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    I’m an American relying on food stamps. This country has turned us into lab rats

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    It is 10 November, and my refrigerator is almost empty.I am, in fact, hungry as I write this. It is not that I do not have food at all; it is that I do not have the inclination to eat a can of tuna for breakfast, nor do I have the time to cook the winter squash my neighbor gave me.I am one of 41 million Americans who rely on Snap to make ends meet. When I offered to write about my experience during the government shutdown, it looked like we were not going to get any food assistance at all. And then we were. And then we weren’t.For weeks, the administration has been using our precarious survival as a bargaining block. Will they eat, or won’t they?This is what life is in Mapleton, Oregon, population 527. One white-spired church, one general store, one diner, one bar, one food bank where people line up two hours before the doors open.Roughly one in six Oregonians rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) to buy groceries, but it it worse here in the sticks. Our 22% poverty rate is double the state average, and even higher for young families: 44% of the kids in this school district live below the poverty level.I am not writing this with self pity. I do not have kids and my rent is very low, due to the generosity of friends. I understand that my version of poverty – the kind where you are down to canned tuna and raisins – is not the same as starvation. I feel fortunate to live in one of the states with a governor who has stood up to the federal government. That was heartening – especially after weeks of stress.But it still seems to me that we, America’s low-income people, have been treated like lab animals in a sick political experiment. Oh good, they’re giving us food! Oh wait, they’re not.When I say “giving us food”, it makes it sound like we do not work or do for ourselves. That is simply not true. Even with a regular allotment of Snap benefits and a handout from the food bank, it takes true ingenuity to get through the month. And while we are cooking beans from scratch, we are also working or hustling to find work.Take for instance, my cousin’s daughter Alissa, 24, who pays $1,000 a month to live in what she describes as “a roach-infested” slum in a nearby town, where it is slightly easier to find work.Her partner was a fisher but now works at a fishing supply store in order to spend more time with his family. Alissa used to be a full-time barista, but her $13.50 an hour did not make sense if it all went to daycare. She still hustles jobs in the so-called gig economy, but it is not enough. After taxes and rent, there is barely enough to cover their bills. She is reliant on Snap for their food.When I talked to her a week ago, she was stressed.“I’m really worried,” she said. “Not just about my family but the whole town. There’s not a lot of food banks to begin with and their funding was already cut earlier in the year.”The problem is that most people who get Snap benefits are like me: we were already running low on food before the end of October. We have been scrambling for weeks. And out here in rural Oregon, we make do with what is in front of us. “It’s hunting season so he’s out in his spare time,” Alissa said of her partner. They also forage for wild food.All this hunting, foraging and cooking from scratch might sound romantic, but less so when you consider she is living in a crap apartment and breaking Instacart rules by bringing her daughter on the job.“There’s too many people that simply don’t have the insight into what life is really like for the majority of us,” she said.For decades, I survived without relying on the government safety net that our tax dollars fund. But in recent years, everything has been getting harder. AI ate up most of my contract work. Competition is stiff so I cannot raise my rates – I make the same amount per hour that I did five years ago, but it has about half the buying power. I began racking up credit card debt to pay my bills.Last fall, I was awarded $250 in Snap benefits. It was not enough to survive the month. Then my Snap benefits were reduced, first because I found meager part-time work and then again for unknown reasons. Meanwhile, grocery prices soared.I quit being choosy at the food bank, and started picking up stuff I would not normally eat – AKA stockpiling food. Off-brand mac and cheese, a can of peaches. The thing about food insecurity is that you are always worrying. You are always doing mental math, figuring out how to substitute key ingredients or spruce up the pot of lentils you have been eating all week.And then there’s shame. At first, I refused to go to the food bank because I worried I would run into someone I knew. Now I realize the fallacy of that: if I run into someone at the food bank, it’s because we’re in the same boat – or they are there to help. I don’t feel shame any more. I feel solidarity and anger.I am angry there are so many of us. That I cannot make a living from hard work at a job I am good at. That I have been writing about my own food insecurity for 15 years.I am angry that I have worked so hard to get here, and I am angry for all the people who have had it worse. The furloughed workers who have not been paid. My friend Kevin who is unable to work because an insurance agency has denied him back surgery for an injury he got on the job. My friend Mel, who has been working for a hotel chain for seven years, and lost her Snap and healthcare assistance because she got a minuscule raise. All the people with toothaches they cannot treat, all of us with overdue electric bills.Every month the lines are longer at our food bank while rich people scheme ways to avoid taxes and blame us for the problems their policies create. Now it looks like some Democrats at the federal level are willing to play nice with the Republicans for political gain – at the expense of essential healthcare subsidies for the working poor and middle class? That doesn’t strike me as moral, either.I am not alone in my anger. I am part of a rising tide.“The amount of propaganda and gaslighting the government has been doing is sickening,” Alissa said. “Any amount of either is a sign of a failed system in my book. I mean truly imagine having to trick someone into agreeing with you because you knew they’d be against your policies if you were upfront.”She is part of a family group chat where they discuss health, parenting, and politics. “My Maga grandma definitely thinks I’m a dumb liberal, even though I’m not a liberal,” she said with a laugh. “What more people need to understand is it’s never me versus you, Democrat versus Republican, or Maga versus lib. It’s the people versus exploitation.”Here is your report from rural America: the stress, frustration and disgust are off the charts. Conspiracy theories swirl and some don’t sound that crazy to me. Two I heard this week: either they want to push people to rebel so they can invoke the Insurrection Act, or they want us all so broken that we do not have the energy to defend our rights, or even be there for one other.It’s hard to speak up when your teeth hurt. It’s hard to stand up when you are hungry. It’s hard to show up when you can’t afford gas. More

