I ran into Vincent Williams at Seneca Scott’s big rally yesterday at City Hall. Vincent, who runs the Urban Compassion Project, told me an unsettling story: Recently, he was intervening in a situation between Caltrans and the residents of a homeless encampment, when he was unceremoniously arrested and taken to Santa Rita Jail. There, he was thrown into a cell, where he languished for twelve hours, until the cops released him with no charges, no explanation and no apology.
Vincent, who is no stranger to the inside of a jail cell, took it all in stride. What had upset him wasn’t so much being in jail, it was the way Caltrans behaved with respect to dismantling the encampment, which was on their property.
To hear Vincent tell it (and he has plenty of video to confirm his version, some of which I’ve now seen), the Caltrans incident is part of the generalized absurdity that has characterized all the official reactions to encampments. Caltrans wanted the camp off their property. A fence separated their property from an adjoining city sidewalk. Caltrans’ decision was to compel the campers to take all their belongings from the Caltrans side of the fence and put them on the Oakland side of the fence. That this was simply dumping the problem into Oakland’s lap seems not to have occurred to Caltrans. This illustrates the almost complete absence of communication between entities such as Caltrans, the Mayor’s office, the City Council, OPD and Oakland’s various homeless agencies. What Caltrans did was simply the same old whack-a-mole we’ve gotten used to, where encampments are shuffled around from one place to another but the underlying situation is never resolved.
Poor Vincent had the temerity to stand up for a pregnant woman in the encampment. He wasn’t confrontational or violent; he just asked Caltrans and the cops what their relocation plan was. Under the alleged conditions of the Martin v. Boise court case, wasn’t Caltrans obligated to provide alternative shelter if they wanted to move the homeless people? Yet simply sending them to the other side of the fence was hardly “providing alternative shelter,” and it was this that Vincent wanted an answer for.
It seems like a good question to me. Readers know how much I dislike camps, and that the Coalition for a Better Oakland has long demanded that the city enforce its own Encampment Management Policy and rid our town of this blight. At the same time, as a rational man, I can’t quite wrap my head around what Caltrans did. Sending the homeless people with all their possessions from one side of a fence to the other seems like such a dumb, pointless waste of time. I can hardly blame Vincent for being upset about it.
From my perspective, it seems like Oakland is getting a ton of money from various state, national and private sources to deal with its encampment problem. And yet one has the impression that the whole thing is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Who knows how many Oakland government entities, involved with who knows how many nonprofits and contractors, are siphoning off this money in untransparent ways, spending it in questionable efforts of which we are told nothing? This is a big part of the public’s antipathy to Oakland’s response to homelessness: the suspicion that Oakland government constantly demands more and more money (more parcel taxes are on the way, homeowners), and yet there’s less and less accountability, less and less cooperation between top players, more and more confusion, more and more nonsense—and more and more encampments.
Isn’t it time we had real leadership in Oakland?
Steve Heimoff