(Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
By Curtis Brodner
(BELLINGHAM, Wash.) Bellingham Police on Thursday destroyed a homeless camp at City Hall a day earlier than scheduled in an attempt to avoid protests that were planned to block the action, reported KIRO 7.
Despite the change of date, protesters arrived and formed a small, make-shift barricade with wooden palettes. Police arrested four demonstrators and succeeded in displacing the homeless people by 5 p.m.
Mayor Seth Fleetwood said in a press conference that the city accelerated their plans for the sweep after receiving information that “agitators” had “put out a call throughout the Northwest to gather in Bellingham on Friday.”
The threat of outside agitators was a common trope employed by the Ku Klux Klan to demonize northerners protesting Jim Crow laws, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Before that, the same trope was used to attack slavery abolitionists.
“The same trope appeared over and over,” wrote political scientist George Ciccarello-Maher in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece. “‘Outside agitators’ must be riling up the locals. It became a staple rationalization among members of the Ku Klux Klan.”
The people who showed up on Thursday to protest were mostly locals.
“I feel troubled about it,” demonstrator Aiden Ellsworth, a student at Western Washington University in Bellingham, told KIRO 7. “Why are there armed guards? Why are there people on the roofs? No one is starting violence.”
Fleetwood said he decided to authorize the sweep due to undesirable behavior from the homeless people living there.
“We have seen tensions rise and an increase in violence, threats to people who walk by, mental health episodes, likely drug transactions and other criminal behavior,” Fleetwood said.
The city intended to move the homeless people to shelter beds, but many of the former camp residents struggle with addiction, and the shelters don’t allow drug use.
Indoor shelters also put homeless people at higher risk for coronavirus infection, according to the CDC.
“If individual housing options are not available, allow people who are living unsheltered or in encampments to remain where they are,” CDC guidelines say. “Clearing encampments can cause people to disperse throughout the community and break connections with service providers. This increases the potential for infectious disease spread.”
Volunteers helped homeless people displaced by the sweep move to another unauthorized homeless encampment at nearby Civic Field.