The Selective Criminalization of Being Outside: A Conversation w/Paul Boden of WRAP

FULL TRANSCRIPT

This is Due Processing, it's me, Avi, I'm here with Kate, Kate, what's up?

Hey, Avi, how are you doing? Good to hear your voice.

You too. And today we are joined by Paul Boden. Paul is the Director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project, which is a collective of 11 homelessness community organizing groups.

Paul, welcome.

Yeah, good morning. Thanks for having me on.

WRAP’s Advocacy

Kate, do you want to set the table for this convo?

Yeah, I'd love to. Paul, maybe first just talk about RAP. I call it RAP.

I'm not sure if that's right or not, but can you talk about the work that you all do?

RAP is the Western Regional Advocacy Project. We formed about 20 years ago. Actually, we just had our 20th anniversary party.

And it was created by a bunch of local community organizations that were coming from and addressing issues of homelessness in LA and San Francisco and Seattle and Portland. And the idea was to collectivize our experiences, our voice, our priorities, to identify the common threads in the organizing work that was happening in Skid Row and in Portland, Oregon and in Seattle. And really push collectively.

And now we're in 11 cities. When we started, it was like six. A common message around criminalization, around the human right to housing, around the fact that we're addressing homelessness 42 years later with sweeps.

And now we're getting militarized in how we're doing our sweeps. So like, it was like a clarion call of like, this is fucked up. This is wrong.

And we're gonna fight. And we're gonna fight it with every breath we got. I mean, I've been doing this 42 years.

I don't care. I'll do it another 42 years. Like, this is about our community and about our lives.

And about our right to exist in public spaces. Without fear of police harassment, private security harassment, or now the National Guard kicking our butts. We need to collectivize our priorities and our voices and our experiences.

And we need to build an organizing campaign that is truly of and about the communities that we're based in. We're not talking about those homeless people. We are that community, and we need to be speaking for ourselves.

The last thing poor people need is another freaking leader. So the first thing we did was the Without Housing Report to show the connection between the massive housing cuts during the Reagan trickle-down economic revolution and the advent of contemporary homelessness in the early 80s. As soon as FEMA started funding shelters, we started seeing police sweeping homeless people out of public spaces under the pretext that there's actually an alternative and a decent place for them to go.

We knew damn well that wasn't true. That is proven to be true, that we were right. Shelters ain't going to end homelessness.

Nothing ends homelessness like a home.

Homelessness Origins

You know, there's so much here that I want to get into, but I do want to start with a historical perspective. I mean, you mentioned a lot. Talk about sort of the origins in this country of modern-day homelessness, what we've seen.

You mentioned the Reagan cuts to affordable housing, but could you just sort of start us back in 1980?

Well, I mean, you got to remember, we've had poverty forever. Like, you know, homelessness is a manifestation of an extreme and incredible poverty. And you can call it low-income, very low-income, extremely low-income.

You can categorize people all you want. Poor people are ending up out in the street in droves. And when you look at what happened during the Reagan era, and we look at that period mainly because it was 1982, late 82, early 83, that cities across the country started getting FEMA money because they had a crisis.

And emergency shelters opened up across the country. They were deemed temporary emergency shelter facilities. Well, that was 1983, folks.

You can't be talking about emergency and temporary when you're talking about 43 years later. Like, this was about housing policy and cuts to affordable housing, which is cuts to poor people's housing, while tripling the tax write-off for home ownership. It's a neoliberal economic policy that's played out where all housing should be generating income for corporate and wealthy Americans.

And any housing that is going to poor people is something that we can't afford. So, we do a hundred-something billion in homeowner tax subs, or housing subsidies through tax write-offs. And we do 20 billion and 30 billion, and we're cutting that now.

And we continue to see this incentivizing profit in the development of affordable housing, and it's putting poor people out in the street in droves.

Criminalizing Public Existence

You know, one of the things that we are talking about on this podcast is the idea of policing or police officers and incarceration as the go-to solution for seeing people existing outside. What are your kind of reactions to that large subject in the context of homelessness?

When we were putting together a sort of organizing plans around the criminalization issue, we went out and did 1900 documented street outreaches, asking consistent questions in 12 cities and five different states, just about policing. And in the course of doing those surveys, 82% had been arrested, cited or harassed for loitering. You know, 76% for sitting on a sidewalk, 79% for sleeping.

So when you realize that the top three criminal, quote unquote, offenses that people are being targeted with, standing still, sitting down, and sleeping. Those are not anything that people would say, oh, that's a criminal offense, but it's how the policing apparatus works. Because it isn't that you're standing still.

It isn't that you're sitting down. It's that we see you. And we did some research with UC Berkeley Law.