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      US agriculture department tells states to ‘undo’ Snap benefits for families in need

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      The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) is directing states to “immediately undo” any steps that have been taken to send out full food aid benefits to low-income Americans, following a supreme court order on Friday that temporarily halted a lower court order requiring those payments.The USDA’s directive, issued in a memo on Saturday, followed a supreme court order granting the Trump administration’s emergency request to pause an order for the USDA to provide full Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) benefits during the ongoing federal government shutdown, which is now in its 40th day.That lower court ruling, issued on Thursday, ordered the Trump administration to fully fund the Snap program for November by Friday, rather than issuing only partial benefits. The ruling led to some of the roughly 42 million Americans enrolled in Snap – commonly known as food stamps – to begin receiving their full benefits on Friday from the states, which issue the payments of federal dollars.But on Friday night, the program was thrown into chaos again when the supreme courtagreed to temporarily pause the order to allow an appeals court to review the Trump administration’s appeal.In response to the supreme court’s decision, the USDA, which delivers the money to the states, issued its directive that any payments that had been made under the prior orders are considered “unauthorized”.“To the extent States sent full SNAP payment files for November 2025, this was unauthorized,” Patrick Penn, the deputy undersecretary of agriculture, wrote to state Snap directors. “Accordingly, States must immediately undo any steps taken to issue full SNAP benefits for November 2025.”The memo warned: “Failure to comply with this memorandum may results in USDA taking various actions, including cancellation of the Federal share of State administration costs and holding States liable for any overissuances that result from the noncompliance.”As the Associated Press reports, it remains unclear if the directive applies to states using their some of their own funds to sustain the program, or just to ones relying entirely on federal money. The USDA did not immediately respond to a request for clarification from the AP.Lisa Murkowski, a Republican senator for Alaska, said it would be “shocking” if the order applied to states using their own money to support the program.“It’s one thing if the federal government is going to continue its level of appeal through the courts to say, ‘No, this can’t be done,’” Murkowski told the AP. “But when you are telling the states that have said this is a significant enough issue in our state, we’re going to find resources, backfill or front load, whatever term you want, to help our people, those states should not be penalized.”On Sunday several state leaders criticized the memo.Wisconsin’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers, refused to abide by the directive.“No,” Evers said in a statement responding to the memo. “Pursuant to and consistent with an active court order, Wisconsin legally loaded benefits to cards, ensuring nearly 700,000 Wisconsinites, including nearly 270,000 kids, had access to basic food and groceries.”He added that the Trump administration had “assured Wisconsin and other states that they were actively working to implement full SNAP benefits for November and would ‘complete the processes necessary to make funds available”, adding that “they have failed to do so to date.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Our administration is actively in court fighting against the Trump administration’s efforts to yank food assistance away from Wisconsin’s kids, families and seniors and we are eager for the court to resolve this issue by directing the Trump administration to comply with court orders and provide the certainty to the many Wisconsin families and businesses who rely on FoodShare,” Evers said.Maura Healey, the Democratic governor of Massachusetts, also condemned the directive in a statement on Sunday, saying: “If President Trump wants to penalize states for preventing Americans from going hungry, we will see him in court.”“Massachusetts residents with funds on their cards should continue to spend it on food” she said. “These funds were processed in accordance with guidance we received from the Trump Administration and a lower court order, and they were processed before the Supreme Court order on Friday night.”“President Trump should be focusing on reopening the government that he controls instead of repeatedly fighting to take away food from American families,” she added.Amy Klobuchar, a Democratic senator for Minnesota, also criticized the memo, saying that “cruelty is the point”, adding: “It is their choice to do this.”Associated Press and Reuters contributed reporting More

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      US supreme court issues emergency order blocking full Snap food aid payments

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      The supreme court has issued an emergency order temporarily blocking full Snap food aid payments.The high court’s order came after the Trump administration asked a federal appeals court on Friday to block a judge’s order that it distribute November’s full monthly food stamp benefits amid a US federal government shutdown.After that request to block was denied, the Trump administration turned to the supreme court in a further attempt to block the order to fully fund Snap food aid payments.The application to stay reads: “If forced to transfer funds to Snap to make full November allotments, there is no means for the government to recoup those expenditures – which is quintessential irreparable harm. Once those payments are made, there is every indication that the States will promptly disburse them. And once disbursed, the government will be un-able to recover any funds. Worse, these harms will only compound if the decision below stands.“There is every reason to expect that if the shutdown lingers, the court below will not command the government to tap these funds again in December to support Snap – blowing a bigger hole in the budget for the child nutrition programs.”The application – which was filed at about 7pm ET – also requested that the supreme court grant the “immediate administrative stay of the district court’s orders by 9.30pm” on Friday.Shortly after 9.30pm, attorney general Pam Bondi shared a note on X saying that the supreme court “just granted our administrative stay in this case. Our attorneys will not stop fighting, day and night, to defend and advance President Trump’s agenda.”US district judge John J McConnell Jr had given the Trump administration until Friday to make the payments through Snap, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, after the administration said last month that it would not pay benefits for November because of the shutdown.On Friday, Patrick Penn, deputy undersecretary at the Department of Agriculture, wrote in a memo to states that the government “will complete the processes necessary” to fully fund Snap for now and the funds will be available on Friday.But also on Friday, the Trump administration asked the appeals court to suspend any court orders requiring it to spend more money than is available in a contingency fund.The court filing came even as Britt Cudaback, the spokesperson for Wisconsin’s governor, Tony Evers, said on Friday that some Snap recipients in the state already had received their full November payments overnight on Thursday.“We’ve received confirmation that payments went through, including members reporting they can now see their balances,” she said.The court wrangling prolonged weeks of uncertainty for the food program that serves about one in eight Americans, mostly with lower incomes.Last week, in separate rulings, two judges ordered the government to pay at least part of the benefits using an emergency fund. It initially said it would cover half, but later said it would cover 65%. More

