With the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Johnson v. Grants Pass, Oakland no longer has any excuse for not immediately clearing our parks and other public spaces of all illegal encampments.
For years the City Council and Mayor have avoided taking this step by hiding behind a legal fig leaf: a lower court ruling, originally known as Martin v. Boise (2019), that prohibited cities from evicting campers if there was not enough available shelter to house them. This excuse was never valid, because Martin v. Boise didn’t explicitly spell it out, but it provided enough wriggle-room for cities like Oakland to avoid taking any action whatever against tent camps.
SCOTUS now has ripped away that fig leaf. Even San Francisco has announced it will get tougher with encampments following the Grants Pass ruling.
On the other hand, here in Oakland, there’s been nothing but silence.
As the Coalition has pointed out, the progressives who have run this city for years deliberately allowed encampments to spread across the city. They could have stopped it anytime they wanted, but they refused. You’d have to ask the individuals involved—Sheng Thao, Nikki Bas, Carroll Fife, Dan Kalb, Rebecca Kaplan and former mayor Libby Schaaf—why they allowed tent camps to proliferate. Most likely you’d receive in answer something along the lines of “Martin v. Boise”—“Oh, we’d love to clear out the camps. But the courts won’t let us.” But the truth is far more sinister: progressives believed that the camps were politically helpful in driving Oakland even further to the left, and so not a tent was to be interfered with.
To be fair, SCOTUS’s decision, however sweeping, is actually fairly narrow. All the Court did was determine that clearing tent slums does not violate the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, the prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishment.” It was this proviso that the pro-encampment supporters based their case on: if clearing encampments was unconstitutional, they reasoned, end of story: encampments could not be cleared. Most of us who were familiar with the facts as well as the Constitution knew that this was a fabrication—an absurdity. That cities were unable to enforce their own laws regarding the use of public spaces because of some supposed “right” to live in and soil our parks was ridiculous and counter to centuries of Western civilization. We knew it was only a matter of time before SCOTUS said so; and while the wheels of justice grind slowly, they grind exceedingly fine. SCOTUS has finally awoken: cities have every right to eliminate homeless slums and to arrest homeless people who refuse to leave.
But—and it’s a big but: Nothing in Johnson v. Grants Pass compels cities to clear encampments. They are legally entitled to do so, if they wish, but they don’t have to. And let’s be clear on this: Oakland will never, ever make the slightest move to clear our parks, unless and until they’re compelled to. But what can compel them? Under our federal system, nothing. Neither Sacramento nor Washington can force Oakland to act if Oakland doesn’t want to. If anyone even tried to, it would result in more lawsuits, tying up all parties in endless court fights, and even if Oakland lost the battle, they still could refuse to act, and then what?
The answer is that nothing will ever change until we, the voters, change the politicians who got us into this mess in the first place. It’s going to take a complete washing-out of our current leaders, with their cynicism and twisted ideology. How simple things would be if we had a Mayor give a speech—with the Police Chief by her side—in which she said, “With this Supreme Court decision, I am now ordering the Oakland Police Department to clear every encampment, in every city park and on every city street, and to cite any individuals who refuse to comply with my order.” Within days, our public spaces would be cleaned; pedestrians would no longer have to cross the street to avoid dirty tents with spooky and possibly dangerous inhabitants, dodging urine puddles and feces and hypodermic needles on the sidewalk. We could replace the tents with flower planters and become once again a safe, orderly city.
But while the current power structure—Thao, Bas, Fife, Kaplan, Kalb, Gallo, and their buddies—remains, with their idealistic socialist fantasies of social equity, so will the encampments. And the wokes will have achieved their dream: to make Oakland so uninhabitable, so horrendous, that no one wants to live here anymore. Property values and rents will continue to plummet; crime will continue to explode; Oakland will become a huge dysfunctional ghetto; the City Hall commissariat will impose ever higher business and property taxes to bleed dry whoever remains in a decaying city; and the death cycle will continue.
And where will the rousted campers go? To be brutally frank, that’s their problem. Brooke Jenkins, the S.F. District Attorney, was correct when she said that homeless people “have to be made to be uncomfortable.” Cities that rolled out the red carpet to them, as Oakland did, have endured measureless suffering as a result. There’s a good reason why so many people don’t feel sorry for the homeless anymore: we’ve observed them for years, and realized they’re mostly asocial misfits, purposely living gangster lives outside the norm of human civilization. I’m not saying we shouldn’t offer them any services. But it’s time for some tough love.
Steve Heimoff