In the wake of new, court-ordered training, San Francisco employees complied sometimes with a years-old policy designed to help people living on the streets retain essential belongings, new records show. Despite logging at least 126 encampment clearings in a recent three-month period, the city recorded just 11 signed acknowledgements from unhoused people, which are required when belongings are seized in sweeps.
During encampment clearings, Department of Public Works employees remove tents and makeshift structures from sidewalks and other public spaces. They are also responsible for taking and storing unhoused people’s property if it is unattended, or if the owner cannot or will not move it. This process is known as “bagging and tagging.” When someone can’t or won’t move their belongings, workers taking the items are also charged with collecting signed acknowledgements from the owner stating that essentials such as ID or medication have been separated from the confiscated property.
In December, the Public Press reported that the city had no records of any such acknowledgements from January to mid-November of last year, despite at least 588 encampment clearings recorded during that period.
In response to an updated records request for acknowledgements, the Department of Public Works provided 11 signed acknowledgements. From December to the end of February, the city took items in at least 284 recorded instances and carried out at least 126 sweeps. All 11 acknowledgements produced were from one week in February.
While the city does appear to have complied with the policy in several instances, Nisha Kashyap, an attorney with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area representing the Coalition on Homelessness in an ongoing lawsuit against the city regarding seizure of homeless peoples’ property, expressed alarm.
“I am really concerned to hear about the number of signed acknowledgements in that time period,” Kashyap said, noting the recent implementation and lack of consistency.
The small number of acknowledgements shows that “this city does not take seriously the policies they themselves have constructed,” said Lukas Illa, a human rights organizer at the Coalition on Homelessness.
When asked why there were so few acknowledgements, Dariel Walker Hampton, a communications officer at the City Attorney’s Office, said on behalf of the office and Public Works that the city is complying with the bag and tag policy.
She noted in an email that Public Works holds weekly trainings for field supervisors, monthly trainings for line staff, and mandatory orientation sessions for new operations employees. Additionally, she said supervisors conduct routine spot checks to ensure the policy is being adhered to, “from operations in the field, documentation on the backend and storage protocol.”
Court orders new training, problems persist
In September, U.S. Chief Magistrate Judge Donna Ryu ordered the city to retrain all relevant Public Works employees to better understand and comply with the city’s bag and tag policy as part of an ongoing lawsuit. The city submitted documents in late December showing that 98 out of 107 active employees had been retrained.
However, compliance cannot be ensured solely by new training for Public Works employees, Kashyap said.
During encampment clearings carried out by the Healthy Streets Operations Center, a multi-agency effort overseen by the Department of Emergency Management, “incident commanders” are responsible for advising people experiencing homelessness to separate essentials from items being seized, and for giving them the acknowledgement forms to sign. These incident commanders are often San Francisco Fire Department employees. Public Works staffers are then responsible for bagging and tagging property and collecting signed acknowledgements. Thus, training provided only to Public Works employees will be insufficient to address the problem, Kashyap said.
While the Fire Department confirmed that it does employ incident commanders, it referred other questions to the City Attorney’s Office and Public Works. An Emergency Management representative parried inquiries to the Department of Public Works.
The bigger problem, Kashyap said, is that “despite having a policy for years, the city has failed to follow its policy.”
Police involvement
Besides voicing concerns about policy implementation, advocates questioned the role of police in clearings.
Logs show that nearly 30% of the bag and tags recorded between December and the end of February list police stations as the location where Public Works collected the confiscated property. The actual share may be higher, since not all entries list full addresses. The Police Department has instructed officers not to bring belongings from encampments to police stations, and instead to request that Public Works send its own employees into the field to bag and tag items.
Christin Evans, vice chair of the city’s Homelessness Oversight Commission, was critical of deploying police to encampment clearings rather than city employees who can provide services, and an emphasis on moving people along the streets instead of tackling the causes of homelessness.
“I’m disappointed that Mayor Lurie has not yet addressed this poor use of resources,” she said.
Lurie’s office did not respond to questions about encampment clearing practices under his administration. On March 17, he signed an executive directive to address homelessness and drug use in San Francisco that advocates criticized.
