Street Spirit December 2005

San Diego's Massive Assault on the Poor

Incredibly, like a page from Dickens' horror stories of the 19th century, police are now arresting the poor for simply being poor.

by Rocky Neptun

As he sat in front of an Adams Avenue bookstore in San Diego, Thomas Dwyer, the token bohemian and resident hobo of Normal Heights, had his space, his niche in a cruel, uncaring, selfish world guaranteed by his appearance.

His long, silky, white hair; blowing in different directions, often touched his massive oyster-colored beard, framing a soft, ruddy expression. Poets saw him as Walt Whitman and others saw Thomas as one of those heroic mortals battling away on Mt. Olympus.

His presence added to the ambience of New Age refugees from a corporate-owned world desperate for a morsel of authenticity and substance. They glided between upscale shops and coffeehouses, while he sat at his station, sipped vodka, read and talked with passers-by.

Luckily, Thomas Dwyer missed the recent services at the Concourse for the 54 homeless people who died on city streets this year - San Diego's own peculiar, perverse Dia de los Muertos celebration every November. He would have enjoyed the songs, sung by the Rescue Mission's choir, and listened politely to the various prayers by several clergy, while the names of the dead were read.

Thomas, no doubt, would have been shocked and ashamed that this year, the San Diego City Council issued a proclamation designating November 1st as the Fourth Annual Homeless Memorial Day. His bitterness toward city officials at the first memorial service in 2002 was intense, where he was heard muttering, "The City Council should be here. First they kill these folks, then don't have the decency to say a prayer for them in public."

No one from the City Council attended this year's memorial either, and the turnout was the lowest in four years - fewer than 60 San Diegans, not counting those from the Rescue Mission.

Thomas loved people, hated hypocrisy. He would sit for hours on Adams Avenue, available to the curious. Their chatter, brisk chumminess, or their searching, trivial questions did not fool Thomas. He knew that, like a bizarre painting, they could not understand him. Yet they were drawn by the hope and possibility that, within this aberration, there was a clue to their own freedom from despair and isolation in an empty, cold world based on money and hierarchical illusions.

Thomas justified to himself and a few confidants that he hustled his spot in Yuppieville so that others could have a shelter bed downtown. He knew there were less than 2000 shelter beds for the over 8000 homeless folks in San Diego. He often raged against the increasingly brutal police persecution and abuse of his fellows because of the gentrification of the downtown area.

Escalating police harassment is reflected in the increased citation of homeless people for illegal lodging violations, up from a few hundred all during the 1990s, to 1,477 in 2003, just under 2,000 last year, and over 2,500 so far this year. Thomas was shielded from tickets but was bitter that he could not offer the safety of his lean-to, behind the bookstore, to a friend.

Thomas dies in jail

San Diego's holy war against the homeless finally caught up with Thomas Dwyer. He died while in police custody. Joining in death 109 others last year, Thomas was finally able to share his solidarity with other homeless people. Like another Greek myth, whose powerful enemy slays the champion of humans; the San Diego city government killed him. Presciently, Thomas used to say, "San Diego was becoming America's cruelest city."

Thomas Dwyer's disgust of politicians in San Diego was matched by his love for young people, as they struggled to make sense of a community based on artificial determinates of caste. He warned against hate talk, a mindset that strips away the humanity of the poorest of the poor, calling them bums, scum, filthy winos, and deadbeats, so that they can be hunted down like mad dogs, beaten, harassed, jailed and allowed to die, sick and alone as collateral damage in San Diego's war on the homeless.

There are the gang slayings of those refugees from downtown fleeing police persecution, moving into neighboring crime-ridden areas, as well as drownings, fatal snake-bites and the inflamed medical conditions of those pushed into marginal areas in the canyons and riverbeds.

Thomas often ranted that it's all about money and politics. "If the developers and speculators, the hooker politicians and the deceitful media can create a group of hunchbacks and ogres, dehumanized outcasts, then people will come to fear them. And out of that fear (or because of it, for people with a conscience) they will hate. And out of that hate, they will criminalize them." He often noted that, "the poor, and, particularly, the homeless, will become the persecuted Jews of our new 21st Century because power and wealth needs scapegoats and bogeymen."

Thomas used to get very melancholy around Christmas time, saying, "San Diego officials don't want to give the homeless space. They have bought into the corporate lie, the mythology of the system, that power and wealth is king, not compassion, equality and love - concepts for which Christ lived and died. I think of Christ: born in a stable, lived poor and homeless, had no possessions and was crucified naked on a cross. What would He say about our city's ethical poverty, its spiritual brokenness, that allows this group victimization by officials that seek to create a form of non-dignity of the despised so that their rich friends can profit."

San Diego bans meal programs

He was particularly bitter about the closing of the last legal open-air feeding area at 13th and Broadway in 2003. Located on city property, several area churches fed hot meals to around 300 people each night for 13 years; often half of those fed were women and children, while toward the end of the month, the numbers swelled by seniors lining up for food.

In 2003, Western Pacific Development corporation began building $400,000 condos on the opposite corner and, according to several homeless activists, bribed Housing Commission staff for the right to park their trucks and equipment on the lot during the day. As the project neared completion, they then sued the city because the lot wasn't zoned for a feeding program. With the help of former City Councilman Byron Wear - who has since gone to work for downtown developers - the city rolled over and lied, saying that there was nothing they could do, when, in fact, they simply had to vote for a variance.

Fiery 70-year-old Norma Rossi of the Inter-faith Coalition for the Homeless, several Nazarene pastors, and this writer were threatened with arrest after we tried to feed the crowd on the sidewalk, near the padlocked gate. Thomas didn't go that night because "a frightened community that arrests Christians for feeding the poor is too pitiful to watch."

