Treatment of unhoused people: DOJ report says their rights in Phoenix are trampled

In a first-of-its-kind finding, the Justice Department said Phoenix police have shown a pattern of violating the civil and constitutional rights of unhoused people in a scathing report of how the force has handled a growing homelessness crisis.

Officials said police unlawfully arrested, ticketed and destroyed people’s property, often hindering them from finding stable housing. The overpolicing of the group became a significant part of the police force’s strategy, the DOJ report said, with more than a third of the people arrested between 2016 and 2022 facing homelessness.

Over the past decade, the city’s homeless population has nearly tripled and the rise in homelessness downtown led to the start of an encampment often called “The Zone” that was home to close to 1,000 people during summer 2023. While city officials have said police are told to “lead with services,” the report discovered many officers were incentivized to cite or arrest people for sleeping or camping outside.

“Phoenix has given law enforcement the responsibility of addressing this complex social problem,” the report reads.

The report concluded Phoenix police violated unhoused people's rights in two ways. Officers detained people without reasonable suspicion and seized their property without giving enough notice. The two patterns are violations of the Fourth and Fourteenth amendments. It's the first time the Justice Department has made such a finding about a police force.

"A person's constitutional rights do not diminish when they lack shelter," the report reads.

Joseph Young, 54, who has been living unhoused in Phoenix, said Thursday he is stopped by an officer nearly every day. He said it becomes demeaning, but has few other options as he searches for a job.

"I get no sleep," Young said.

While officials acknowledge the city has allocated more resources to support people facing homelessness, including almost $100 million in grant funding for services, around 2,700 people in the city are still unsheltered, according to this year's estimate.

Police directed people to move to ‘The Zone’

The Zone, previously found close to the state’s Capitol complex, was once a sprawling homeless encampment taking up more than a dozen city blocks. The area was the focus of a lawsuit against the city, Brown v. City of Phoenix, in which neighboring residents said the encampment had become a public nuisance. As a result, the encampment was cleared by November of last year.

But before then, police pointed to The Zone as a place where people could move to escape the threat of citations or arrest. Officials said that placed many people in danger, with high rates of crime including theft and sexual assault previously reported in the area.

Hundreds of people were forcefully moved from The Zone during the city's sweeps over the last year. While city officials placed more than 80% of the people they interacted with into shelter, around two-thirds of them remain sheltered. However, experts caution the displacement will likely have harmful long-term effects including higher overdose rates and illness.

The report details a pattern of police unlawfully subjecting unhoused people to citations or even arrest for camping on public sidewalks or in parks. One man was cited or arrested 20 times during a three-year time span.

“All we are trying to do is survive,” one woman told investigators.

Rudy Soliz, director of operations of the Justa Center, a center for older adults on the edge of where The Zone once was said he remembers "the good and the bad" of how police interacted with unhoused people.

Soliz often saw police force people to move, telling them to go "somewhere else."

"But where was that somewhere else available?" he said.

Police disposed of phones, medicine and an urn during sweeps

Even before the organized clearing of The Zone, the city conducted frequent “cleanups” that began at 5 a.m. Police would use sirens and loudspeakers to wake people sleeping outside.

Investigators attended these cleanups and witnessed workers throw away tents, sleeping bags and purses. At one cleanup, an investigator said one worker asked if the person who was moving was familiar with “minimalism.”

Until 2022, the city did not have any signs explaining when or how often cleanups would take place. People living in the area received first notice that morning, and if no one was present to claim property, it was considered abandoned.

While many procedures were changed to provide advance notice and store people’s property, that was not the case for other less-surveilled areas of the city.

One man told investigators that police threw his items away, telling him, “You guys are trash, and this is trash.”

The report detailed the discarded items including tents, blankets, birth certificates, insulin, food stamps and, in one instance, the urn holding a family member’s ashes.

Ben Rundall, an attorney representing unhoused people who sued the city after being cited and having their possessions destroyed, said Thursday’s finding is “long overdue.”

“This is something we have been arguing has been happening for over a decade,” he said.

The lawsuit from 2022 resulted in a court injunction preventing the city from enforcing camping and sleeping bans when a person can’t “practically obtain shelter.”

Since then, however, Rundall said he has not seen a significant shift in Phoenix police’s behavior and that many people have been cited or arrested for simply sleeping outside, something Thursday’s report corroborates. Rundall said he wants to see an end to the criminalization of homelessness in the city.

“Take this report as a wake-up call,” he said.

Helen Rummel is a reporter for The Arizona Republic. Reach her at [email protected]. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter: @helenrummel.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Treatment of unhoused people in Phoenix: What the DOJ report says