San Francisco cannot prove it follows an aspect of its own encampment clearing policy intended to help people retain their essential belongings.
During encampment clearings, if unhoused people do not move their property, the Department of Public Works is charged with discarding waste, as well as confiscating and storing other items for a limited time, a process known as “bagging and tagging.” City policy instructs the workers to collect signed acknowledgements from the unhoused people that they have been advised to retain items like medications or legal paperwork and identification, which people need in order to access many services.
Despite at least 588 clearings recorded this year through mid-November, the city could not provide evidence of any such acknowledgements.
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Several people experiencing homelessness told the San Francisco Public Press that they had gone through encampment clearings, and that city workers had never told them to separate important items like medication from property being taken — whether that property was bagged and tagged or simply discarded. They also said they had never been asked to sign documents acknowledging such an instruction.
In response to requests for comment, Jen Kwart, director of communications and media relations for the city attorney’s office, said departments are complying with the bag and tag policy. She also said workers are not obligated to bag and tag soiled items, and that these can be discarded without advising the owner to separate essentials.
However, when asked why there was no evidence that the city was following the policy regarding non-soiled items, Kwart declined to comment further.
The city also did not answer a question regarding which department is responsible for compliance with this policy.
Christin Evans, vice chair of the city’s Homelessness Oversight Commission, was not surprised that the city could not produce evidence of following its bagging and tagging policy.
“There’s been a systemic effort citywide to ignore those policies and push forward on a mandate that the mayor put in place to very aggressively sweep people,” she said. People commonly refer to encampment clearings as sweeps.
Evans said that the Department of Public Works “should hold themselves accountable to their own policies,” but ultimately, it’s up to the city attorney, the mayor and the Board of Supervisors to ensure that departments are in compliance.
Lack of training on encampment sweeps
This policy requiring staff to advise encampment dwellers to separate essential belongings from property being bagged and tagged has been in place since at least February 2022. However, documents and correspondence from the city suggest employees are not yet being fully trained to carry out the policy. If that were the case, the city could also be out of compliance with a court order.
The court order is the result of a lawsuit that the Coalition on Homelessness brought against San Francisco in 2022, alleging that the city violates unhoused people’s rights by destroying their property during sweeps, and that the city is not following its bag and tag policies.
In September, a judge ordered that officials update training slides for workers, giving them more detail about the bag and tag policy, how to carry it out and document its execution. The judge also set a deadline for relevant staff to be re-trained.
Officials produced new training materials with the required details, and added an instruction to workers to take photos of written acknowledgements from people subjected to sweeps. The Public Press requested these photos, and none were provided. A Public Works records custodian said in early December that this element of the training had not been implemented yet. The re-training deadline had already passed.
City officials did not respond to a request for clarification about whether any part of the updated training had been given, and did not comment on the court order.
Nisha Kashyap, an attorney with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area representing the Coalition on Homelessness in its lawsuit, described this as par for the course.
“That is the heart of this litigation, is the city’s failure to follow this policy, and by failing to follow policy, violating the rights of unhoused people to their property,” Kashyap said.
Loss of important items
Most of the time, unhoused people cannot or do not retrieve their confiscated property from the city. A recent investigation by ProPublica found that, over the course of a year and a half, property in San Francisco was reclaimed only about 12% of the time. After a mandated time period has passed, the city throws out items in storage. This can result in the loss of survival gear like sleeping bags or devices like wheelchairs, and create obstacles to obtaining housing and other resources.
The Public Press spoke to residents of encampments during two clearings in December. A few people said during those clearings that they had been advised to separate property they wanted to keep. However, they said they weren’t given adequate time to do so and some items they wanted to keep were then thrown in the trash instead of being bagged and tagged.
Others also shared previous experiences with the city, saying employees had taken property without warning. One man, Joel Beiswanger, said staff would yank property out of peoples’ hands.
Chocolate, a woman experiencing homelessness who did not want to share her last name, said that the Department of Public Works confiscated her purse, which contained her birth certificate, ID and social security card, during an encampment clearing in July. They did not give her information about where to get her purse later, she said, and she believes it was thrown out.
That has affected her ability to access services.
“You can’t do anything without ID,” she said.