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      Snap cuts are leaving one in eight Americans hungry. Here’s how you can help

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      As the US government shutdown continues, nearly 42 million people face a threat to their food supply. Funding for the Snap program – commonly known as food stamps – expired on Saturday, leaving recipients’ fate uncertain. “It comes down to paying for my medications and my bills or buying food for myself and for my animals,” a Missouri veteran told the Guardian. A California resident described being “housebound because I need a couple of spinal cord surgeries so this is really gonna hurt me because I cannot work, and thereby earn money to put food on the table”.Last week, a judge blocked the Trump administration from suspending benefits entirely. But on Monday, the administration said it would provide those enrolled in the program with only half of what they usually receive. Now, food banks are struggling under the weight of “unprecedented demand”, said Linda Nageotte, president and chief operating officer of Feeding America, a network of food banks across the US. “One in eight people in our country right now don’t have enough to eat, and if you’re one of the seven who does, it’s time for you to activate.”If you are directly affected by the Snap cuts, you can find a nearby food bank here. Otherwise, here’s how you can lend a hand.Donate to food programsThanks to relationships with retailers, farmers and other food industry sources, “the cost per pound for food when a food bank is sourcing it is really, really, really low,” Nageotte said. “We can provide far, far more meals’ worth of food with $1 than you could if you took that same dollar and went to the grocery store.”With that in mind, you can donate funds to larger organizations such as Feeding America or New York City’s City Harvest, or to a local site. In the US, you can find a food bank near you via Feeding America, via the website FoodFinder, or via a quick Google search for food assistance programs in your area. Another option is FindHelp.org, which identifies a huge number of aid programs, including food assistance.You can also host your own food drive. Check in with a local bank to learn what is most needed and then encourage friends, family or co-workers to donate canned goods and other non-perishable items. Or you can help at a food bank near you by volunteering.“We need donations of money. We need donations of food. We need people who can volunteer and help us sort and pack boxes so that they can quickly be distributed to neighbors who need them. And we need folks who want to lift their voice and advocate” for a reopening of the government and full Snap funding, Nageotte said.Mutual aid programs also offer support – the Mutual Aid Hub is a good place to start. Or you can contribute to local community fridges (here are some examples in New York, Chicago, Atlanta and Los Angeles), which provide free food for neighborhoods.Support your neighbors directlyPerhaps there’s someone in your area who needs a hand paying for food or going to the grocery store. If so, you might offer to be a “grocery buddy” who goes shopping with a neighbor, or pitches in needed funds or a gift card. The phenomenon has grown during the shutdown, with people posting in neighborhood forums and Facebook groups to volunteer, CNN reports.You might also see whether your local school has a “backpack” meal program that helps ensure kids can eat outside school hours. Or you could organize and schedule a Meal Train, building a team of people to ensure a friend is getting regular meals. And if you enjoy Italian food, neighborhood ties, or Garfield the cat, you might consider becoming a volunteer chef in a lasagne-based program aiming to build close-knit communities.View image in fullscreenA bit of inspirationFaced with neighbors in need, people across the US are taking action.In the San Francisco Bay Area, restaurants are offering free meals; a pasta maker is giving free food to anyone who uses the not-so-secret code word. A Minneapolis breakfast spot is giving out pancakes to anyone who wants them, while a museum is providing free admission to Snap recipients, among many similar efforts across the city. Outside Boston, restaurants are banding together to donate a portion of their gift card sales to a food-recovery non-profit. In Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel has opened a food donation center.Others are busy contacting their representatives, demanding an end to the shutdown and the hunger crisis. Feeding America and 5Calls offer templates to help you do the same.“I’ve been in this work for over 30 years, and if there is one thing that is true when there is a crisis, it is that the best of humanity shows up in full force,” Nageotte said. More

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      Americans brace for food stamps to run out: ‘The greatest hunger catastrophe since the Great Depression’

