When it’s all you own, it’s not trash. Miami, stop destroying homeless people’s possessions | Opinion

Imagine they came into your house. Big men. Angry-looking men. They don’t have guns other than their well-toned biceps, but standing behind them are the men in uniforms. They have the guns.

Imagine they start grabbing your most treasured possessions: family photos from your childhood; the urn with your mother’s ashes; the years-long research you’ve been doing to create a family tree.

As you’re being forced to sit on the floor of your living room, they grab your sofa, your favorite comfy chair and that little table beside the chair on which a half-read novel sits. They grab the book as well.

You, beyond distraught, object and try to get up, try to stop them, try at least to grab back that urn, but they physically stop you. You have high blood pressure and a heart condition, to boot, and, with the stress of the moment mounting, you go to grab a dose of your medications, but they’ve taken those as well.

Then, with everything piled into a heap in the front yard, they tell you that you can’t live in your house any more.

The only thing they tell you before they cart all your possessions away is, “We’ll be back.”

This is not a far-fetched scenario for the unsheltered people living in Overtown and on the outskirts of downtown Miami.

In recent weeks, all the items I mentioned in that hypothetical horror story, in fact, were seized and destroyed by city outreach workers, known as Green Shirts, backed by Miami Police Department officers — the ones with the guns. Their homes, the tents that provided them with a modicum of privacy and protection from the elements, were seized and destroyed, along with life-sustaining medications; ID cards and difficult-to-replace birth certificates; irreplaceable family photos; and an urn containing the ashes of one woman’s mother, taken in their most heinous act of all.

On Aug. 2, the Green Shirts, the police and a cleaning crew, all of whom make up a multi-departmental unit called the Homeless Empowerment Assistance Team — HEAT — descended on encampments on 10th and 11th streets and seized and destroyed all of people’s property, according to independent interviews I conducted with about two dozen encampment residents.

As one of the encampment residents told me, “We value our stuff more than housed people.”

This was not the first time that I’d gotten wind of such coordinated Green Shirt-police department barbarism. In 2013, while assisting a legal team in the lead-up to a modification of the landmark Pottinger v. Miami settlement agreement, I’d documented virtually identical instances of mass theft and property trashing by a number of Green Shirts.

The Pottinger agreement, which was terminated almost three years ago by U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno, had protected the rights of homeless people to engage in life-sustaining activity for more 20 years. Apparently, it was terminated way too soon.

“The nature of the cleanups has totally reverted to the ways in the ’80s, early ’90s,” attorney Benjamin Waxman told me in a recent email exchange. Waxman led the Pottinger legal team, beginning with the case’s filing in 1988. The agreement was finalized 10 years later, following a circuitous journey through the federal courts.

Now, on top of the ongoing encampment sweeps, which began earlier this year, and were dramatically ramped up in August, the city is considering an ordinance that would ban encampments in public space throughout Miami. The measure was introduced by Commissioner Joe Carollo, and passed by a 4-1 vote in September. Only Commissioner Ken Russell dissented.

Activists and attorneys monitoring these developments will be at the ready on Oct. 14, when this horrendous ordinance comes up for final passage.

Jeff Weinberger, founder of the October 22nd Alliance to End Homelessness, has been advocating for the rights of people experiencing homelessness in South Florida for more than 12 years. The Alliance will stage a rally against the anti-homeless proposal at 9 a.m. Oct. 14 at Miami City Hall, 3500 Pan American Dr.