Occupy Santa Ana’s “Necessity Village” Entertains Its Guests

Occupy Santa Ana's Alicia Rojas stretches out with her some of her friends in "Necessity Village" on the city's Walk of Honor

Since its first rebuffed attempt at taking public space on October 22, Occupy Santa Ana has said all along that it would return to the tactic of civil disobedience when the time was right.  With the closing of the Armory, which serves the needs homeless people during the winter months, at 6:00 p.m. yesterday, the time was right.  As of midnight, the story is that Occupy Santa Ana — joined by some homeless people grateful for a relatively safe and comfortable place to sleep and groups of activists attracted to the action from Occupy LA, Occupy Long Beach, Occupy Riverside, and beyond — is back in the disobedience business.  It went about it in a pretty clever way.

Police departments have claimed a lot of credit for being able to change tactics as the hundred million or so (or so it seems) independent Occupy “chapters” came up with new stuff time after time.  With summer come to Southern California, Occupy Santa Ana has unveiled its new spring fashion: going topless — as in sleeping directly under the stars.  There are no tents to be seen anywhere.  The quintessential symbol of Occupy turns out not to be entirely essential, if people decide they don’t need it.

Oh — and by the way — tarps roll up in the morning, preempting the most horrible complaint about Occupiers in Orange County: that our tents killed the grass.  (They didn’t — but that didn’t stop the complaints.)  Under Occupy Santa Ana’s model, the grass will be able to get its ample portion of daytime rays.

In addition, Occupy Santa Ana is apparently not going to try to maintain a continuous 24-hour-a-day presence, as Occupy Orange County’s “Traveling Encampment” did for over five months until essentially collapsing of exhaustion about a month ago at the corner of Beach and PCH.  That fall and winter effort was about outreach to the surrounding community.  Occupy Santa Ana is focusing on homelessness — and that means that, unlike Occupiers in other parts of the county, its most critical time of day is the nighttime, when homeless people are denied the simple necessities of life like being able to sleep without being cited, fined, and forced into community service.  More sinister is the unavailability of public bathrooms for the homeless while the Armory is closed: getting rid of bodily waste in public literally puts one at risk of being branded a sex offender — and forced to register as one forever — for publicly exposing those waste-excreting naughty bits.  If this doesn’t make a lot of sense to you, given that people don’t really have much of a choice about engaging in certain bodily functions, welcome to the world of homelessness.

I told you that these people were fiendishly clever, and here’s where I get to prove it.  Do you see that board?  On it is listed every single place in Orange County where a homeless person can seek shelter.  It’s no secret to anyone that demand for beds in OC exceeds supply even with the Armory open; with it closed, the mismatch is worse.  The board also lists the times at which decisions about remaining space are made, who is eligible, and so on.

So what do the crafty Occupiers do?   As Massimo Marini explains in the above photo, they make calls — the way an extremely conscientious homeless person with the means and will to get to a shelter would have to do — and find out whether there is available space. No available space left? Out come the tarps. (You gotta sleep somewhere, after all!) This may (and I deliberately stop at “may” rather than going all the way to “will”) allow people to invoke the “necessity defense,” which I discussed yesterday.  Will people who do have the ability to get to shelter be able to invoke the defense?  It’s not clear — but so long as there’s at least one homeless person there to protect, I’d hesitate to rule it out.  Meanwhile, the people visiting from adjacent counties (and even beyond) really can’t be assured of finding a place to sleep here after they protest.  Maybe they can’t invoke the defense either, but at some point one may think that a court will get the idea that if there are more people who need beds that there are beds, someone is sleeping outside in our county — and our county ought to have provisions for it.

The long-used alternative of shipping people to another county may make some sense (at least to people in city government), but it has the alternative of being, among other things, stupid and cruel.  (I’d argue that such “temporary banishment” also violates the right to travel — but things have not yet gotten to that point.)  Meanwhile, the Occupiers have a much more radical, crazy, and unworkable solution: simply using the old downtown Orange County Transportation Authority bus terminal as a homeless shelter.  Clearly, they don’t appreciate that something that makes that much sense could never make sense.  Busing people to Victorville is so much simpler.  (Well, maybe not for Victorville.)

As I write, reports have been coming in for hours on the state of the action.  One visitor to the camp (old enough, like me, to want to avoid roughing it when possible) reported:

Yes, they are sleeping on tarp…each one has yoga mat and one blanket, compliments of Catholic Charities. It was quiet when I left. Police made themselves visible earlier on horseback.  I think there were 7 but none approached.  Rumor is no arrests or citations planned tonight. Just heard from Necessitty Village page lots more occupiers showed up.

One thing I’ve learned about rumors about police response is not to rely on them, but that’s still a better rumor than many.  Meanwhile, the Facebook pages of those of us in OC’s Occupy movement have been lighting up with comments like this:

Much love and respect to all my friends in Occupy Santa Ana who are holding down Necessity Village tonight under the cold and wet conditions. Yes, people die in OC from the cold…I learned that tonight. That and other troubling stories of the suffering of an hermano that will linger with me for a while.

There’s a Ustream.tv feed, which may or may not persist through the time most people will read this, which as of about 1:30 a.m. shows a video of people bopping around being interviewed at 11:08 p.m., with an energy that suggests that sleep may not have be easily had after all.  A 1:00 a.m. recording shows a black screen and a whispering narrator.

If one of Occupy Santa Ana’s purposes is to get publicity for and spread awareness of its cause — and it is — it seems to be working.  At around 11 p.m., the Register came out with its online story on the night’s events, noting that “Several members of Occupy Santa Ana planned to spend the night Tuesday sleeping on mats in the Civic Center to call attention to the need for emergency shelter beds for homeless adults” and to stop the ticketing for “camping” of homeless people who sleep in public spaces in Santa Ana.  Not a bad start.

Massimo Marini described what the old Occupy OC Campers might find an ironic reversal of our assertion that “we [were] using public space not as a place to sleep, but as a means of free speech.”  In his words:

“We will sleep, not camp, understanding them as different actions in solidarity with those whose very existence is now a crime. Cities in Orange County need to recognize the difference between camping and the necessity to sleep every night.”

The Register‘s story got a point that I had missed, with my Occupy-O.C.-centric focus on continuous hours of occupation: the 17 (OK, 16) consecutive hours I noted on was just the first day’s work.  This exercise will be repeated tomorrow night, and the next, and so on for seven days.

The police, for now, were keeping calm.  Four horsemen (seriously, that was the report) appeared at 4:00 p.m., but they ushered in no apocalypse and eventually cantered off.  And this line of the Register‘s story was especially interesting, though it would have been more reassuring had it had a later time stamp:

Police at about 8:30 p.m. said that no one had broken the law during the protest, and that as long as that remained the case they didn’t plan to take any enforcement actions.

I wonder if they’ll be saying the same thing as dawn breaks.  If they do act overnight, I’ll probably be among the lawyers getting rudely awakened by an urgent call, but I’ll try to update this story before tossing my suit in a car and heading downtown.  Here’s hoping that, instead, everyone gets a good night’s sleep.  One might call it a necessity.