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      Two decades ago, Sara Carlson, then a mother of three, was newly single because of a traumatic event, and the US’s food stamp program, now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), helped her feed her children with free food supplies.“I wouldn’t have been able to afford to live,” said Carlson, 45, who lives in Rochester, Minnesota, and now works as an operations manager for a wealth-management firm and serves on the board of Channel One Regional Food Bank, which works to increase food access.While the food stamps helped her, the government cut her off after a couple years because she started making too much money, which meant she again had to worry about having enough food.Now, nearly 42 million people around the country could face the same fate if the federal government shutdown continues and funding for Snap is cut off on 1 November.While Republicans have sought to blame Democrats for the potential loss in benefits that people who make little money rely on, those who work in the food-insecurity space say that is misleading because Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act already eliminated almost $187bn in funding for Snap through 2024, according to a congressional budget office estimate.Should funding run out at the end of the month, “we will have the greatest hunger catastrophe in America since the Great Depression, and I don’t say that as hyperbole”, said Joel Berg, CEO of Hunger Free America.Snap supports working families with low-paying jobs, low-income people aged 60 years and older and people with disabilities living on a fixed income, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.Snap participants generally must be at or below 130% of the federal poverty line. The average participant receives about $187 a month, the center reports.The Department of Agriculture recently sent a letter to regional Snap directors warning them that funding for Snap will run out at the end of the month and directing them to hold payments “until further notice”.More than 200 Democratic representatives have urged the USDA to use contingency funds to continue paying for Snap benefits.“There are clear steps the administration can and must take immediately to ensure that millions of families across the country can put food on their table in November,” a letter from the lawmakers to the USDA states. “SNAP benefits reach those in need this November would be a gross dereliction of your responsibilities to the American people. We appreciate your consideration of these requests.”Democrats have refused to pass a funding resolution to reopen the government because they want the legislation to include provisions to maintain healthcare subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, which the Trump administration cut and are set to expire at the end of the year.A USDA spokesperson blamed Democrats for the upcoming loss in Snap benefits.“We are approaching an inflection point for Senate Democrats,” the spokesperson told Fox News. “Continue to hold out for healthcare for illegals or reopen the government so mothers babies, and the most vulnerable among us can receive timely Wic [special supplemental nutrition program for women, infants, and children] and Snap allotments”.That claim is inaccurate: undocumented immigrants are not eligible for Affordable Care Act subsidies.While his organization is focused on food insecurity, Berg supports the Democrats in fighting for healthcare subsidies because “this has grave repercussions for the people we represent”, he said.“The population getting the healthcare subsidies may have a marginally higher income than people getting Snap, but there is certainly a lot of overlap,” Berg said.Brittany, a 38-year-old mother of three, lives in Greenup, Kentucky, and works 35 to 40 hours each week as a home health nurse.She also has received Snap benefits for a few years.“It’s not like I receive benefits and not work,” said Brittany, pushing back against the misconception that people who receive food stamps just sit on the couch.They allow her to get “most of the necessities throughout the month and then I just pay cash for the rest of them”, said Brittany, who did not want her last name used.If the Snap funding is cut off, she said, she would have to work on the weekends to make up the difference, which would mean she would have “hardly any time with my children”.Still, she supports Trump and blames Democrats for the shutdown because “they are not agreeing on anything that the Republicans offer”. More

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      Portlanders mock Trump for calling their city ‘war-ravaged’. But they’re clear-eyed about its problems

