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HOMELESS
Apparently Stealing From the Homeless Is Allowed
Because life, liberty, and all that doesn’t include your possessions
This is disgusting. According to reporting by ProPublica, some cities conduct unannounced sweeps of homeless tent cities and take everything away without notice. This is considered to be legal because the occupants are squatting.
The seized property is supposed to be identified and stored. Owners are supposed to receive information on how to recover their property. However, items often disappear, possibly due to theft by the sweep or warehouse workers.
Even when possessions are stored, the records showed, people are rarely able to reclaim them. In Portland, which stores the most among the cities ProPublica reviewed, property was reclaimed 4% of the time during a recent 12-month period. In San Francisco, property was reclaimed roughly 12% of the time over 18 months; much of what the city stored was collected after contact with police. Records provided to ProPublica by Anaheim, California, showed nothing had been retrieved from January 2023 through May of this year.
https://www.propublica.org/article/homeless-encampment-removals-property-storage
Shouldn’t we expect better in a country that supposedly promotes life, liberty, and justice for all?