There are 19 laws on the books in California where a cop can jack you up, even though you're doing absolutely nothing to merit police intervention, just by virtue of the activities that you're conducting in public spaces. So local governments have long looked at anti-oki laws in sundown towns and Basarero Treaty and Japanese American exclusion laws. Like this country has a long freaking history of using incredibly discriminatory police enforcement in order to rid communities of people that those in power deem to be unsightly, unwanted, unsanitary, unsafe, whatever label they want to attach.

It's just they want to get the hell rid of us. And the us isn't just unhoused people. And that's the crux of our organizing campaign.

They use, they've been using these laws historically, and they use them continually, and they use them against buskers, and young kids hanging out on the corner if they're a certain color. You know, with panhandling, with mentally ill people, and that the way that we're like going right back to institutionalization of mental illness is freaking unconscionable. And it's a pattern and practice of local governments just wanting to say, we don't want these people, these people.

It's never, you know, nobody that's ever written a sit law like Gavin Newsom has ever thought for a second that they might be criminalized if they sat down on a sidewalk. So they write these laws, they know damn well the laws ain't going to apply to them. And then they push enforcement.

You were talking about how the criminalization of people outside, you know, homeless people spreads to non-homeless people, like just people standing on the corner. I would add to that the kind of idea that's used of people outside who, you know, as a kind of motivating factor for criminalization of even just larger behavior, right? Like, you know, mandatory prison sentences for drug offenses motivated by the idea that there's an unhoused population, right?

You know, that's the point in someone's vision, right? Or that's the kind of advocacy that's being used to then spread criminalization in other respects, right, for people with health issues.

And no one should think that these laws were created for homeless people. These laws have been on the books for a really long time, you know, and it's the enforcement patterns that shift depending on the target of the month, or the target of the year, or the era. You know, sit-lie laws originally, the very first ones, were targeted towards gay and lesbian people in the Castro and hippies in in Haight-Ashbury.

We shouldn't be naïve enough to think, oh, well, that's about unhoused people. No, it ain't. It's about human beings.

And it's about us as a community. Because we weren't the first targets, we are the current targets, and we won't be the last targets. And that's why these laws, we wrote the Right to Rest Act, we ran it in Colorado, California, and in Oregon.

And all the bill says is, you cannot criminalize people for standing still, sitting down, sleeping, or eating in a non-obstructive manner. If they are not obstructing anything, you cannot criminalize them. We ran that bill nine times over 10 years across those three states.

And we got our butt kicked every single time. And we're going to keep running it. Because the organizing behind it has been massive and has been beautiful.

The opposition has been the League of Cities and local governments and police departments talking about how these laws, these arbitrarily enforced laws, against standing still or sitting down, are a tool in their toolbox. Understand, they see these laws as a tool in their toolbox. Their toolbox today is to make the on-house people disappear.

Their toolbox 30 years ago was to make gay and lesbian people disappear. So these are patterns and practices and laws and enforcement and doing separate homeless courts or separate mental health courts ain't going to do shit to address the underlying issues here of allowing for arbitrarily enforced police enforcement and to allow that it be targeted towards specific individuals.

Refuting Misconceptions

You know, Paul, it seems to me when we think about this or when we address this, we get like, you know, stop arresting people, stop, you know, sweeping the streets, stop, you know, throwing people's belongings away, stop harassing, stop oppressing people because they are poor. So that's the argument broadly. And then the pushback that we get is, well, what you think it's acceptable for people to live on the street, you want people out on the street, that's not compassion.

I mean, I've heard the governor and others say that. Like, oh, so it's such a straw man argument, but I'd like you to sort of break that down, or how do you address that? And I would imagine, correct me if I'm wrong, that you hear that repeatedly.

Oh, for a long time, I've been hearing that. And I say, yeah, let's work off of the without housing reporter. Let's work on this beyond shelter plan that they wrote, or whatever the hell it is.

Let's work on pushing HUD like the mayors did in the 30s. And we got the federal government to create what today we call HUD to address homelessness in the 30s. Gavin Newsom, when he was mayor, told me directly, Paul, HUD funds my homeless programs.

I'm not going to give them a hard time about their housing programs. Like, you know, so to say, I'm not going to push for the solutions, but you're just contributing to the fact that people are living in the streets by telling me I can't ticket them or arrest them or throw their stuff away. It's a fool's errand.

It's like debating Trump. Why would you even bother? Or when I would do the Bill O'Reilly show, you know, finally I just called him a freaking idiot and like you can't argue with stupidity.

And they use that argument. They also use the argument of people not feeling safe, which reminds me of they should be on their side of the tracks. We're not safe when they're here, or that many or some are drug addicted.