Our city, on behalf of a few downtown developers and speculators, and by our silence, has created a culture of fear and hate. Thomas tried to understand and forgive what he called "our selfish ignorance and comfort zones."

He was no martyr; there was no Roman Coliseum or Nazi firing squad. He died on the cold, hard, spit-soaked floor of a holding tank, his head smashed into concrete, his beautiful white hair matted with blood. No one claimed his body; he was buried in a potter's field grave.

"Each of us must look into the mirror, peer deep into our eyes, touching that inner sanctum where our compassion and love - our soul, if you will - is housed and ask how complicit are we in the deaths of those who routinely die on our city streets," he advised. Once, reflecting on a 70-year-old woman friend who died in a dumpster, seeking shelter, he said, "evil, indeed, thrives, when good people do nothing; when that inner testimony, our moral integrity, fails to express itself in the outer sphere, our actions. We become crippled human beings, our creative spirituality stunted, our capacity for love, lost."

Renters Union Seeks International Intervention

Several groups in San Diego, including the San Diego Renters Union, are in the process of contacting the United Nations to ask about the procedure to request human rights observers to investigate the city's treatment of the homeless. They are also contacting international groups about the possibility of indictments at the World Court against San Diego City Council members for human rights violations, abuse of authority, neglect of responsibility and crimes against humanity, including negligent homicide.

Every human being must physically exist in some place. If they don't have the means to own (or rent) a private space, they must exist in public spaces. Every human being has the inherent need for food and drink (as well as the need to pass those nutrients) and the need for sleep. How simple it is.

Yet, we in San Diego simply cannot find the words to say, "it's okay to be human," and to understand that there are some who are just too fragile, too victimized in childhood, too traumatized by institutions (whether prisons or military service), too sick or unstable to exist in the dog-eat-dog world of American corporate-owned capitalism with its competitive fear, selfish priorities and rugged isolation.

This city; its council and its downtown corporations uses armed force, including city police, harbor police, campus police, border agents, trolley guards, and private security forces, to kill, maim, harass and create a climate of terror among homeless folks. Our officials develop the social processes of structural sin, as St. Paul would call it, which, working through the dark power of an economic system owned by those sick with the madness of addiction to wealth and possessions, creates systemic violence against the homeless.

San Diego City Council members are bedded down with developers and speculators such as Barratt American, Bosa Development, Intracorp, the Corky McMillian Company, Lennar, Prudential Real Estate, K. Hovnanian, Smart Center, Centex, Granite Gold and Jim Abbott & Associates. These developers ask for the heads of the homeless, if not on platters, at least run out of town. They would have us believe that homeless folks are non-persons, lepers, and ghosts wandering through their private hells, lazy and intent on crime.

First, as they developed the Gas Lamp Quarter, and, now, the East Village, these corporations brought in private militia, the San Diego Safe and Clean officers, in brown uniforms, reminiscent of the Nazi's early police, also in brown, also charged with eliminating the homeless (from Berlin streets). In addition, private guards like the Horton Plaza police (in white uniforms) and security thugs, particularly in Little Italy, were told to not only harass the homeless but to seize their belongings and throw them away whenever possible, to create a zone of terror so no vagabond would dare enter.

In our names, we have let an elite group of millionaires, with their cabal of economic cleansers, led by the Downtown Residential Marketing Alliance, the Downtown San Diego Partnership, that right-wing rag, the Union-Tribune, and the Centre City Development Corporation, prey upon the poor.

These groups, for their personal profit, have chosen to attack the victims of their own system; to demonize them as unworthy, assorted crazies and criminals, anesthetizing the citizenry to the brutality of its systemic persecution of the homeless where, incredibly, like a page from Dickens' horror stories of the 19th century, police have begun to arrest the poor for simply being poor.

The downtown elite and city officials practice what Father Richard Rohr calls "spiritual capitalism," a cultural hubris which says "we have the power to determine who is worthy," and to put their need for money as primary over human dignity. Those in power seek to create a public acceptance of an evil system that uses institutionalized violence against the poor.

These lies are culturally agreed upon and allow all of us to hide from the reality that the homeless face. Despair and rage develop in the human heart as we say "you are not worthy, you are of no value," and as the police harass so brutally and as the social providers and shelters seek to drive the disparagement inward, to develop self-loathing, because their budgets, their salaries, depend on a steady stream of new "clients."

Those that would economically cleanse San Diego of the poor classes use the full resources of the municipality - including its bureaucratic mercenaries - to close some feeding programs, threaten others to scale down to once or twice a week, and attack service providers. There is a reason, however disgusting and perverse it may be, that there is only one public restroom for the 15,000 residents of downtown and the 75,000 that work there.

The city attorney's office regularly meets with corporate groups to discover creative new ways to punish the poor, in an effort to class-cleanse certain downtown areas. They ask the judge to penalize some homeless persons with more days in jail for particular no-poor zones (especially those areas near newly constructed million-dollar condos).

If any other segment of our city's population were targeted in this manner, there would be an uproar. If we swishy ones were routinely beaten, harassed, ticketed or jailed, there would be "no wrath, no greater fury" than that from the powerful San Diego lesbian and gay community. If blacks were routinely targeted, what outrage would ensue. If over a hundred people died of neglect in La Jolla or Rancho Santa Fe, there would be a mob of rich people led by the Spanos, Moores and Jacobs, descending on City Hall for justice. Yet, here in San Diego, human beings are arrested for no other crime than being poor.

What a tragically sad, sick culture we leave our children! What a shining example of greed-based government and economics this beacon of profit-driven madness shows the rest of the world!

Rocky Neptun is director of the San Diego Renters Union and a member of the Peace and Justice Committee, Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). He is a former elected member of city government - mid-city planning board - and the former editor of the San Diego Street Light newspaper.

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