Mayor London Breed should have defied a 2022 court injunction that restricted the city from enforcing laws against sitting, lying, or sleeping on public property.
That’s according to San Francisco mayoral candidate and former Mayor Mark Farrell, who says he would’ve continued to sweep homeless encampments no matter what a judge said.
“You would have just done it? You just would’ve cleared the camps?” ABC7 reporter Reggie Aqui asked during a recent interview with the candidate hosted by The Standard, the television network, and tech reporter Kara Swisher.
“One hundred percent,” Farrell answered. “If you want to sue me in my capacity as mayor because you don’t agree with what I’m doing, I welcome that.”
The injunction was the result of a 2022 lawsuit filed by the Coalition on Homelessness, which accused San Francisco of violating federal precedent in clearing encampments without having shelter available. A U.S. Supreme Court decision in June resulted in the injunction being overturned, though there’s an ongoing legal challenge alleging the city improperly destroys the belongings of homeless people.
Farrell said he “completely disagrees” that the city could not enforce its homeless laws because of the injunction. There were conflicting legal opinions on the city’s rights in that case, he said.
“I think this is a great demonstration of a difference of leadership between Mayor Breed and how I was as mayor, and how I will be next year,” Farrell said. “In the light of conflicting legal opinions, the current mayor’s approach was not to do anything and to let it be, and essentially fester on the streets of our city.”
U.S. Magistrate Judge Donna Ryu has already dinged the city for not complying with the injunction and called the lack of training around the seizure of homeless people’s property “troubling.” To put the city in compliance, she ordered the Department of Public Works to meet with the Coalition on Homelessness to jointly develop training for staffers on how to handle homeless people’s property.
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