The majority of drug addicted people live inside a housing unit of some sort. So you can't say that it's okay for me to criminalize people for existing in public space, because I think they should get housing, get the freaking housing restored, and you won't have to criminalize people for arbitrarily being in public space.

So talk about that solution. I feel like the tenor of media is like, well, we've tried to address this for 40 years, 50 years. These people are incorrigible, whatever.

Now, we're going to just make them go away as best we can with police and county jails and prisons if we need to. What is the solution to this?

Well, first of all, I cut them off when they say, we've tried to address this. Because you had the Reagan Revolution in the early 80s, where we saw the advent of contemporary homelessness. Then you had welfare reform in the 90s that cut millions of people off of food stamps and social security and SSI.

It wiped out health care for disabled people. And then you had HOPE VI, which has destroyed over 200,000 public housing units. So if you're going to sit there and tell me that we have tried to address the issues of homelessness and they're just encourageable, I'm going to show you the pattern and practice of what the federal government has been doing to our social welfare system and say, you're compounding the increase in homelessness.

You are not addressing what created homelessness because you're now 587,000 public housing units less than existed in the 1980s. So you're making the problem exponentially worse. You take the welfare reform, you take HOPE VI, you take the Reagan Revolution, and you put it on steroids and multiply it by 10.

That's going to tell you what's going to happen when the big fascist bill hits. It's going to be massive homelessness in this country, and you're not going to be able to police your way out of it, although we've seen with their military takeovers, you know, they sure as hell plan to try. But anytime these guys say, we're trying to address the issue of homelessness with what?

Coordinated intakes and homeless management information systems, and cops sweeping people off the streets, you ain't addressing shit.

Human Rights for All

Paul, would you say the Homeless Bill of Rights Campaign, and I'm looking at it right now on the WRAP website, which is WRAPHOME, wraphome.org, is that a statement of principles that should apply until that more housing is built and all the other things. So what it has is right to move freely, rest, sleep, and be protected in public spaces without discrimination, right to occupy legally parked vehicles, right to share food and eat in public, right to legal counsel if prosecuted, right to 24 access to hygiene facilities, and the availability of a necessity defense when homeless cases are being prosecuted. How does that fit into this conversation you're having on like solutions or what do we do?

I mean, some of those demands and goals and aspirations of the Right to Rest Act and the Homeless Bill of Rights Campaign directly are applied to the issue of homelessness or impact like the 24-hour access to hygiene. That's not just a homelessness issue. It wouldn't be a bad thing for people to have.

You know, like being able to travel freely and free of harassment and being able to stand still on a sidewalk in public space. Like, my God, this is just common decency. And all it's saying is human beings should be retreated with dignity and respect.

And when you treat people with dignity and respect nine times out of 10, that's what you're going to get back from them. And so, if we could set up a government system where education and health care, you know, and the ability to live in a decent place and the ability to have a living income, like, how are those considered bad for anyone? The more people in our community that are healthy and educated and well housed and can afford to live in a capitalist system, the better off we all are.

So, we feel like that should be a core tenet of what it means to be a government with a community of human beings.

Impending Crisis

Paul, you mentioned this massive federal bill and projected a prediction of what it's going to do to homeless populations. Can you talk through your thinking about if there's certain key, especially damaging components of the bill, what those are and how they're going to play out?

Well, I mean, the estimates are several million people are going to lose their access to health care. That's going to kill people. It's not even just about homelessness at this point.

It's about survival. You know, the feds announced today, they ain't using their supplemental funds to extend the food stamps that people are, like the Chump Change Food Stamp Program that people are using to sustain themselves. You know, this is, and if you look at USAID, where over 90,000 children have died because of the cuts, these guys don't care.

You know, we're talking 40 million people that are gonna be impacted either through the HUD programs, through the food stamp programs, through the Medicaid programs, through the Social Security office closures and spending hours waiting to just get told something when you have to call into them. Like this is gonna, as all of these different phases of the big fascist bill hit, you know, the housing vouchers that are going, and vouchers are a really difficult program to get benefit from. But some people have managed to do that and have found landlords that will take the voucher, and they're wiping that program out.

So we're talking massive, you know, whereas these programs I mentioned before were targeting specific subsets of the overall poor people's population, what we see coming up right now is they're going after all of them at once, and they've already beat on people three times in the past. So there really ain't no fat left on this bone, and now they're going after the marrow.

Legal Limitations

I have a question for you about community organizing and the courts, and waiting to see what the courts will do, and can we have the courts as a thing that helps out? And I'm thinking of Grants Pass and hoping that the decision it was overturning was providing some protection against prosecuting people for sleeping outside if there are no available beds and a safeguard that that provided, but that safeguard is gone. So, when you hear about like, you know, let's wait for the courts or have the attorneys do things, you know, as opposed to or in combination with movement work, what do you, you know, what's your take on that?

