Philadelphia Police Harrass Homeless Philadelphians

The subterranean halls of Suburban Station and the catacombs below City Hall have long served as a place where Philadelphians without homes turn as a last resort for shelter from the cold. Non-profit homeless shelters can be unsafe and unwelcoming, places where one’s belongings can be stolen while one sleeps, doors close early, and restrictive policies result in many being turned away. Drop-in daytime cafes, run in winter months, offer a heated place to sit (although sleeping is officially prohibited) but “dropping in” requires trips to various agencies to get one’s name on a list, and even then the cafes are open only for 8 hours a day and their capacity is limited in the worst cold emergencies to only 125 people -- while the lists include nearly double that many names.

With few other workable options, many find a place to sit out of the cold in the public train stations underground. However, in January, Center City’s Ninth Police District began what they disturbingly call a “quality-of-life initiative,” designed to promote arrests of those who the city deems undesirable. (“Two Sides of the Street,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Sun, Feb. 24, 2008). Police have been aggressively hounding those who appear to be homeless in Suburban Station. They have also repeatedly threatened to arrest volunteer groups, including Food Not Bombs and local churches, for sharing food in or near the Station. In January, police began to patrol the Station in groups of up to six officers, where before they patrolled the halls by themselves. These gangs of officers have been observed driving people out of the station, discriminating based on appearance, and smashing people’s personal property in their efforts to force them out into the streets. The station’s halls are now often littered with cardboard mats and bags of belongings, apparently left behind as police drive people out into the cold.

These evictions occur regardless of temperature, during snowstorms, and even during “Code Blues” -- or city-declared cold emergencies. When temperatures plummet to unsafe levels, Code Blue emergency services go into effect. Teams in vans patrol the streets offering rides to shelters, where relaxed regulations permit extra cots and beds to be stuffed into nooks and crannies. But now, the City has changed the way it defines Cold Blue -- altering the threshold by several degrees and refusing to take wind-chill into account. On nights when the temperature is 35 degrees, but winds create frigid sub-freezing conditions, shelters are held to stringent regulations and lower maximum occupancies levels are enforced.

Meanwhile, Nutter has been giving mainstream press interviews expressing disdain and outright animosity to homeless Philadelphians. In the same Inquirer article, he claimed that at night, “Center City becomes ‘a Philadelphia version of a South African shantytown.’” As spring nears, it remains to be seen what new forms the mayor’s drive to “clean-up” Center City by endangering not only the basic liberties, but at times the very lives, of those he and the Philly Police deem “undesirable” will take.