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by Terry Messman, (reprinted from The Street Spirit)
Sitting in the crowded, bustling offices of the Sacramento Homeless Organizing Committee (SHOC), Clifford Crooks gestures at James Gorman, an articulate homeless man working feverishly on the phones to try to convince churches in Sacramento to open their doors to street people during this rainy winter. Gorman has a vision of convincing churches all over California to wake up and realize that the bedrock principles of their faith compel them to become more actively involved in working for justice and offering sanctuary for the homeless poor.
Crooks watches Gorman working the phone lines in his one-man crusade, and says with satisfaction, “This is how SHOC works. When a person gets really ticked off, they have an office to come and fight… You find that an angry man gets a lot done.”
Fueled by that kind of dedication and outrage, the homeless organizers of SHOC have beaten all the odds and endured in their stubborn and tenacious defense of homeless people in our state capital for more than a decade now. Since 1987, SHOC activists have somehow kept up a remarkably creative drumbeat of protests and pressure campaigns in support of the human rights of the poor.
SHOC has persevered in its grassroots organizing for justice despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles and the limitations of a shoestring budget. This bare-bones, impoverished group made up of equally impoverished members somehow has found the heart to take on the powers that be in a very unequal struggle. For SHOC’s efforts to defend the defenseless are opposed by powerful forces: by a police force notorious for unleashing aggressive raids to tear apart homeless camps; by merchants who launch heartless campaigns to drive away the poor; and by a City Council which committed one of the most shocking acts of officially sanctioned bigotry in recent history by voting to sue Loaves and Fishes, one of the pre-eminent service providers in the state, in an abortive attempt to push the poor out of downtown Sacramento.
One of the reasons for SHOC’s survival in this climate of intolerance is surely their feeling that poor people’s lives hang in the balance. SHOC is now involved in an effort to end police brutality against homeless campers. Lillian Hanson believes that a systematic police effort last winter to demolish encampments, slash tents, and confiscate the blankets of homeless campers directly threatened the lives of her friends. “They were being robbed of their sleep and their life was being taken from them literally,” she said.
Mikeal O’Toole, one of SHOC’s founders, took part in past efforts to block bulldozers that roared up to demolish a homeless encampment. He quietly demonstrates the life-and-death stakes involved in this struggle by pointing to one of nearly 200 names inscribed in marble on a memorial built by Loaves and Fishes to honor homeless people who died on the streets of Sacramento. O’Toole points to the name of Gene Kulik, a founder of SHOC, who was his friend and a dynamic reason for SHOC’s very existence. Following a period of depression, Kulik died while he was still homeless. Now all that is left is a name etched on a marble wall.
Street Spirit: For the last several years, I’ve heard story after story from friends in Sacramento of police mistreatment of homeless people, especially raids on encampments by motorized cops they call “Bronco Billys.” What has the situation been like in your city this past year?
Lillian Hanson: I remember very clearly how last winter I came down to Loaves and Fishes and my homeless friends were not allowed to sleep in Sacramento. The police were raiding their camps consistently, every night or every other night, at two or three in the morning. Deliberately and with forethought, they would take the campers down to jail, and sometimes just release them, sometimes hold them in jail. But the point is the campers could not sleep anymore. They were robbed of their ability to sleep.
SS: Where were the camps located that were being raided by the police — in the downtown, sprinkled around the city, or mostly on the American River?
Lillian: The police were concentrating on the river camps. Definitely up and down the river.
SS: Was this random harassment or a deliberate effort to systematically tear down homeless encampments?
Lillian: It was a deliberate move on the part of the police. It was planned with foresight. The police during the day were scouting to find where the camps were. Then at night, they would wait till two or three in the morning and consistently go after the same camps and roust the campers.
The NSA security people were also making the rounds of the camps and waking the campers up — telling the campers that they were sleeping on ground that belonged to businesses and calling the police. Then the police would come and take them to jail and give them tickets and citations. Later on, we found out that the NSA was actually raiding camps on property that was not business property; they had no business being there.
SS: What is NSA?
Clifford Crooks: It’s their security in the downtown area — NSA Security.
Paula Lomazzi: They’re hired by the Business Improvement District in this area of Sacramento. They hired their own private security.
Lillian: Later on, SHOC was able to find out that where they were raiding the camps, they had no business being there because it was public property. It did not belong to the businesses, but they were doing that anyway, overstepping their boundaries.
SS: Did they arrest homeless people themselves or call the police?
Clifford: They would call the police and get the police to do it. But they did other things themselves, too. For instance, one of the guys here, they gave him three days to clean up his camp. On the last day, when he had his stuff sorted out and his sleeping bag and everything ready to move, the same guards that told him he had three days, took it and threw all his stuff in a pond.
What we did was Debbie and I went up and confronted each of the security guards, and we told them they were being watched now, and anything they do is going to be reported and documented. And it stopped right then.
SS: Debbie was a member of SHOC?
Lillian: She was a friend of ours who died of cancer last year. She was a homeless person who camped out along the river.
SS: That’s how you confronted the private security force. What about the police?
Clifford: As far as the police go, we had to do a lot of complaint forms about how people were being harassed in encampments by the police, and then it was taken before Don Casimere’s office.
Paula: Casimere directs the Office of Police Accountability.
Clifford: Casimere was brought in by the work of the NAACP. They had like 1,500 complaints against the Sacramento police brought into Internal Affairs, and only one was investigated in a year’s time.
SS: So the NAACP spearheaded the effort to get Casimere appointed to investigate all the complaints of police abuse?
Lillian: Yes, the NAACP negotiated with the city for about four years and they take credit for Casimere being hired, and the Mexican organizations also took credit. The police brutality to the Black community and the Mexican-American community was really quite horrible and they needed to do something to set it back.
