‘This is wicked’: Miami clears out Overtown homeless encampment despite CDC guidance
Homeless people living in an Overtown encampment in place for years said they were forcibly removed Wednesday morning — without any offer of another housing option.
The breakup of the site, later described by Miami police as a scheduled cleanup, flies in the face of advice from health experts on handling the homeless during a pandemic.
Wednesday evening, advocates including the Greater Miami ACLU and Southern Legal Counsel, sent a letter to leaders of Miami, Miami-Dade and the Florida Department of Transportation questioning the clear-out, calling it an “indefensible and inhumane assault.”
Residents of the underpass sounded the alarm while taking morning showers at a nearby sanitation station set up by nonprofit social justice organization Dream Defenders.
Rachel Gilmer, co-director of Dream Defenders, shot video of city staffers clearing out tents and dissembling campsites with rakes and a truck with a crane.
“The state is evicting them in the middle of a pandemic. It’s inhumane. It’s disgusting,” she said. “Their housing solution seems to be the jail right now. It’s really a shame.”
She said residents there told her police threatened to arrest them for trespassing if they didn’t leave within 30 minutes. Only one person told her they were offered housing — a hotel for one night.
“This is wicked,” Andre, a homeless man who’d lived in that spot for two years, said on video. “These people, they don’t care about anything.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has specifically urged against clearing encampments, which “can cause people to disperse throughout the community and break connections with service providers. This increases the potential for infectious disease spread.”
Unless individual housing is available, the CDC recommends encampments be kept in place with appropriate spacing between tents.
The city of Miami, which appears to have ordered the cleanup, has not responded to all of the Herald’s questions about the incident.
Tish Burgher, a spokesperson for the Florida Department of Transportation, said the City of Miami Overtown NET office asked FDOT staffers to help in a “joint cleanup” of the area.
“The City asked the contractor to be present so they can remove trash that is on the FDOT right of way,” she said in a statement.
Miami also asked FDOT to install no trespassing signs in the area. They installed some on the south side of Northwest 11th Street and north side of Northwest 10th Street a month ago, as well as new ones Tuesday on the north side of Northwest 11th Street and the south side of Northwest 10th Street.
Gilmer called a lawyer for the Community Justice Project, co-founder Meena Jagannath, to the scene for help. Jagannath said none of the homeless people she talked to were given a verbal warning about trespassing, and when Andre asked the sign installer what the no trespassing sign meant for them, he said he didn’t know.
“Usually for the crime of trespassing before you actually arrest people you have to issue a warning beforehand, and if they defy the warning there is cause for arrest,” she said. She believes the city intends to use the newly posted signs as the warning.
Deputy Miami Police Chief Ron Papier called the effort a regularly scheduled cleanup and said that the group was welcome to return to the sidewalk area after workers from the city’s solid waste department are done.
Papier said the city usually posts signs ahead of time and that no one was arrested and said people living there had been offered shelter.
He warned that people staying there needed to avoid the fenced-off area that is controlled by the Florida Department of Transportation.
Manny Morales, Miami police’s assistant chief of operations, said the clear-out was a coordinated effort across multiple city departments to pick up garbage that had piled up and to hose down the street.
Morales said such cleanups have continued in other areas of the city recently, and he couldn’t say why it hasn’t happened in Overtown in a few months.
“I don’t want it to come across that we went there with some nefarious intent,” he said. “We’re trying to bring services to this area, and to keep people safe.”
Terrance Cribbs-Lorrant, executive director of the nearby Historic Black Police Precinct Courthouse, said city crews have in the past come once or twice a month to clean the street, placing a notice ahead of time and allowing people to come back after the cleanup is finished.
Cribbs-Lorrant said he had not seen city workers do this since February, before the COVID-19 pandemic upended daily life in South Florida and the CDC advised against breaking up encampments. The “no trespassing” signs appear to have gone up overnight.
“A lot of this could have been prevented if people had been sheltered earlier,” he said.
Dr. Armen Henderson, a University of Miami physician who leads homeless COVID-19 testing for Dream Defenders, questioned why the city would choose to defy CDC guidance and clear out a homeless encampment during a pandemic.
“Why are you trying to do this? You know you don’t have the capacity to house all of these individuals. Why not leave them alone?” he said.
Ron Book, chairman of the Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust, said he had no knowledge of the clearing of the encampment and said the outreach staff member on site works for the city of Miami, not the trust. No one asked him about finding housing for anyone displaced.
“I am completely unaware of any placements needs they have. We would work to accommodate anything they have,” he said.
Miami’s homeless are protected from undue police harassment under a landmark legal agreement stemming from a class action suit against the city. The Pottinger Agreement prevents Miami police from arresting unsheltered people for “life-sustaining” activities like sleeping on the sidewalk and urinating in public.
A federal judge dissolved those protections in 2019, saying the city’s increased resources for the homeless provide a big enough social safety net, but the decision is under appeal. The city’s position is the agreement still applies throughout the appeal.
In the letter sent to local leaders Wednesday night, which called “every agency involved in any way” responsible for the incident, the authors suggested the consent decree was still needed.
“Today’s sweep shows the culture of abuse has not changed,” the letter read. “It would be unfortunate if the only way for us to secure the City’s, County’s, and State’s respect for the constitutional rights of these vulnerable homeless residents, particularly amidst the global pandemic, were to return to federal court with another lawsuit.”
This story was originally published May 13, 2020 at 5:09 PM.