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      When Donald Trump said he was sending the national guard to Portland, Oregon, to protect immigration officers, local residents immediately responded with characteristic sarcasm. Mocking the president’s portrayal of a city in decline, social media was awash with videos of children in parks, busy farmers’ markets and September’s falling leaves overlaid with satirical text: “war ravaged”.When the US secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem, visited the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) building where protesters had been gathering for weeks, she found a small crowd of demonstrators wearing inflatable animal costumes, not a city overrun by antifascist militants. The reality on the ground did not deter Trump from painting the city as unlivable.“I don’t know what could be worse than Portland,” Trump said in an 8 October White House meeting. “You don’t even have stores anymore. They don’t even put glass up. They put plywood on their windows. Most of the retailers have left.”Oregon’s largest city boasts a wealth of beauty, nestled between two rivers and surrounded by mountains. It isn’t “bombed out”, as Trump said, and officials in recent weeks have worked hard to convince Trump the city is not a dystopia, saying years of public messaging about Portland’s challenges are outdated.“Portland is vibrant and thriving,” said a 28 September letter co-signed by 200 Oregon business leaders, elected officials and organizations. “Just like with public safety, we recognize that there is more work to do and we continue to forge public-private partnerships every day to make our city better.”But Trump’s narrative did not appear suddenly. Portland is, in fact, struggling with a dire affordability crisis, with persistently high rates of homelessness, and too many people living on the streets with mental health and addiction needs.Economic leaders in the city have argued for years that those problems, combined with high taxes and racial justice protests, have slowed the city’s economic recovery from a deep pandemic hole.Progressive critics have said that a period of economic boom followed by Covid left the city’s social safety net in disrepair, and their arguments have increasingly resonated with voters in recent years.View image in fullscreenPortland’s mayor, Keith Wilson, a moderate, won election in 2024 in a landslide. But the election also brought four members of the democratic socialists of America (DSA) and an even, progressive-moderate split to the city council.Campaigns promising to address root causes of social issues are resonating with voters across the nation, including in New York, where Zohran Mamdani is leading the polls for the mayoral race.Sameer Kanal, a DSA-affiliated councilor, said that, like in cities across the country, there is a new, relentless focus on affordability.“How can we make sure that the rent is low enough, not make sure that the people that are richest in the city are benefiting the most?” Kanal said.Cost of livingIn the mid-2010s, national media celebrated Portland’s quirks, bringing an influx of new residents and business opportunities. It also meant housing costs soared and homelessness increased year after year. Average rent in Portland increased by 30% from 2012 to 2015, and the average home sale price grew by nearly 50% from 2011 to 2016. In 2025, Portland’s average fair-market rent for a two-bedroom apartment, as defined by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, was $1,997, up from $905 in 2011.No single neighborhood’s average rent is affordable to Portlanders making under $31,000 annually. And despite home sale prices decreasing by 7% citywide from 2020 to 2024, high mortgage rates and a low stock of houses for sale leave even median-income Portlanders with few options to buy.To keep up with demand, Portland’s housing bureau estimates the city needs to build at least 63,000 units affordable for low- and moderate-incomes in the next 20 years.Mitch Green, an economist and professor elected to Portland’s city council this year, said the “Portlandia era” of the 2010s brought significant revenue to the city, but did not create the sufficient affordable housing necessary to meet the needs of the entire population, particularly low-income residents.“People can, in some sense, adapt a little bit to changes in rent,” Green said. “But when it changes quickly, what you’ll see is, people will fall through the cracks.”View image in fullscreenA 2019 project to bring a luxury Ritz-Carlton hotel and residences symbolized both the market’s optimism for Portland and its troubles after the economic downturn following Covid, people like Green argue.The $600m project displaced a block of food carts enjoyed by locals. The city’s tax incentives obligated the project to build affordable housing units or contribute $8m toward an affordable-housing program. When high rents and the arrival of Covid hollowed out downtown Portland in 2020, shuttering the central city after its upswing, the project like many others of its kind struggled. Only 8% of the 132 luxury condos sold, and the city may never see the money or the affordable housing after the construction lender foreclosed on the building earlier this summer.Temporary solutionsThe lack of affordable housing has been a key driver in a persistent homelessness emergency. As of July, more than 16,000 people are unhoused in Multnomah county, which encompasses Portland. Roughly half are unsheltered, and the vast majority live in Portland.There are twice as many unsheltered Portlanders as there are shelter units. With affordable housing in short supply, unhoused residents are left surviving in the shadows, under constant threat of fines, jail time or sweeps.The mayor has responded with a dual strategy: clearing encampments, while building out temporary shelter units.Like in many counties across the US west, encampment sweeps have become more frequent and aggressive in recent years. It’s a strategy the mayor says he wants to scale up.“The city of Portland anticipates returning to enforcement of existing public space regulations on safety, sanitation and livability in the coming days,” Wilson said. “Every community member, both housed and unhoused, deserves a safe community.”Meanwhile, the mayor’s office has added 800 beds since January toward his goal to add 1,500 by 1 December.The approach is not without its critics. A Street Roots and ProPublica investigation earlier this year found that the increase in sweeps in Multnomah county contributed to a fourfold increase in homeless deaths over a four-year period. And progressive leaders, backed by a throng of local organizers, have argued the city should focus on building permanent housing rather than temporary shelter.Multnomah county has spent $500m on housing in 2024, with half spent on temporary shelters and navigation services. That approach is expensive and ineffective, according to Green.“It’s good to open up some shelters so people have a place to hang their head at night, and they don’t have to be stuck out in the winter or the summer experiencing the conditions,” Green said. “But it’s not a solution for homelessness. The solution for homelessness is housing.”Green and other local leaders recently visited Vienna to learn how social housing might better address Portland’s needs. The European city spends $500m on its entire social housing program, including all homelessness spending. It is rare for a person to live on the streets.Meanwhile, the outlook is grim for Oregonians at risk of losing housing. Amid billions in federal cuts to social programs and tax breaks in Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill, the state’s Democratic supermajority legislature cut $100m in eviction-protection funds this year, instead allocating $205m toward a statewide temporary homeless shelter program.That’s a heavy loss, according to Becky Straus, managing attorney at the non-profit Oregon Law Center, which provides pro bono legal assistance for low-income Oregonians.“We can’t cut our way out of the housing crisis,” Straus said. “Without eviction prevention, more people will end up on the streets and shelters won’t be able to keep up.”Through August, nearly 8,000 evictions were filed in Multnomah county alone this year, with 90% for nonpayment of rent.Drug decriminalizationAs the city grappled with a sharp increase in homelessness, it also faced the visible impacts of a drug crisis that rose nationally since as early as 2013, following decades of disinvestment in services at the state level. In 2021, Oregon became the first state in the US to decriminalize drugs and allocate hundreds of millions in marijuana tax revenues to build treatment programs across the state. The measure was an attempt to address a persistent addiction crisis, one that appeared more visible with storefront windows boarded up and social services at a minimum post-pandemic. Rather than incarcerating low-level drug offenders, the state would invest in building up its support infrastructure.The decriminalization measure – passed after the city saw 100 consecutive days of racial justice protests – was meant to reduce interactions with the criminal justice system and confront racial disparities in policing, particularly for low-level offenses, and create a public health framework for addiction. A now-deleted Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) 2020 survey showed Oregon among states with the least access to substance use and mental health treatment.But the headwinds the policy faced were fierce. After voters passed the ballot measure, it took more than 15 months for the state’s health authority to send funds to new statewide support networks – the other side of the decriminalization coin. That meant people were not arrested for possession or consumption of drugs, even in public spaces. Still, few options existed for a person seeking recovery services for substance use disorders.In time, multiple studies showed that the effects of Covid-19, rising housing costs and the arrival of fentanyl coalesced in early 2021, leading to the public’s distorted perception that drug decriminalization was responsible for homelessness, crime and high downtown vacancy rates.Despite appearances, deaths from fentanyl followed an identical trajectory in all 50 states after the drug saturated each market, regardless of each state’s criminal penalties.“Portland was not an outlier,” said former Multnomah county district attorney Mike Schmidt.Still, the Oregon legislature ended the state’s decriminalization efforts under public pressure in September 2024, while maintaining funding for new treatment centers.Portland police have arrested 400 people for drug offenses since then, with 72% being charged with misdemeanor possession of a controlled substance. Meanwhile, funding has helped thousands of people access harm reduction, peer support and substance use treatment services through new networks the decriminalization measure created.Olivia Katbi, co-chair of the democratic socialists of America Portland chapter, said she still believes “Portland is the best city in the country”, despite its challenges. “And, Portland as a city has problems in the way that every large American city has problems.”This article is co-published with Street Roots, an investigative weekly street newspaper More

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      LA 2028 Olympics: fears of mass displacement and homeless sweeps as Trump threat looms

