, as well as related data structuring and most of the cool symbolic and misc rad and creative approaches. I do try to learn about it regularly; a fine nerd pudding.

Thomas Dietterich is a brilliant, prominent artificial intelligence (AI) researcher. He recently posted a super helpful delineation of potential approaches to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), which might be thought of as a combination of having common sense and being a sharp cookie.

He listed ‘the’ four techniques for chasing it. I have little to say of these methods; a quibble about his attitude about one, nothing more, as I’m not an AI expert. There’s a fifth approach he neglected that I am qualified to propose, though more of a required overlay to the others than its own method: finding the philosophical and psychological requirements for “minimal priors” of general intelligence. In other words, it’s finding what we have to teach a computer about human life and thinking well for it to run programs that will allow it to act and communicate like us.

Though “one should not cross disciplinary boundaries unescorted,” as Dr. Dietterich says in his post, almost everyone who works on AGI seems to me to think it’s fine to do so with these two fields, that arguably are forced to do the heavy lifting when it comes to our (most basic) priors. The two sciences are simply the best qualified to specify what general intelligence is, how it relates to language, the body, and a myriad of odd-sounding-yet-important subjects like epistemic justification. They’re the only fields positioned to deal acceptably with questions of context, prioritization, and many issues of purpose and meaning, their detection, expression, and dynamics. All of which seem quite firmly off the radar of cognitive and computer science folks.

(I’m slighting biology fields here by not dragging them in, by not talking about three sets of fields impinging on AI instead of two. I just can’t represent them and others like language and physics well without mucking things. I assume their arguments will be different, and perhaps not parallel. Anyway, there are many other fields that have significant claims on turf.)

Nerds may see what it’s like to try to solve a problem without having the priors you’d normally have in a situation, by playing this video game with the setting of no priors. I gave up instantly; it was like trying to win a debate with someone speaking Chinese, while being spun upside down. There are also game versions with just some of the priors taken away, so we can get a sense which assumptions we use in life are the most important.

At first, a person hearing that social scientists might help with AGI’s priors may think this is good news, that these less exotic, less technical teammates can come help with a few basics to constrain the real work nicely. Eek out a few definitions, and get out of the way. Unfortunately, it can’t work that way. When one wades in, one discovers that much of what a four-year-old brought with them genetically, added to what they’d learned since conception with that go-go sponge of a brain– is a monstrously large set of knowledge, schemas, and processes. It’s not going to make for elegant or compact code. There are also arguments about lots of it. It’s the opposite of a grand theory, because there are thousands of psychic details that dribbled out all over the neighborhood while we were building a real life based on general intelligence. Now we have to range all over our unconscious selves to pick up those pieces we dropped, and translate them for a machine. Except we can’t, because they’re almost all unconscious, much harder to observe. We have to depend on a bunch of careful psychologists to play Sherlock Holmes in thousands of ways to define who we are for the machine, using two-way mirrors, genius, luck, a statistical package, and lots of takeout.

The AI researchers don’t know this battle is ahead. They act as if somebody’ll hand them a data stick soon with the priors, and off we’ll all go to a future of robot friends and farmers and security guards that work for nothing. AGI, the attempt to replicate generalized human intelligence, is just one problem among many for them; they see no need to emphasize it above other problems, especially when everyone’s making such good cash now. That attitude by the AI community’s intellectual leaders is one reason why we’re waiting around, like lightning bugs, butt lights happily in sync, for AI geniuses who speak in tongues to deliver an efficient, elegant, minimal kernel of priors. So they can juggle, and eventually understand jokes. As Dr. Dietterich does here, there’s a tendency to vibe or emphasize that there are lots of other problems, too; that AGI can be dealt with like any other technical problem

Ironically, the parts of the task of AGI that might well be the hardest to create aren’t even thought of as necessary by the vast majority of the field. I’m embarrassed for us; embarrassed for science. There are whole reams of work to be referenced by Ruth Millikan (meaning/purpose/intention), Susanna Schellenberg (perception), Yves Citton and many others on attention, Bruce Russell (justification/uncertainty), biology philosophy (the unintuitive likely need for embodiment in AGI), veins of relatively unambitious moral psychology/philosophy, plus likely hundreds of related subjects. None of those can reasonably be left out of the priors, because they’re all jiggling around in that four-year-old. Those are just my touchpoints in the field where I see priors required, by the way; I don’t have any special insights into the pieces of priors needed. Part of the whole point is that no one has a good sense of the scope of the priors yet. 

