Recently I was witness to another example of Salt Lake City’s failed homeless policy as the residents of Fort Pioneer were evicted. The camp abatement, under an anonymous and industrial-feeling overpass very much out-of-the way and ironically within eyeshot of the silo at Deseret Industries’ “welfare square,” displaced well over a hundred people.
Some people left early out of self-preservation, but many were not able or simply refused. Living on the street has cost these working folk and any who refused to be evicted their means of survival – tents and warm bedding, work tools and clothes, and anything else worth holding on to from vital medicines to family members’ ashes, even the identification needed to access future services.
And what is the cost to the taxpayers of this abuse of power? We will never know the true cost of the countless police officers in bullet-proof vests making time and half, the multiple dump trucks making trips back and forth to the dump, the tow trucks trailing cars and RVs to the already overcrowded impound lots from other sweeps, health department and city pickups roaming around. All of these resources we assign over and over to repeatedly upend the lives of a few stray humans and then do it again next week. The dollar cost for each operation is measured in hundreds of thousands surely, not to mention the fundraisers that follow for impound and bail fees. The emotional trauma and fallout from losing your home and having nothing is even harder to measure, let alone overcome.
Mayor Mendenhall blames other cities in the valley for kicking the homeless down the road. Other city mayors in the valley blame the state Legislature or the health department for the abatements. If you ask around enough, the sweeps would appear to be nobody’s responsibility.
But the police are not funding themselves, they tend to do what they are told.
Although nobody with the required power was willing to stop this particular abatement (despite only four shelter beds available that day), the recent sweep has been but one of many, and it will surely not be the last. The evicted people are likely camping in another anonymous spot; I hope their sleep goes uninterrupted.
Rather than continuing to spend tax money on police-driven health abatements, why don’t we just provide the missing services such as bathrooms and showers, garbage removal, warming tents and blankets?
Jake Trimble, Salt Lake City