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      In the lead-up to the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, the city deployed 30 police officers on horseback to rid downtown of unhoused people and, in the words of a captain, “sanitize the area”.Some people were arrested and transported to detox centers. Others were forced from public view while their possessions were trashed.Now, as the city prepares to host the games once more in 2028, civil rights advocates are fearful history will repeat itself, and authorities will again banish unhoused communities in ways that could exacerbate the region’s humanitarian crisis.Karen Bass, Los Angeles’s Democratic mayor, has vowed not to bus unhoused people out of the city and repeat the tactics of 1984, telling the Los Angeles Times her strategy will “always be housing people first”. But the scale of the problem in LA is larger than it was four decades ago, and the Trump administration’s forceful stance on homelessness could increase pressures on Bass and the unhoused population.LA county is home to an estimated 72,000 unhoused people, including 24,900 people in shelters and 47,400 people living outside in tents, makeshift structures and vehicles. In the last two years, Bass and county leaders have reported some progress in moving people indoors, which they attributed to their strategy of targeting people in encampments with shelter options and resources.But the dramatic shortage of affordable housing in the region will make it difficult to get tens of thousands of people stably housed in less than three years and stop new encampments from rising up.Meanwhile, Trump, who appointed himself White House Olympics taskforce chair, has made it clear he wants to see encampments disappear from American cities, signing an executive order in July to push local governments to clear encampments and making it a point of focus during the federal crackdown in Washington DC.Combined with a supreme court ruling allowing governments to fine and jail unhoused people when no shelter is available, Trump’s ongoing deployment of troops to Democratic cities, significant support from California residents for tougher policies towards the unhoused, and California governor Gavin Newsom’s push for aggressive sweeps, experts fear the Olympics could force out many of LA’s poorest residents.“The pressures are going to come from the White House, from the state and from local government as we get closer to the Olympics,” said Pete White, executive director of the Los Angeles Community Action Network, an anti-poverty group that advocates for unhoused people and is based in Skid Row, a downtown area with a high concentration of homelessness. “My fears come from being an Angeleno and seeing our communities attacked and displaced when major events come our way.”‘I remember the arrests’There is a long history of Olympics host cities trying to get rid of their most disenfranchised communities.In Moscow in 1980, organizers pledged to “cleanse” the city of “chronic alcoholics” and dumped people outside city limits. In Atlanta in 1996, officials arrested thousands of unhoused people under anti-loitering and related ordinances. In Rio de Janeiro in 2016, more than 70,000 people were displaced. And last year in Paris, thousands of unhoused people, including asylum seekers, were bussed out.The 1984 LA games led to the increased militarization of the LA police department (LAPD) and an escalation of racist and aggressive policing that targeted Black and Latino youth, experts say.“I remember the pre-Olympics arrest of my older cousins,” said White, 56, who grew up within walking distance of the Coliseum, a stadium that served as an Olympics venue then and will be used for the 2028 opening and closing ceremonies. “Young Black and brown men were afraid to be in the streets, because they were sweeping people up under the pretext of addressing gang violence.”View image in fullscreenThe games helped LAPD acquire flashbang grenades, specialized armor, military-style equipment and an armored vehicle, which it used a year later to ram a home where small children were eating ice cream, Curbed LA reported. The Olympics-fueled law enforcement expansion also paved the way for LAPD’s notorious Operation Hammer, a crackdown that led to mass arrests of Black youth.In 2018, after LA won the 2028 bid, then-mayor Eric Garcetti said the games would present an opportunity to improve homelessness, which he said could be eliminated from the streets by the games.“Garcetti kept saying: ‘We’ll end homelessness in LA,’” said Eric Sheehan, a member of NOlympics, a group founded in 2017 to oppose the Olympics in LA. “And we have been warning that the only way they can actually end homelessness is by disappearing people.”Increasing sweepsCalifornia, LA and LA 2028 officials have not released plans for a homelessness strategy.But on the streets, there are already fears that sweeps of people living outside are escalating due to the Olympics – and as LA prepares to also host the World Cup next year.In July, the city shut down a long-running encampment in the Van Nuys neighborhood in the San Fernando valley, north-west of downtown and visible from the 405, a major freeway. The site, which residents called the Compound, was across from the Sepulveda Basin where the Olympics is planning events. The sweep displaced roughly 75 people. The city said it offered 30 motel rooms to the group and other shelter options.Carla Orendorff, an organizer working with the residents, said she was aware of at least 10 displaced people now back on the streets, including several who had been kicked out of the motels, which have strict rules. Residents were dispersed to eight motels, and in one, staff ran out of food and people were left hungry, she said.Those still out on the street “are just forced further underground, in places that are harder to reach, which makes it incredibly dangerous for them”, Orendorff said.Giselle “Gelly” Harrell, a 41-year-old displaced Compound resident, said she lost her motel spot after she was gone for several days. She was temporarily staying in a hostel with help from a friend, but would soon be back in a tent, she said. Before the Compound, she was at another major encampment that was swept.View image in fullscreen“They’re strategically cleaning out the area for the Olympics,” Harrell said. “They’re destroying communities. It’s traumatizing … I wish all that money for the Olympics could go toward housing people … but they are not here to help us.”It was hard to imagine the Olympics taking place in an area where so many people were living outside and in cars, Orendorff added: “The city has all these plans, but our people don’t even have access to showers.”Bass denied that the Compound closure was Olympics-related, with the mayor telling reporters the site was a hazard. Officials had worked to shelter everyone and keep people together and would aim to transition residents into permanent housing, she said, while acknowledging some “might be in motels for long periods”. “I will not tolerate Angelenos living in dangerous, squalor conditions,” she added.The mayor’s office continued to defend the Van Nuys operation in an email last week, saying an outreach team had built relationships with encampment residents over several months and offered resources