Swept: How Authorities in Los Angeles use Sanitation Sweeps to Criminalize Unhoused People

[Text]

Over 75,000 people are without housing in the county of Los Angeles.

The city has authorized LA Sanitation to conduct systematic clearings of unhoused encampments, enforced by the Los Angeles Police Department.

The operations are known as 'sweeps.'

Numbers of unsheltered residents continue to increase as wages fall far behind the cost of housing.

Six unhoused people die every day in LA County.

swept
part one

[We see a small encampment next to a canal.]

MICHELLE: They woke us up this morning telling us that they're going to do a clean sweep, and that to grab what we can, and to get out. Because they were taking everything else.

They take our food. They took all my underclothes. They took all my shoes. They leave us with no resources. So we're stuck here until we can manage to get something to eat or clean water or whatever it is, because they don't care.

I've been here four years on the river, and they've done this to us three times already.

Everybody gets to arguing. 

Everybody gets to fighting. 

Your relationship falls apart. 

Your family falls apart.

I was a manager of a laundromat. The minute Covid hit the owner he was gone. Took all the money from all the machines. He left me there with nothing. I lost my job, I lost my house. It's mainly me, my family. My son, my boyfriend, my friend.

This is our home right here. Because we're together. I feel like I'm the mom. Everybody comes to me, like, "What are we going to do? What are we going to do?" I don't know anymore.

If we don’t stick together... we won’t make it.

PETE WHITE, Los Angeles Community Action Network: Over the last decade here in Los Angeles, houselessness has exploded.

The city has made the choice to use criminalization and sweeps as the answer to houselessness. 

Criminalization, in the most simple sense, is the use of laws and policies and regulation to arrest, displace and banish poor people
from places that government does not want to see them.

BECKY DENNISON, Venice Community Housing: I cannot answer the question as to why Los Angeles, or any other locality would still be using a criminalization model. It clearly does not work.

Los Angeles has the most unhoused people and for many, many years was using the most punitive criminalization measures.

And then if you put the institutional racism on top of that, Black folks are something like seven or eight times overrepresented in the unhoused community.

[Several police officers and city workers are seen conducting a sweep.]

MAN: They can’t throw my family heirloom away!

PETE WHITE, voiceover: Most people, when they hear the word "sweeps," they think like sweeping the sidewalks is a great thing. But sweeping an encampment, this entails scores of police. Heavy industrial equipment. 

Where else in the world would one use a bulldozer to remove a camping tent? 

[Person with megaphone]: People are going to be sitting on the side of the curb, trying to figure out how they're gonna get the money to buy a stick of deodorant. This is very violent.

You have a man who has a whole mechanic shop out here. And you guys just bulldoze people’s stuff away, like it don’t mean nothing.

[A person carries a ladder away from police.]

He wants his ladder. He wants his ladder, man.

PETE WHITE, voiceover: Once we actually understand the purposes of a sweep, and that purpose is not to help get the individual into housing, then we understand that there's something really broken with this system.

[pause]

[A man examines the contents of a box outside.]

HARVEY: Want some Narcan? Joanna brought me a whole box again, and it’s good until 2026. That's good.

I'm not a drug addict. I don't want to do it. But then again, I can't turn my back.

That's one thing I will never do, is turn my back on somebody who needs stuff like this.

I've been doing it for the 24, next month will be 25 years that I've been living out here.

Now we have to move.

[We see a flier taped to a utility pole with the title "NOTICE MAJOR CLEA" and a date and time.]

I get it that they want to fix this up, and that's why we have to leave. But we're not gonna be able to come back.

Shouldn’t have had all this stuff.

They’re gonna fence it. They're gonna put a fence here so that nobody can come in here to stay.

We are a community. When you see a group of homeless people, that's community.

[Standing in a tent encampment as people pack belongings into a truck, Harvey hugs a woman.]

HARVEY: Thank you for coming.

HARVEY, voiceover: They're all set up near each other, that's community. But see, they don't see it that way. They don’t see that we actually can protect each other.

I became homeless after I lost my house due to a fire.

I was on the freeway, I was moving in, I was coming over here to LA.

All of a sudden, I started getting tunnel vision.

And I went to the doctor and I was shaking, really shaking so much that he just stood there looking at me, and he knew that it was the Parkinson's.

