San Jose Police's Drive to Get Rid of the Homeless
A Personal Account of Downtown After It Gets Dark
Story by Alex Gutierrez

Red and blue lights flash through the center of Fourth and San Fernando Street. Police cars pull up. Five officers slipped out of their vehicles, and you could hear the sound as their boots hit the ground. They pull out their bright flashlights and beam them though my sleeping bag. The lights are so bright I could feel the beams burning my skin as the light touches me. It's two in the morning, my family and I are sleeping on the street because we have no other place to go, and the police want us to answer questions. “Does everyone have ID?” the officer says to my family. I pulled out our identification and handed it over to the officers. They did a routine check on our names. As usual, our names come out clean. Regardless of the fact that my family is not bothering anyone, and are just tying to rest, the police tell us that we are loitering, so we have to vacate the premises. This evening, the police are doing what they are doing more and more of -- driving out the homeless of San Jose.

More now than ever, the police have made it a habit to smother the downtown San Jose area, giving homeless people citations and warnings, just knocking everyone down deeper and deeper in debt.

The downtown area of San Jose has been known for the homeless to be sleeping on the streets, in parking lots, alleyways, and the cold steel bus stop benches. Lately, SJPD have been cracking down on the homeless of all kind -- youth, families, elderly, and disabled during night time. Even after it gets dark, I feel that we still have rights as human beings, not to be treated like some dark secret that should be locked away in a shelter on the outskirts of the city.

I believe the police are upping their game so they can be rid of what's left of the current downtown area. As it is, downtown San Jose is doing a lot of renovating, and I think that with the new changes, homeless will have to move on along with what's left of the old, fading downtown scene.

The most common thing police say to us to justify their efforts to kick us out of where we are sleeping is to say they've been called in by the public. They'll say they got called about adults contributing to the delinquency of minors, or the classic, “there was a disturbance call for trespassing.” Sometimes they'll say that they got a call about us “breaking and entering,” even though nothing is broken and the family is still sleeping on the sidewalk on the outside.

The most common thing the police will say to us is to go to a shelter, but they don't understand how limited and dangerous those shelters are. Pretty much all shelters are set up away from the rest of the world. The most common shelter, Emergency Housing Consortium, is a shelter down the street from a cemetery, towards the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds. If they take you in, which is not a given, you get to enjoy the pleasures of sleeping with one eye open, having the risk of being robbed or being beat down in your sleep. How the Emergency Housing Consortium works is that you have to show up at or a little before 3:00 P.M just to enter a raffle for bedding. That is why having a cop tell you to go to the shelter at two in the morning makes no sense. At the time of the raffle, they choose a certain number of names by the number of beds they have available at the time being. If your name is not chosen after the quotas are up, you're out of luck. Their best advice is to let you know that if you leave now, you can catch bus 22 to make it to the Sunnyvale Armory, which is in the heart of Sunnyvale. Now, that's when decision making gets dangerous, because now if you got money you must decide, shall I eat or have a warm place to sleep until 5:00 A.M. But also too, that's only if you have enough money to go to Sunnyvale, and to come back from Sunnyvale. Even if you make it to Sunnyvale you need to come back to get your meals at the local churches in the downtown San Jose area. So when people tell you to go to a shelter, that its better than sleeping outside, that is when you know they have never been to a shelter before.

People should know that all the homeless in downtown are not just looking for free hand outs. There is a difference between free hand outs and helping hands, some of us just need a boost to get out of our current situations. The City does not help by having the police kicking homeless deeper into the hole of debt by giving us tickets for loitering, or making it impossible for us to stay in one place. It is like were being migrated by around the police from block to block, whenever they tell us to move. How do they expect us to get rest to look for work if we can't even sleep?