This is aside from the police brutality to our homeless population. When we entered the picture, Don Casimere just happened to be appointed there recently and we were able to work with him.
SS: What happened with the complaint forms SHOC collected from homeless people harassed by the police?
Lillian: Casimere stated to us that the complaint forms that SHOC gave him were to his advantage and something he could really use. I remember many a night last winter coming down to Loaves and Fishes in the rain collecting these complaint forms; Clifford did it, Paula did it, we all did it.
My friends, the campers, they had long, dreary faces then. They were worn out, they were tired, they could hardly walk, there were no smiles, and it was raining hard. It was really quite ghastly, the sleep deprivation. Their sleep had been taken from them. You try going without sleep for one month and see how you feel. They looked like ghosts. They were being robbed of their sleep and their life was being taken from them, literally. After awhile you can’t focus and you can’t think and you can’t get a job.
Some of the ones I had spoken to had gotten jobs and saved money and they had their gear to go to work; but they were unable to do the jobs because the police would come in and raid their camps with all their gear. So they couldn’t show up at work. The police were constantly taking every blanket they had, and they couldn’t sleep at night.
SS: What were the police excuses for confiscating blankets in the middle of winter — illegal camping?
Clifford: Yeah, they’d use the camping laws.
Lillian: The camping laws gave them the right to steal people’s blankets. There was a terrible, horrendous lack of blankets last year — people were freezing. That’s when SHOC stepped in. We collected the police reports. Clifford created our complaint forms.
SS: What kinds of complaints did you document?
Clifford: Police abuse, and things like cutting their camping gear up. As a matter of fact, we have a sleeping bag right there with a complaint form on it that has been all sliced up. Police would cut up tents, sleeping bags, everything. They would either slash them up and leave them there or they would take them with them. Like underneath the overpass over here, people would camp under that. On a rainy night at about two in the morning, the police came in and confiscated all their gear, forced them out from underneath the overpass out into the rain, and left them defenseless to the elements.
This was all going on until we took our complaint forms to Casimere’s office. Then he called Internal Affairs and he drug them over the coals for all this abuse.
According to the NAACP, there were 1,500 complaint forms turned in from all over the city from citizens, and Internal Affairs only investigated one or two of them out of all those. That’s why they brought in Casimere; he’s above everything. He can drag the police over the coals and that’s exactly what he did.
SS: So he was brought in because the community found that there was nowhere to go with their complaints because Internal Affairs would not investigate. What did Casimere do with your complaints from the homeless community?
Lillian: Well, he called a meeting with himself there and members of SHOC and the police department. The first confrontation began and, of course, the police denied a great deal of this. Their position was, “We didn’t do it. We’re innocent.” Then, SHOC would bring forward the complaints.
Blake Smith was a homeless man who became involved in this. He later became the president of SHOC; but at that time, he was camped out on the river with his friend. One day he went to his camp after eating lunch at Loaves and Fishes, and there were two policemen hiding behind the trees with guns drawn. The police came out from behind the trees and said, “Get out of here now,” or something to that effect. They ran, because the police had their guns drawn.
Now Blake knew that was totally against the law, so he wrote out that complaint and we submitted it to Casimere, and Casimere was really able to go to bat with that. It was one of the outstanding complaints he had to work with.
Blake Smith was so angry over what had happened that he was willing to back up that complaint all the way. We had several meetings with the police after that, and we had meetings with Tom Clinkenbeard, the public defender. The outcome of all this was that Blake needed witnesses because the police, of course, were denying it. We went and found one of the witnesses and she wrote up a complaint. So we did back it up; but as far as I know, neither of the officers involved were punished in any way, and nothing was done. Blake Smith has since left Sacramento.
I just want to say Casimere was such a gentleman about this whole thing. He actually came to Friendship Park [the park for homeless people at the Loaves and Fishes complex] and he said that he wanted to meet everybody. I’ll never forget that day. This man who looks like a judge, all dressed up, very educated; he sat right down and homeless people came up complaining about what had happened to them, and he listened to them all. I thought it was really wonderful because he didn’t think of himself as better than us.
SS: What role did the public defender, Clinkenbeard, play?
Lillian: Clinkenbeard had witnessed last summer, when he came out with one of the people he was representing, and he saw helicopters, two cars, a jeep, and various policemen chasing the homeless down the river. He couldn’t believe what a waste of taxpayers’ money that was. When he saw this, he comprehended what was involved and he has since become a defender of the homeless, and he has a legal clinic he runs at Loaves and Fishes.
He represents homeless people in front of the judge with his lawyers. All the homeless have to do is to show up and he drives them there and he brings them back. He worked out an arrangement with the judge. A typical sentence for misdemeanors is four hours of cleaning up at Loaves and Fishes. Clinkenbeard has been a real help and a tremendous asset for us.
SS: What was the ultimate outcome of your work exposing police misconduct?
Lillian: After we made the complaints and had several meetings with the police — even though, as far as I know, the policemen themselves were not punished — Casimere was pleased because he was able to convince the police that something was wrong. And they did back down! They did back down without further ado; they stopped making the raids at two or three in the morning, which is what we were aiming for. They no longer do that. They were ID-ing homeless people and they’re still doing that and even taking IDs away. That continues; they are harassing the homeless now. But we were able to stop the merciless practice of waking up the campers in the middle of the night so they couldn’t sleep. That was so inhumane. That stopped.
For more on this story you can read SHOC The COPS By Terry Messmen on www.poornewsnetwork.org. For more information about SHOC write: SHOC at 1351 North C Street, Sacramento, CA 95814. Phone: (916) 442-2156. E-mail: Homeward2@yahoo.com
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