Non-Profit 'Operation Dignity' Says Emeryville Police Removed a Homeless Man, Police Deny It

 Somebody is Lying:

Police Department Says They Didn't Remove a Homeless Man

Emeryville Non-Profit Contractor Says They Did

Police Sergeant Says She Can't Remember 

Planet Fitness Says They're a Judgement Free Zone*

*Except For Homeless People

News Analysis

Regardless of strongly asserted public denials over the years, the police have been and continue to roust homeless people camped on public property in Emeryville before and after a 2024 US Supreme Court decision legalizing it.  The proof recently came as a result of a Tattler public records request that denied any records about a specific man formerly camped alongside 45th Street near San Pablo Avenue who has since been removed by the police against a countermanding statement about it from the local homeless shelter non-profit organization that contracts with the City of Emeryville.  

Oakland based emergency shelter, Operation Dignity, says Emeryville police, operating at the behest of Planet Fitness Inc, forced the man who had been camped nearby, to leave Emeryville against his will.  The police are denying a public record exists that would document the removal.  It is a crime for a municipality to deny public records requested via the California Public Records Act and a public agency that played a part in a removal of a camped individual would be required to document it.

Inside Emeryville's New Planet Fitness
They call the police on homeless people camped 
nearby on public property: That's a judgement.

 

In an email to the Tattler, Operation Dignity Executive Director Tim Evans says the Emeryville Police Department indicated that the man, who had been camping on public property alongside 45th Street near the Planet Fitness exercise facility location for months, would no longer be allowed there at the insistance of that corporation.  Mr Evans stated that Planet Fitness was readying a grand opening for their new Emeryville facility and that was the reason for their call made to the police.  Operation Dignity did not say whether they were able to provide a bed for the man but shelters across the Bay Area have indicated there are not enough beds on any given night and women with children usually get preference.    

In 2024, the Supreme Court found that municipalities may henceforth remove or arrest people caught sleeping on public property even if no shelter beds are available.  However Emeryville has not changed its municipal code or its stated intension to allow for the police to arrest or remove such people that way.

You belong at Planet Fitness Emeryville!*
*Unless you're homeless
Then we call the police on you.

In an email to the Tattler, Operation Dignity Director Evans, stated their organization had reached out to the man in question several times as a result of EPD requests and “The individual expressed hesitancy about engaging in services and declined ongoing assistance at that time”.  Evans added, “Unfortunately, due to a new business moving into that location, he could not continue camping there.”

A manager at the Planet Fitness has denied anyone from their facility made the call to the police.  

The Tattler began its investigation after EPD Sergeant Michelle Shepard said she had no recollection of a man camped at that location over the last many months.  Because we had direct knowledge of the man in question and we were aware of the Planet Fitness opening, we initiated a public records request for all documents regarding a man camped at the 45th Street location from ‘November 27th to today’ (the time the man would have been forced out).  The City responded with a blanket “no disclosable documents” statement.  The curious lack of memory of Sergeant Shepard also prompted us to inquire about the homeless man from a different police department employee who stated off the record, “Of course we noticed him”.  Observation and situational awareness is a central job description of police work.

After the man was removed from public property, the $9 billion corporate giant hosted their grand opening at the facility located at 45th Street and San Pablo Avenue.

EPD Sergeant Michelle Sheperd
She is paid to be observant but
she didn't notice a man camped in
plain sight for four months on 45th Street.

 

So the story stops at an intriguing impasse: the police department and Planet Fitness representatives both deny they interacted in any way with the man in question but the non-profit homeless advocacy organization Operation Dignity, who are contracted by the City of Emeryville, says both did interact with the man. The Emeryville police have denied rousting homeless people for years regardless of any Supreme Court ruling but the Tattler has found evidence they lied about past rousting and encampment clearances.  People who have noticed that Oakland and Berkeley both have a lot of encampments but Emeryville has had almost zero have been left wondering against loud proclamations from both the police and the City Council saying rousting just doesn’t happen in Emeryville.  The police, if they played a part in rousting this 45th Street man in addition to violating the California Public Records Act, will be revealed to have violated their own stated policies.

Emeryville has an official 'no clearances' policy as far as homeless encampments go.  The policy has always been to direct campers to shelters if beds are available and if the person is willing to go.  After it became legal for cities to clear out encampments regardless of shelter bed availability as was made clear by the Court's decision in 2024, the City of Emeryville never changed its policy.  Then and now, City Hall has always loudly and proudly taken the humane and compassionate way dealing with encampments.  Any clearances the City has done over the years have been despite the official policy.     

Three of the four claims presented in this story appear to be dubious and a skeptic would note that a police sergeant, who's job it is to be observant, would fail to notice a man camped in plain sight for more than four months in a town as small as Emeryville.  Further, said skeptic would note that a profit seeking corporation has an interest in lying to protect their PR and their shareholders while the police department has an existential interest in lying, to protect their image in the eyes of the public.  An emergency shelter non-profit has no discernible interest in lying about their bailiwick.

The law allowing cities to arrest people for public camping stems from the U.S. Supreme Court's decision last year in Grants Pass v. Johnson, which ruled that cities can enforce bans on sleeping and camping in public spaces without violating the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment, even if no shelter beds are available.

The public has a right to know how the least fortunate in our community are treated by government but unfortunately, governments have been known to lie.  Distressingly, any mistreatment is done in our name.  

The Tattler reached out to former mayor David Mourra, current mayor Sukhdeep Kaur and City Manager La Tanya Bellow about this story but none returned our inquiries.