I can feel that it wants to act up. I'm not young anymore, so I really wish I had my own place, that would help me with not only getting off the streets, but it would also help me with my medical problems.

If I start to shake at least it’ll be in private. Not in a tent.

[pause]

[Two women walk across a street. One of them is pulling a wagon full of paper bags.]

SONJA: So we do a lot of outreach at the Grand.

We haven't done around the building yet, so that's why we were talking. Because there's a lot of unhoused people right here.

People get lost. Like when they look at somebody that's unhoused. They just see this, like, drug-addicted, damaged person.

They don't ever look at someone like, oh, they have a family.

That's some down there? Yeah. Down there.

[Sonja and her companion are talking with a man next to a tent.]

MAN: How much is it?

SONJA: It’s free.

MAN: I’ll take it.

SONJA, voiceover: Pretty much most of Los Angeles is a paycheck away from being unhoused.

You could lose your job, lose a spouse, have something maybe traumatic happen and maybe lose your mind for a moment.

It could happen to anybody. I've met lawyers. I have a friend who used to be a nurse. It's the worst feeling in the world to have somebody walk by you like you're not even there.

[Sonja walks by a broken fence along a street.]

So yeah, we used to stay right here, like along this fence. 

So you can tell where mine is, see where the cutout is? That hole right there? 

[laughing] We had that hole!

I lived right there for the majority of the time that I was unhoused. Close to seven years.

Every Tuesday, all of that area would get swept.

It would be like half the police for was out there. Like are you kidding me?

The minute eight o'clock would hit, they would throw up the tape. And if you didn't have one thing, you lost it. They didn’t care. They would throw your s**t away, and not even think twice about it.

[Images of black & white photos.]

I had a lot of personal family photos. Things from my dad who passed away, and they got swept.

It was like super demeaning, you know?

And, you know, I sat in that space for a really long time when I was unhoused.

Like I was undeserving of doing better.

PETE WHITE: So of course the effects of criminalization on houseless people, it's a horrible disruption.

GENERAL DOGON, Human Rights Organizer, LACAN: They start off. They don't come and just unzip your tent and walk in. No. They start off with a razor blade. And slice your tent down the middle, killing your tent right there. It ain't no good no more.

GISELLE HARRELL, Resident and Organizer, Aetna Street: So they're there to specifically take our personal belongings and throw it away.

So I'm like, it's not a cleanup.

GENERAL: They took this woman's urn of her mother’s ashes. And I mean, the screams that woman would yell, was like somebody was taking her baby away from her.

[A man with a face mask carries a meowing kitten.]

RONALD PAUL HAMS, Resident and Organizer, Aetna Street: Just last week, I lost everything from personal belongings, to electronic devices... I.D., everything, so you know, I have to start over, pretty much all over again.

GISELLE: And it's a traumatic event. Like every week. Every week we have to go through this.

RONALD: I went overseas and I fought for my country and watched a couple people die for theirs.

I can't even walk on it or live on it or lay on it?

That's a slap in the face.

SONJA: When you're on the street, you feel like completely isolated. Even though you're around a billion people. You're, like, alone in your head.

Makes it very hard to get your feet back on the ground, and that f***s with your head after a while.

I don’t know. It’s like really, really cruel.

[pause]

[Text]
part two

[Michelle, from part one, walks toward a bag checkpoint.]

MICHELLE: I got lucky because I network and network and network, and I was the lucky one that they had one space for a woman.

And I got a Chinatown container home.

The sadness from not having a place went away. 

And then I became sadder because I'm by myself.

[Michelle takes a seat on a city train.]

MICHELLE: I do this every day.

Because I could be in my little room, with my heater and air conditioning.

But what's the point of that, if my heart is right here with my family and friends?

They should have took us all together.

[Michelle walks into a tent encampment.]

WOMAN, with dog: She just ate a whole bowl of food!

MICHELLE: It's my son, my boyfriend, my friend, my daughter-in-law. They're all out here still. I'm not leaving them like that.

I’m the mom.

Since we can't afford to buy clothes all the time. So we sew everybody’s holes!

Like hoodies, jackets...

What would I like?

I would like everybody to get off the streets, into some kind of housing, and not have to be like this.

[Michelle is back on the city train.]

MICHELLE: It's not right.

So I go home, I come back. I go home...

I’m the mom.

I have to come back.

