Beginning an op-ed (“Sweeping encampments is antiquated, inhumane”), as Portland City Councilors Victoria Pelletier and Anna Trevorrow did in these pages on Dec. 27, 2023, with a quote from Confederate General Robert E. Lee, then applied to all of us who oppose the continued presence of homeless encampments on Portland public property, is a slap in the face.
Workers from C.A. Newcomb and Sons erect a fence below an on-ramp for the Casco Bay Bridge last week near Harbor View Park, the site of a large homeless encampment. Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer
Lee was despicably racist in his judgment of “the black race.” And so are we, we are told, by wanting the encampments at Harbor View Park and near Douglass Fields taken down. The authors tell us we suffer from unconscious bias – and even more humiliating, it seems we do not know it.
It appears we have no compassion; that we are willing to coerce individuals into shelter by forcible eviction and/or threat of prosecution and they, staring down their noses at their benighted constituents, “object” to this strategy.
The writers said no criticism of city staff was “meant” by their piece. So that leaves the administration, along with anyone who supports the administration, as I do. I worked with the administration for 11 years, retiring on Dec. 29, 2023. The city administration, they imply, suffers from unconscious bias, by virtue of ordering the removal of illegal campsites on public property, per the city ordinance that makes it illegal.
And these two councilors, and their Portland City Council backers, are superior to us morally, intellectually and even unconsciously, since they do not, it seems, suffer from unconscious bias?
How confusing this is in the context of a small Maine city attempting to deal with around 200 homeless people illegally camping on public property. Police calls, missing bicycles, trash cleaned up day after day and week after week? Irrelevant. Portable toilets trashed, used for who knows what, too few, too infrequently cleaned; people with a business catering to children, or any business, people with children, or anyone at all walking past, threatened? Irrelevant.
Fire department and Emergency Medical Services calls beyond number to revive persons overdosing, mental breakdowns ongoing with the behavioral health units from the police department and Milestone Recovery struggling to respond? Irrelevant. Sex trafficking perpetrated without interruption to facilitate drug sales? I suppose drug dealers would object to clearing encampments up, too.
People with homes dealing with vandalism, graffiti, scorch marks from fentanyl cooking (that was me); collecting used needles dumped by the side of the road to turn in at public health’s needle exchange at 39 Forest Ave. (that was me); cleaning up human waste on clothes in Garbage to Garden buckets – me again, but also hundreds of others, all of us bystanders bearing some of this responsibility as residents living alongside people suffering from addictions and other misfortunes. We are apparently irrelevant, too.
There are ways to help people in need of help. Tolerating chaos and enabling it is a disaster. I have a conscious bias for order. I am deeply grateful for the rule of law, however vile its roots in history. I support the Portland administration in its efforts to help the homeless in all the ways it does now, from offering shelter, food, counseling, referrals for housing placement and more. And I am deeply grateful for the city’s (relentlessly attacked) progress in working with the homeless to support them and to end the illegal encampments.
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