City to probe sweep of homeless camp

By Timothy Pratt

Monday, Feb. 21, 2005 | 10:55 a.m.

North Las Vegas officials are scheduled to meet Tuesday to investigate the cleanup of a homeless camp of up to 100 men and women, according to city spokeswoman Brenda Johnson.

The cleanup, which occurred Wednesday, was the result of ongoing community complaints about a growing camp on public and private property along Owens Avenue, across the street from the Salvation Army, Johnson said.

But the move, which some homeless men and women said caused them to lose personal possessions including identification, alarmed public and private officials.

"That sort of action would be an obvious violation of civil rights," said Gary Peck, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada.

"Anybody whose property has been seized and who have been given no opportunity whatsoever to retrieve their possessions ... raises serious constitutional issues."

Johnson said that personnel from the Public Works Department -- the lead agency in the cleanup -- told her people were given a chance to remove their possessions from the site. She said all property left at the site was taken to the municipal dump.

However, she said, "The city will follow up on any allegations of misconduct by employees or mistreatment of individuals and take appropriate action." All agencies involved will meet Tuesday "to find out what happened."

The Rev. Charles Bowker, chairman of the Southern Nevada Homeless Coalition, said the cleanup, together with the breakup of three other camps in as many months, is creating "a diaspora of refugees" in the Las Vegas Valley.

As in the previous actions, private and public officials called for more communication between municipalities so that help can be offered to the homeless even when it is necessary to enforce the law.

Paula Haynes-Green, who became the valley's first regional coordinator of homeless services last year -- and whose salary is paid by all area municipalities, including North Las Vegas -- said she wasn't informed about the cleanup beforehand.

"Whenever possible, if actions are taken that disrupt the homeless, we would like to see a notification given to my office -- and not the day of the action -- to do everything possible to get people housed or to some other place of safety," she said.

Bowker said recent events suggest it may be time to develop "an official encampment" somewhere in the valley, since there is a cycle destined to repeat itself.

"What you're going to do is have people moving up the street and then someone else will complain," he said.

Johnson said that businesses neighboring the site complained to the code enforcement division of the Planning and Development Department three times in the last year.

That division then passed on a work order to public works, which arrived Wednesday morning to clean up the site, together with North Las Vegas Police, Johnson said.

Tim Bedwell, spokesman for North Las Vegas Police, said city officials "had exhausted every effort to get them to leave on their own."

Police had also told them they were trespassing and should move along, he said.

"If they would've left the day before ... they would've been able to keep their things," he said.

Bedwell said North Las Vegas Police get "hundreds of complaints about transient camps ... (and are) forced to balance the need to uphold the law with the need to respect their rights."

He also said that in a case where law enforcement and public agency officials have repeatedly told homeless people to vacate private property or a public right-of-way, "on the day we come, we're not going to wait around all day."

A man who only gave his name as Charles said he was sleeping in a tent by the railroad tracks on Owens when police came through about 8:30 a.m. Wednesday and told him, "'Pack up your stuff, there's a cleanup crew down the street."'

His girlfriend, Jana, had already headed out to work.

He packed their tent, clothes and other possessions into three shopping carts and took them down to the sidewalk on Owens, where the cleanup had already begun.

Then, he said, an officer told him to leave the carts behind, and only let him take some of his possessions from the carts before telling him to "get outta here."

He said he lost his girlfriend's California state identification, Social Security card and birth certificate.

Others -- including several men who were pushed out of other camps in recent months -- said they had friends who lost their possessions in the cleanup.

Peck said he went to the site Thursday night and spoke to three other people who also had their things taken in the cleanup.

Bowker said recent efforts to deal with camps around the valley make it hard for private and public agencies trying to help them get off the streets.

"The more you push them around, the more invisible they become and the more resistant and distrustful they become," he said.

"You're producing a population of refugees."