[pause]

[Harvey, from part one, is walking along the street.]

HARVEY: What are you guys up to?

They’re chasing us out of here.

They’re going to take us on a bus. Three of us, with our stuff to the motel.

I couldn't sleep last night.

I was thinking about what's happening today because I have to get rid of stuff and you can only take so much.

We'll give you 60 gallon bags, two.

Whatever you fit in that, is what you can take to the room.

BECKY DENNISON, voiceover: Emergency housing is really, really expensive. The one that's the most unsustainable is the use of motel rooms.

Paying $140, $180 per night. We're talking thousands of dollars per person to live in these motel rooms. And it is absolutely not sustainable.

It comes at the expense of people's lives and at the expense of permanent housing options that could have been invested in with that same amount of funding.

So if it really was, you know, 60, 90 days and then they’d be moving on, you know, that could work.

But that's not the way it happens, because we have no place for people to go.

[Harvey smokes a cigarette outside a motel at night.]

HARVEY: It feels isolated.

I feel like I'm very isolated here because, you know, the rules are that you can't go visit your friends. The ones that came with me over here, that I convinced to come over here.

They even make you sign a form saying that you promised that you wouldn’t be going to room to room.

[interviewer]: And they're in the same hotel right?

HARVEY: Yeah, they're above me.

To me it’s more a prison.

It's more of a prison. But with a revolving door that we can come out here and get fresh air or whatever.

I wish I could get somehow the right help.

That would help me find a place cheap enough for me to afford, that I'll be able to live there at peace on a permanent basis.

[pause]

[People are holding signs and chanting outside.]

[person with megaphone]: Housing is a human right!

[crowd]: Fight! Fight! Fight!

SONJA, voiceover: I could never do the work I do if I wasn't in housing.

[Sonja walks a dog into a house.]

I was on the street for about six plus years, and I finally got my housing voucher.

I have a great landlord, who has already worked with Section 8, and helped me get in here.

They take 30% of whatever income you get. So if you get no income, then you don't pay anything.

When I first moved in, I wasn't full time working yet.

My rent was $10 a month.

And now I’m paying like $1200, and they pay the difference.

[We see the inside of Sonja's full walk-in closet.]

I've always had a 'shoe thing.' But now I have a bigger ‘shoe thing.’

When I got into my own place, it was like, ‘Oh my God I’m me again.’

You know, it was huge.

I got offered the job like two months into getting my housing.

[Framed photos are hanging on the wall.]

Now being inside, every time I see my mom she sends a box of pictures.

And gives me a lot of old photos, you know, those black and white ones of family.

And so I decided to litter my walls with them.

When I first came here, I secluded for the longest time because I was just, like, soaking it all up.

It was huge, to like, not have to worry about your stuff getting stolen. Or if you can go to sleep or not, if you're going to be safe.

[Sonja swipes down a phone screen.]

My calendar is nuts. That's what my calendar looks like.

It just made me fight even harder to, like, keep my job and make sure that I don't lose it.

BECKY DENNISON: Permanent housing. It is the only solution to homelessness, both for individuals and for our region.

PETE WHITE: The solutions are right at our fingertips, but the political will does not exist.

BECKY: Because it's about the appearance versus the solution.

PETE: If we had real budget hawks you would say: Those strategies that push people everywhere are actually more expensive.

BECKY: Every piece of research will show you that permanent supportive housing is really, really effective.

PETE: The only way that this is fixed is that we're building housing in every community.

BECKY: That's the investment that any industrialized, wealthy country besides the United States has made.

And we need to make it.

[Sonja stands at a podium in front of people.]

SONJA: Hi, my name is Sonja Verdugo, and I'm an organizer.

SONJA, voiceover: My work means everything to me.

I could never maintain my job right now, if I was on the street. There’s no way.

It's probably the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever done.

I feel like I’m part of the push to make the difference somewhere down the road.

It's gotta start somewhere.

And I think the people in LA are tired.

Of seeing how things are.

And they're ready to fight.

[pause]

[Text]

In June 2024, the US Supreme Court issued a ruling that further enables cities to use criminalization as their primary response to houselessness, even when people have no place else to go.

Research and experience point to a better approach.

Creating permanent, affordable housing, with supportive services for those who need it, is the proven way to end houselessness.

Tell your representatives to end criminalization and prioritize housing as the solution.