Whoever is running HSD's Twitter account (perhaps the same notoriously combative person who runs their website?) is spending their morning yelling at people that the sweeps team doesn't do sweeps, that forcing people to leave where they live isn't displacement, etc.
Conversation
Weird priority for a human services agency, but I always have time to combat misinformation so I'm just gonna respond to these real quick one by one.
3
3
34
"Offers of shelter" are meaningless if they aren't a) appropriate shelter and b) coupled with extensive outreach with no intimidating cops present and transportation to the shelter. MOST "offers" do not result in actual sheltering, according to HSD's own numbers, in NORMAL times.
1
10
45
The Nav Team was going by to drop off bars of soap and flyers as well as info about Hep A vaccines. Great! But they only have two social workers actually trained in outreach to vulnerable people. The rest are HSD staff and cops.
1
3
28
REACH, which does nothing but outreach and social service work, stopped participating in the Nav Team's regular activities when they switched more than 90% of their work over to doing no-notice sweeps. There is reason to question the quality of "outreach" done by armed police.
1
7
38
The use of "unlawful" in this tweet is also interesting. HSD and explicitly said that they would not remove encampments during the pandemic except in an "emergency"—being "unlawful" (i,e. existing in a public space) was not among the list of qualifications they gave.
1
5
35
On to the next few. Of course people were displaced. Anyone with eyes could go there on Saturday and come back on Monday and see that most people had been displaced by Monday morning. Then the Nav Team came through and removed the rest. This is the most Orwellian of the bunch.
1
1
24
Interestingly, the "campers" (gross) have repeatedly been told line contradicts what HSD has told me repeatedly, which is that they were "just doing outreach" and not urging people to leave. So if that's true, HSD has not been truthful in the past. (I suspect it isn't).
1
1
27
Although, IDK, HSD repeats it twice, so maybe the "just outreach" they've been doing was even less useful than I thought. "Hi, here's some soap and a Hep A flyer, now also GTFO of here in the middle of a pandemic"?
1
20
Obviously they're sweeping people. Previous attempts to find sanitized synonyms for sweeps include "cleanups" and my favorite, "cleans." "Encampment removals" is neutral but also makes it clear what is happening—people are being swept from one place to somewhere else.
1
2
22
Next up: Saying "everyone knows" and writing in a weird passive-voice construction does not make a statement true. It does look weirdly defensive, though.
1
22
One thing that "is well known," however, is that people rarely follow through on "offers" of shelter. A guy who got a referral to the Navigation Center yesterday told me had no idea where or what the Navigation Center was, for example.
2
21
As I've reported, and based on the Nav Team's old NON-pandemic numbers, just 23 percent of people with "offers" actually show up at shelter, or 6% of those "contacted" by the team, a number that has almost certainly gone down during the pandemic.
1
14
And as I reported yesterday, there were 15 people left by Monday morning—the place was mostly empty when the sweep began—and most of them were men. 7 of the 12 spaces on offer for those 15 people were women-only, and 2 were for couples only.
1
1
19
If all 15 had "accepted" and followed through with shelter offers, there would not be enough "guaranteed spaces" in enhanced shelters and THVs. The system only works if most people don't follow through. That's how it's designed to work.
2
6
27
The alternative at that point would have been to find spaces in the already too-crowded mass shelters run by Salvation Army, Catholic Community Services, etc, which are petri dishes for disease because everyone shares the same space.
1
18
Finally, there's the assertion (which HSD has made repeatedly) that there is a large Hep A outbreak associated specifically with the Commons. Last month, according to King County Public Health, the growth of cases actually SLOWED, with 6 new cases among homeless people in Ballard
1
17
HSD told me unequivocally that have not linked cases specifically to the Commons, but that has not stopped the city's Human Services Department from asserting that scattering people from this single small park will hinder the spread of hepatitis.
1
1
18
I'm not an epidemiologist, but it's hard for me to draw a straight line from 6 cases in the general Ballard area to "this park is the source of hepatitis A and must be swept," especially given the large homeless population in Ballard overall.
1
1
18
Señor Moose, a restaurant a couple miles away, had as many cases in a week or so as homeless people in the Ballard area did in a whole month, and somehow the county found a way to close them for 5 days and do tons of tests instead of razing the building.
4
4
32
Finally, just want to re-emphasize how weird it is that HSD is using its clout as a government agency to go after random Twitter people who don't like their policy. Especially in the middle of a global pandemic that is impacting so many of the people it serves.
1
26
Sorry, last thing. HSD says the encampment was removed because it's illegal to sleep in parks. If that is now the official city standard, there are 1000s or 1000s of people who will need to be immediately removed from parks during the pandemic. Do they have beds for all of them?
2
4
25