to all of them: “Coming indoors meant access to three meals a day, case management and additional supportive services.”Zach Seidl, Bass’s spokesperson, did not comment on the city’s Olympics strategy, but said in an email that since the mayor took office, street homelessness had decreased by 17.5% and placements into permanent housing had doubled: “She is laser-focused on addressing homelessness through a proven comprehensive strategy that includes preventing homelessness, urgently bringing Angelenos inside and cutting red tape to make building affordable housing in the city easier and more efficient.”Inside Safe, Bass’s program addressing encampments like the Compound, has brought thousands of people indoors and “fundamentally changed the way the city addresses homelessness by conducting extensive outreach, working with street medicine providers and offering other supportive case management services while they are in interim housing”, he continued. “This is why she ran for office and this is progress she would’ve made regardless of the Games.”The White House did not respond to inquiries about the Olympics, and a spokesperson for Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (Lahsa), the lead public agency responsible for addressing homelessness in the region, declined to comment.‘Legal restraints are gone’Advocates’ concerns are partly fueled by a supreme court ruling last year that gave local authorities significantly more leeway to criminalize encampments.“The legal restraints are gone, to the extent they were meaningful, and there is broad policy-level agreement by liberals and conservatives that sweeps are an acceptable approach,” said John Raphling, associate director of Human Rights Watch, a non-profit.He authored a report last year on LA’s policing of unhoused people, which found that unhoused Angelenos were routinely subject to aggressive LAPD crackdowns, misdemeanor arrests and sweeps that destroy their belongings.Homelessness-related arrests and citations, such as anti-camping violations, increased 68% in LA in the six months after the supreme court ruling, a recent CalMatters analysis found. The crackdowns are happening even as LA has vowed to not rely on criminalization and has promised a more restrained approach than other California cities.View image in fullscreenSheehan said he was concerned LAPD would work with federal authorities to target people during the Olympics, especially after officers aggressively attacked protesters and journalists during demonstrations against Trump’s immigration raids in June, in violation of the department’s own protocols.Newsom, meanwhile, has pushed California cities to ban encampments by adopting ordinances that make it a violation to camp in the same spot for three days, and advocates fear his presidential ambitions could lead him to continue to push punitive strategies as the Olympics approaches.“We’re already seeing a contest between Trump and Newsom as to who is going to appear tougher on homelessness, with tough being defined as how one responds to visible homelessness,” said Gary Blasi, professor of law emeritus at the University of California at Los Angeles, who co-wrote a report last year on the 2028 Olympics in LA and the unsheltered population. “There aren’t good signs from either of them. Newsom offers the promise of alternatives he doesn’t identify and Trump offers the promise of some equivalent to incarceration.”In a statement to the Guardian, Newsom said the state has a “strong, comprehensive strategy for fighting the national homelessness and housing crises” and was “outperforming the nation”. “I’ve emphasized that our approach is to humanize, not criminalize – encampment work is paired with shelter, services [and] behavioral health support,” he said, citing his Care court program, which is meant to compel people with severe psychosis into treatment.“Bottom line: encampments can’t be the status quo. We’re cleaning them up with compassion and urgency, while demanding accountability from every level of government. There is no compassion in allowing people to suffer the indignity of living in an encampment for years and years,” the governor added.Tara Gallegos, Newsom’s spokesperson, said the governor’s approach was distinct from the president’s, writing in an email: “The Trump administration is haphazardly bulldozing and upending encampments without creating any sort of supportive strategy to go along with it. It is about fear, not support … California’s strategy pairs urgency with dignity and care, creating wrap-around services addressing the root causes of homelessness.”An LA 2028 spokesperson did not comment on homelessness, but said in an email: “We work closely with our local, state and federal partners on Games planning and operations, and remain committed to working collaboratively with all levels of government to support a successful Games experience.”Organizers and providers prepareHomelessness service providers and advocates said they hoped LA officials would pursue bold solutions that quickly get people housing and resources without the threat of criminalization.A key part of the region’s strategy during the early pandemic was getting people out of tents and into motels, but those programs are costly and not a good fit for all of LA’s unhoused residents; it can also be challenging to transition participants into permanent housing. Blasi noted that that approach would become even harder during the Olympics when hotels face an influx of tourists.Blasi advocated for direct cash payments to unhoused people, akin to the 2020 stimulus checks, which could help some unhoused people get off the streets at a faster and cheaper rate than the traditional process, he argued: “There are a lot of people who can solve their own homelessness if they just have a little bit more money.”Alex Visotzky, senior California policy fellow at the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said LA has seen success with rapid rehousing programs that offer people rental subsidies, and that he hopes those efforts can be scaled up: “We know how to move people back into housing and do it quickly. It’s just a matter of whether we can marshal the political will to bring the money to make that happen.”Funding cuts, including from Trump’s slashing of federal homelessness resources, will be a barrier.The Union Rescue Mission, a faith-based group that runs the largest private shelter in LA, has recently seen an influx of people needing services as other providers have faced cuts, said CEO Mark Hood. Hood, however, said he has had productive conversations with the Trump administration and remained optimistic the Olympics would provide an “opportunity to collaborate with our city, county, state and federal government in ways that we never have before”.He said he hoped the Olympics would lead to increased funding for providers, but was so far unaware of any specific plans.White, the longtime organizer, said he expected grassroots groups to come together to defend unhoused people, especially as mutual-aid networks have grown in response to Trump’s raids: “The kidnappings of immigrants and the attempted clearing of houseless people as we get closer to the Olympics gives us an opportunity to bring various communities together, and that’s when we can build the power necessary to push back.” More