The STROAD: 40th Street to Become a 'Super Stroad'

The '40th Street Multi Modal Project' Shows Emeryville Continues to Aspire to Be a Place to Travel Through On the Way to Somewhere Else

People Who Want to Travel to a Better Place Than Emeryville Will Be Helped by the $33 Million Infrastructure Project

"A stroad is a thoroughfare that combines the features of streets and roads.  Stroads attempt to be both a high speed traffic connector (a road) and a place for business and people (a street) but fails at both.  They are wide arterials (roads for through traffic) that also provide access to strip malls, drive-throughs, and other automobile-oriented businesses (as shopping streets do).  They are the most dangerous type of urbanized thoroughfare and have come under near universal criticism among city planning professionals.” WIKI

 

News Analysis

A street

Emeryville has cleared the way to make traffic on 40th Street move more efficiently through a proposed $33 million infrastructure project known as the ‘40th Street Multi Modal Project, a project that will exacerbate current problems associated with a lack of habitability and the alienating civic space created by the street.  Effectively, Emeryville is preparing to turn a ‘stroad’ into a super-stroad and any improvements for bus travel or bike travel touted by proponents are threatened to be overtaken by a greatly diminished livable space for Emeryville by the pyrrhic effects of the 'improvements'.

The project, seven years in the planning and slated to begin construction in the new year, will cost $33 million, $5.5 million of that paid by the City of Emeryville and will likely result in higher speed traffic and more people moved per hour; part of the touted efficiency.  But in so doing, it will create a reduced access ‘super-block’ grid out of existing small blocks, cutting neighborhoods off from each other with more traffic noise and more air pollution for people living nearby.  The built out project promises to reduce desirability for neighborhoods close by, as these kinds of high efficiency arterials have been shown to do.  People who don’t live in Emeryville but who travel through or commute to our town or who travel here to go to the auto-centric shopping malls Emeryville has built will benefit however.

A road

City officials insist the 40th Street project will not just help regional shoppers and people cutting through our town headed to other (more desirable) destinations, but it will also help people traveling to the planned $1 billion Sutter Health Hospital planned for Emeryville.

Proponents of the project which includes four out of five City Council members (Priforce dissenting), tell us bikes, bus users and drivers will be helped because of, rather than in spite of, the closing of 40th Street side streets.  The closing of the streets will create several 'super-blocks' of the sort that the late Canadian city planner Jane Jacobs warned us against.  She has shown how this consolidation of small blocks into super-blocks in the street grid devalues the neighborhood.   Discounting the Jacobs inspired city planning ethos (begun as a 1960's scrappy rebellion, now turned into orthodoxy), the proponents of the project have shown how traffic will move more efficiently, including bus traffic and bike traffic, with fewer (side street) conflicts.  Between Adeline Street and Halleck Street, there are currently nine small blocks that intersect 40th Street.  After the $33 million project is complete, that number will be reduced to six large super blocks.

Traffic engineers have long worked to increase flow rate efficiencies without concern for livability downgrades for people living nearby.  The real estate market has long shown how major arterials, including stroads and freeways, reduce value for home prices and there is nothing about the 40th Street Multi Modal Project that would suggest the improvement for traffic efficiencies it will bring will be any different.  Indeed, the market has shown people like their communities to be quiet as far as traffic goes, with the low speeds and volumes that low efficiency streets bring.  

A stroad
40th Street in Emeryville

Emeryville has three existing stroads: Powell Street, San Pablo Avenue and 40th Street.  These corridors exhibit all the negative effects of stroads: induced demand traffic congestion, high volume, high noise and pollution, danger, and other intangibles that equal a high ‘ick’ factor.  Improving the carrying efficiency of 40th Street, a street that already embodies these bad qualities, will only worsen the civic space.  It threatens to turn a stroad into a super-stroad.

Stroads are part of a rationally based modernist vision for cities.  Traffic engineers are taught the rationality of efficiency in graduate schools.  Towns that throw their transportation plans over to traffic engineers as Emeryville has done, tend to get less than desirable places.  Robert Moses, the formerly great urban planning expert knew about moving people with the greatest efficiency; he's the godfather of the top-down urban renewal ethos of the 1950s and '60s that bulldozed entire neighborhoods to build massive freeways cut through all across America.  His star however has been dimmed in recent years by people demanding more democratic control of their cities.  In this milieu, stroads seem to be a part of the last vestiges of this heavy handed vision of how not to create livable urban spaces.  The YIMBY movement too is part of the anti-democratic top-down Robert Moses vision but is not a vestige, rather it is a new iteration of the Moses vision.  YIMBYists' propose stroads to be used to connect their apartment towers to freeways for 'easy in, easy out' commuting to help developers maximize profits.    

The 40th Street Multi Modal Project calls into question what Emeryville is for.  Is it a place for people to come to, get stuff and leave?  Is it a place for people to travel through on their way to someplace else (more desirable)?  Is it a place where the politics have tried (and failed) to create a nice place to live or to be?  Stroads are built by municipalities that have no pride.  They are built by towns that pay deference to corporations seeking to make a profit.  After a couple of decades of Emeryville granting developers approvals to build auto centric sprawling shopping malls with big box retail surrounded by acres of parking lots, after another couple of decades building massive auto centric all-rental housing projects that are linked to the shopping malls and the freeway by stroads, after making Emeryville a place to get through in order to get to a place people desire to be, perhaps we should be turning stroads into streets as opposed to super-stroads.  

After spending $33 million on this project, it would seem Emeryville's future is already decided for the next 40 years, the useful life of this expensive infrastructure.  Desirability is out and moving people more efficiently by use of rational traffic management is in.  Regardless, people don't like being near stroads, living or lingering and Emeryville residents will be able to use the 40th Street Multi Modal Project for decades to come to travel from the place they live to places they want to be....places not run by developers and traffic engineers.

The 40th Street Multi Modal Project is HERE.

Robert Moses is HERE.

YIMBY is HERE.

Jane Jacobs is HERE.