Well, the last part that you said there, in combination with community building, that's what we have a manual that we put together that's also on our website that you mentioned earlier, and thank you for that, raphome.org. It's called the Legal Defense Manual. And if your legal work is tied to the community organizing happening in the community, then you can use the skills and the backbone of your legal support system to move your organizing and build power to actually make the concrete changes.

Because I don't believe for a second that the courts are going to save us. And this is this, the kind of systems change that we're talking about, the kinds of laws that need to be gotten off the books, just take them off the books. You know, and my experience trying to use the courts to address the issue of homelessness is it depends on who can convince the judge that they know the system better.

You know, I've seen so many total BS because I've been in the system for so long. Total BS presentations by local governments about how effective their referral system is. We talked to 300, we're just starting an outreach project around sweeps, effort around sweeps.

And of the first 300 people we've talked to, 78% weren't offered nothing. And only 6 people so far even got into a shelter bed while they were being swept, which is no excuse for throwing people's belongings away and sweeping them from public space. But even there, it's a total public relations and convince the judge that your system can accommodate the right people.

And so, we have to use the temporary restraining orders that can delay harm, or we have to use the right to recoup your belongings, or these are your personal property and it should be treated as such. If cops just walked into your house and started stealing your stuff, unless you're poor and a person of color, they're probably not going to get away with it. So, they shouldn't be getting away with people's belongings out on the street.

So, you can mitigate the damage with the court system, but until we change the laws, what the judges are interpreting is totally at their whim. And you saw that with Grant's Pass. I mean, their argument in support of overturning the Grant's Pass decision was totally asinine and had no connection to reality.

You know, it is cruel and unusual punishment to criminalize somebody for not being able to have a place to live. Like, that's just common sense.

Absolutely. We've talked around this. You've talked about this.

But we talk about what's happening at the federal government. But I think the temptation for us in quote unquote blue states or blue cities is to think that somehow a change in the federal government is going to change things on the ground for people who are unhoused when really so many of these policies are carried out by local governments and by state governments. So I mean, it just becomes a fight on so many different fronts.

How do you manage that? How do you keep going? We can't take anybody off the hook is, I guess, what I'm thinking, you know?

I mean, right now in San Francisco, what? They're towing people's RVs?

Not just San Francisco, they're doing it everywhere. I mean, that's the thing that I feel that a lot of the organizing or in a lot of the discourse with especially trying to talk to freaking reporters is this isn't a local issue exclusively. The impact is felt locally.

The feds do their shit. What I talked about with the Reagan era stuff and the welfare reform and the Hope Six. And, you know, Reagan was right.

There is a trickle down, but it's not a trickle down in saving money for the wealthy and they'll distribute it to the poor. It's a trickle down in oppression. Well, hell, they're wiping out all of our housing funding or they're wiping out all of our welfare programs and they're wiping out social security for disabled people.

So I need to mitigate the impact. And the impact as far as government's concerned is we see it. We don't have a homeless problem if we don't see any homeless people.

So if we can just get rid of the presence of homeless people, we don't have a homeless problem. Our poverty rate is really low because we gentrified all of our low-income neighborhoods. So therefore, we don't see poverty because we got rid of all the poor people.

It's the same thing. And it's the same mindset. If I see it, it's an issue.

If I don't see it, the problem has been solved. And for the groups that are part of RAP, we're going to keep fighting and you're going to keep seeing us until we actually address the causal issues connected to the fact that so many people are living out in the streets. We're seeing a tsunami.

We're seeing something coming. We know it's coming. We know from past experience, it has brutal impacts on all the community members.

So think of it in the context of us and not the homeless or the disabled or the seniors. Think of it in terms of the things that benefit us as a community are the things that we should be banding together and fighting for. And that's where it comes down to access to quality education, good health care, a decent place to live for people.

Because the organizing can't afford to be siloed when we're talking about this broad band of impacts that we're going to see with the big fascist bill. And we need to gear up. This is serious times.

Collective Power

Paul, can you tell us how people should be thinking about organizing and action in this time?

And one of the things that has been building is the context of organizing with a mutual aid component to it.

Right.

And because that's the level of survival that we're getting to. We have to love each other and we got to take care of each other. And we need to understand that legal support, mutual aid, a blanket, a sleeping bag, a car tow, you know, giving somebody so they can get their car back after it's been towed.

Like, that's all about building community power, and it's all important.

Amen.

I think that's a great place to end this conversation. Paul Boden, thank you so much for joining us on Due Processing.

Yeah, thank you both very much. It was good to see you both again.