Philosophy, which has a reputation for unfathomably “deconstructing” things, or being post-post-something or other, has in fact been building a picture of what constitutes the mostly-unconscious building blocks of language use, concept manipulation, and intelligent thought for decades. That work will need to continue to be argued over, mapped as pseudocode, and instantiated as limits and opportunities, all through the presumably heterogenous systems we end up with as AGI.

That work, which is often mind-bendingly complicated and occasionally mathy, mostly addresses our incredible unconscious capabilities, which are fundamental to the general intelligence at the core of who we are. For instance, to understand what’s involved when we look at footprints in the snow, you have to read, and then probably reread, about 50 pages of Ruth Millikan, delivering some of the most painful, inexorably accurate logic known to humanity. You’ve seen the footprints and had a couple of thoughts you barely noticed, that’s all; you haven’t even done anything, and yet you’re up to about 6 hours of the kind of reading that causes suicide in the weak to sum up what just happened. All to figure out the basics of what you paired up with that sight unconsciously; what you got to ignore, and why; what you compared the sight with unconsciously to figure out they were footprints; how you don’t go past the limits of what you know; linking the sight with various purposes and meaning; how your trust of the footprint to be a human’s is ‘statistical only’–– on and on and on with an avalanche of alien facts and concepts, revealing a scaffolding of meaning and purpose that goes below and above and around this glance, to give each act its place and time in the world.

This detail is surprising to most of us, but in a way, it shouldn’t be: a four-year-old can comfortably use a few languages fluently, with exposure, precisely because they’re capable at that age of learning so many priors so incredibly fast. Ruth Millikan can’t possibly keep up with three seconds of four-year-old life, even with 10,000 dense words, just like we can only fathom what happens in us when we glance at tracks in the snow by slowing the experience to a crawl, and turning it into language.

The many hard problems we already know about– defining/relating objects/concepts/purposes, nesting concepts, hierarchies of meanings (prioritization/attention), abstraction, analogy, the various challenges the psychologist-turned-AI-researcher Gary Marcus has elucidated as likely beyond today’s neural nets– any one of these cannot possibly be attended to adequately without a couple of social scientists standing next to the folks with scalpels at the operating table.

When I listen to Yann Lecun, I hear a fellow who seems annoyed at the focus of AGI ignoring all the cool stuff being done by the AI that’s right here, right now. I very much sympathize, and I think we all should, in the sense  that there are many immediate implications and actualities that we should be pondering and leveraging. The point is also that we will need to desperately unleverage some of them in the future, if we fail to instantiate the common sense that we so loosely and casually toss on the laundry in the corner.

[if you don't have a laundry corner in your room, good for you. Everybody has to get off your high horse for this last part.]

It’s not a coincidence that Mr. Marcus, originally a social scientist, feels obligated to squawk so awkwardly and continually on the depth and urgency of the notion of priors, to the annoyance of most in the field. Yes, one can ignore innateness and still work miracles with various neural nets, from medicine to McDonald’s. At the moment, CNN’s have matured and reign supreme in a variety of settings, with lots of sizzle being provided by seq2seq and a handful of other deep learning methods unearthed in the last few years, in the midst of this heyday in commercial AI we’re having now.

But study of innateness isn’t progressing. It’s not a problem that’ll sort itself, especially when we don’t even bothering to systematically recognize the nature of it and encourage the interdisciplinary acumen needed to solve it. We’re ignoring that the question “what are our priors?” is solely concerned with psychology, biology, and philosophy; we want to skip right to the ‘let’s code it up!’ part. The diffidence with which this subject is met by experts in the field, and the confidence with which the AI community unwittingly isolates itself, both concern me. I can’t tell if we’ll still be waiting in this nonsensical way in twenty years, or if the various projects on common sense at many universities and think tanks will begin to leverage adequate interdisciplinary cooperation. As with so many things in this business, we’ll see.