Berkeley Homeless Advocacy Group Demands Cessation of Brutal Harassment - Real Solutions

Despite the sleep deprivation torture tactics and repeated harassment by Berkeley Police; despite their repeated theft of homeless people's belongings in violation of Wilson v City of Los Angeles; despite the recent arrest of Mike Zint, one of their organizers, and earlier of Nanci Armstrong, a housed supporter and candidate for City Council, for lynching, First They Came for the Homeless, an advocacy group of homeless people in Berkeley, have and continue to maintain a visible presence near Berkeley City Hall.

It is one thing for Berkeley to reject, as it did on Friday morning, Trumpism on a national level. It is another to act locally with compassion and assistance, instead of harassment and mean-spiritedness, with respect those of its residents who have the least.

First They Came for the Homeless calls upon the new Arreguin Adminstration and the City Manager to immediately

• - Impose a moratorium on police raids of homeless tent villages.
• - Designate a location for a sanctioned tent village, as the cities of Oakland and Santa Rosa have done.
• - Renew the emergency shelter declaration and actually use it this year to provide meaningful housing alternatives by beginning to construct tiny homes and other alternative housing to provide truly affordable housing for those without the means to afford Berkeley's rents.
• - Immediately rescind the hateful anti-homeless ordinance language which restricts homeless people to two square feet of existence and forbids them from staying in one place with their possessions for more than two hours.

First They Came for the Homeless has been and continues to make visible the face of homelessness in Berkeley. Not content to sleep furtively under bushes so that the good burghers of Berkeley may ignore the homeless, they have pitched tents at old City Hall, on the Adeline median, at Adeline and Fairview, and most recently at new City Hall over the course of this last year. They demand the one thing that everyone needs - a place to call their own.