On June 4th, police in Berkeley, California swept a long-standing encampment in a largely industrial part of the city. Telling residents they had 20 minutes to clear their belongings, officers brandished less-lethal guns and tossed smoke cans into tents. Bradley Penner is the editor-in-chief and lead reporter for Street Spirit, which covers homelessness and poverty from the perspective of those most impacted. According to Penner, the Trump administration’s attack on immigrants now playing out in cities and towns across the country mirrors the increasingly aggressive war being waged against the nation’s unhoused. In both cases, he says, the rights of already-marginalized groups are being stripped bare. He spoke with ACoM reporter Chris Alam. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
So before we get into it, tell us a bit of your background, how you first got to Berkeley and how you got started with Street Spirit.
My story with Street Spirit started in 2008 when I came to Berkeley as a transient youth, kind of hitchhiking along the West Coast. I used to busk with my guitar on Telegraph and a friend of mine who’d been there a little longer started selling Street Spirit. It was like this extra form of income. I lived that life for a little bit but was lucky enough to get housing about a year later. I very much assimilated into the Berkeley community, working in different establishments, going to school, working at Berkeley City College, all the way up to getting an MFA at San Francisco State. And then after COVID, I learned that Street Spirit was looking for a new editor. Our outgoing editor, Alastair Boone, chose me to be her replacement. But during that time, we learned that Street Spirit’s funding got pulled … the paper just ceased to exist overnight. So Alastair and I, in 2023, we got together and decided to keep it running. We spent the rest of that year fundraising a bunch of money to go back to print in 2024. Alastair is still with us as the director and I’m the editor in chief. Our first publication was in March 2024. We’re still going.
How would you describe the current political landscape when it comes to homelessness?
The past year has seen dramatic shifts in how states, counties, municipalities, and cities can approach homelessness in the United States. There was a Ninth Circuit court case in 2018, Martin vs. Boise, which basically said you cannot sweep an encampment without providing adequate shelter because to do so would be considered cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution. Another court case, Grants Pass versus Johnson, sought to sort of shift that. And it went all the way to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court did rule in a six-to-three ruling that it is not considered cruel or unusual punishment to sweep people if shelter is not available. So once that ruling happened, and that was in June of 2024, it almost immediately started trickling down into state and local policy. California’s Governor, Gavin Newsom, threatened to claw back funding for homeless services from cities that don’t start sweeping people. A number of cities also passed legislation, including Berkeley. In Fremont, in Alameda County, they made it illegal to “aid or abet” homeless individuals. So if someone is swept from their encampment in Fremont, they’re left with nothing and you go give them a tent, you’re guilty of a misdemeanor. And people lose a lot of property during these sweeps. Their ID’s might get lost. Medication is a really big one. People are left in dire conditions.
A lot of your recent focus has been on encampment sweeps, including the one on June 4th. Can you describe the scene there?
The city of Berkeley showed up to this long-standing encampment at 8th and Harrison streets. It’s an industrial part of town. They’re supposed to give a 72-hour notice before they start an encampment eviction. But they hadn’t posted any of that. They showed up at 6 a.m. and basically said to everybody, “You have 20 minutes to leave.” At the 20-minute mark, people are still gathering their stuff, but officers decided to start forcing them out. They began throwing smoke canisters inside people’s tents, but still some people resisted, essentially saying we need more time. That’s when police started using less-lethal weaponry. One person who was shot with a less-lethal round was later arrested. There’s video of this showing two cops pushing him towards the caution tape marking the no-go zone, then under it, later tackling and arresting him. He ended up spending two nights in Santa Rita Jail. One of the charges was for throwing a chemical agent at Berkeley police officers, which purportedly was just him handling the smoke canister they had thrown into his tent. A judge later dropped all charges, ruling the sweep operation illegal and in violation of due process rights.
What’s been the response from the Berkeley community to the recent sweep?
I do think that there are a lot of people in the Berkeley community who see and empathize with unhoused people. But the prevailing response from a lot of businesses in the area, homeowners and, you know, dare I say the keyboard warriors online have been in full support of these sweeps, regardless of their legality. Just sort of like, remove them by any means necessary, even if it’s in violation of due process. We broke the news on our Instagram, and we received a lot of comments kind of applauding the operation. That was really disheartening.
We’ve been hearing a lot about due process when it comes to ICE raids and deportations. How does it relate to encampments and the unhoused?
The ICE kidnappings and deportations of undocumented people who are just waiting on their immigration hearings has garnered a huge response which, in my opinion, is a little hypocritical. It really pains me to think that there is this willingness to cherry pick which marginalized groups have the right to due process. Homelessness is much more visible since COVID. The social safety net has been shredded. The machine is showing signs of disrepair. And there is this impetus to react, but at the same time we’re witnessing this embrace of a growing police state as people clamor for this larger feeling of order, which translates, for example, into the clearing of an encampment in violation of due process.
The state came down hard on protestors in LA. Do you see parallels between what happened there and what you’re seeing with the sweeps?
Police violence is a huge part of maintaining order. It’s happening in encampments. It’s happening to squash direct action protests. Allowing that to continue unfettered is just going to lead to more police violence. It will become normalized. If you live in a tent, or you are undocumented, or you’re willing to put your body on the line to stop an ICE vehicle from driving away with someone who’s undocumented, you are an enemy of the state. And the big question is, are communities okay with those types of escalations? Protesters in LA clearly were not, and they were accosted for their resistance. Due process lies at the root of these two core issues, and it should be universal.
You can listen to the full interview at Sound On Sight, a new collaboration between Hyde FM and American Community Media, featuring news and ideas told from the inside out.
