FRESNO, Calif. (AP) — Charlene Clay lost her asthma medicine, sleeping bags and her only photos of her dead granddaughter when city workers tore down her hillside encampment.
The people living there weren’t warned, she said. Within minutes, all that remained were the tire tracks of a dump truck, crumpled tents and a few stray belongings.
“All I can do now is close my eyes and remember what my granddaughter used to look like,” said Mrs. Clay, 48. “I couldn’t get any medicine for a week.”
The American Civil Liberties Union and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights are suing the city on behalf of Mrs. Clay and five others, claiming police and sanitation workers have violated the rights of the homeless for the past three years by defining their property as trash and bulldozing their encampments.
This week, they won a major victory.
U.S. District Judge Oliver W. Wanger, calling the city’s policy regarding homeless people’s property “dishonest and demeaning,” granted a preliminary injunction Wednesday ordering the city to stop seizing and destroying homeless people’s property without warning while the civil rights lawsuit winds through the courts.
“Persons cannot be punished because of their status,” the judge said. “They cannot be denied their constitutional rights because of their appearance, because they are impoverished, because they are squatters, because they are, in effect, voiceless.”
City officials argued that the homeless encampments are safety hazards, nuisances and hotbeds of crime.
“We see evidence of drug use, we see human feces, we see other materials that we would be concerned about,” Capt. Greg Garner testified. “If someone says this is my property, they’re allowed to keep it.”
But the judge said workers took people’s belongings without notice and didn’t give them an opportunity to claim their goods. He didn’t accept city attorney James Betts’ argument that Fresno doesn’t have the space, money or manpower to log and store belongings seized in the “cleanups.”
“This is very significant in protecting not just the rights of homeless people in Fresno, but nationally,” said Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. “It’s the court saying, ‘Yes, there are legal rights, constitutional rights that are at issue here and this case needs to go forward.’ ”
Mrs. Clay and her husband became homeless early this year when their apartment became too expensive. They couldn’t afford the down payment on a cheaper place, so they set up in the encampment, where they could still be together. After the raid, they moved their tent under a freeway, but then that site was raided, too, she said.
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