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      How Baltimore’s violent crime rate hit an all-time low: ‘This is not magic. It’s hard work’

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      The end of violence in Baltimore is a litany of stories that weren’t told in 90-second clips on the evening news, about shootings that didn’t happen.The untold stories sound different, said Sean Wees: “The guys had guns pointed at each other. We got in between.”One summer afternoon, two years ago, two men emerged from a corner store at Patapsco Avenue and Fifth Street, steps from Wees’s office at Safe Streets, in Baltimore’s Brooklyn neighborhood.“They had a little face-off in the store,” Wees said. “Words were exchanged when they stepped out the store.”A woman in the neighborhood saw what was about to go down and banged on the door of Safe Streets, a longstanding city-run violence-prevention program and a fixture in Baltimore. Wees knows his community, and knew one of the men well – a guy with a high potential for violence. A shooter. The other guy was new, Wees said.The neighborhood was still reeling from a mass shooting that June. Safe Streets had de-escalated five fights at a Brooklyn Day block party, but weren’t on the scene when a gunfight started there late that night. Two people died, 28 were injured and Wees was on edge.He and his co-worker Corey Winfield rushed outside to find both men shouting at each other with guns drawn.View image in fullscreen“We stood in between,” Wees said. “Corey was talking to one, and I was talking to a guy that was from the community.” Wees and Winfield carefully talked them back from the cliff.“That’s why having that rapport and being very active in your community is real important with this work,” Wees said. “Because if you don’t have that rapport, you’re not going to get them to put away those guns, because you don’t know what this man is thinking. You don’t know if he had that respect for you, enough to not blow your brains out along with the next man.”Violent crime in America’s big cities has been receding from pandemic highs for about two years. But even in comparison, Baltimore’s improvement is breathtaking: fewer people have been killed in the city over the last seven months than in any similar period in the last 50 years.As of 15 August, the running 365-day total for murders in Baltimore stood at 165 dead. Assuming the city remains on that pace, its murder rate would finish below 30 per 100,000 residents for the first time since 1986. If it remains on the pace set since 1 January, it would finish 2025 at 143 murders, a rate of about 25 per 100,000, last seen in Baltimore in 1978.It confounds Baltimore’s bloody legacy. An army of social workers, violence interventionists, prosecutors, community leaders, and even cops all pulling in the same direction for once has made David Simon’s stories from The Wire or Donald Trump’s exasperating trash talk less relevant.But this metropolitan renaissance is born of agony.Before Ahmaud Arbery or Breonna Taylor or George Floyd, there was Freddie Gray, rattled to death in the back of a Baltimore police department van.“We had, if you will, a head start with our uprising in 2015,” said Dr Lawrence Brown, a Baltimore historian and health equity researcher.View image in fullscreenGray’s death in April 2015 of spinal injuries set off an earthquake of protests against police brutality across the country, with none as consequential or long-lasting as those at the epicenter. Protests in Baltimore turned into riots.“Since 2015, there’s been here in Baltimore this acknowledgement that equity needs to be a priority,” Brown said. The riots were as much about the conditions of poverty that led to Gray’s death – people losing their homes in foreclosure to water bills, for example – as they were about police brutality, Brown noted.But the heavy-handed response by cops to the protests and failures to hold police accountable for misconduct eviscerated the relationship between the Baltimore police and the public. Baltimore’s state attorney Marilyn Mosby laid murder charges on the officers involved, and Baltimore’s police union closed ranks in response, eviscerating the relationship between police and politicians. And a series of scandals at city hall and the state attorney’s office – and the failure of Mosby’s charges to result in convictions – eviscerated the relationship between politicians and the public.Violence skyrocketed.Three months after Gray’s death, Baltimore’s homicide count set a 42-year record high. Baltimore’s mayor canned the police chief, then abandoned her re-election bid. In the previous year, 211 people had been killed in Baltimore, about 33.8 per 100,000 residents. That was high at the time relative to other large US cities, but reflected incremental improvement by Baltimore’s historical standards. After Freddie Gray’s death turned the city upside down, the count rose to 344 in 2015 – a 63% increase and a multi-decade high – bucking a long national trend of declining violent crime. The rate at which police made arrests in homicide cases cratered.View image in fullscreenThe gun trace taskforce (GTTF) scandal in 2017 exacerbated problems.Baltimore’s police culture revolved around statistics-driven measures of productivity, which Baltimore street cops often achieved by busting whoever happened to be convenient without concern about the quality of an arrest or the real criminality of a suspect, according to an internal report in the wake of the scandal.The GTTF had a reputation for aggressively pursuing arrests and putting up big numbers, insulating it from internal scrutiny. But a federal investigation revealed that the taskforce had long abandoned its mission to track down the source of illegal guns and had instead become a criminal gang prowling the street to rob drug dealers. Its officers planted guns and drugs on suspects and fabricated testimony to cover their tracks. More than a dozen police officers went to federal prison.Baltimore had tried more than one way to attack violent crime, from zero-tolerance “broken windows” policing to relying on neighborhood crime statistics to motivate police officers into making more arrests. Efforts to get guns off the street backfired spectacularly from political interference, incompetence and, with the GTTF, corruption.The scandal destroyed whatever public faith in Baltimore’s police department remained. By 2017, Baltimore’s homicide rate had risen to the highest of any large city in the US.“We had a police unit that was committing crimes. They were contributing to the crime,” Brown said. This history makes it hard to attribute the city’s current gains to police work, he added: “Who do I give credit to? Police are the lowest on my scales. It may be 5%. In some cases, at least with that gun trace taskforce, it’s negative.”Snake-bitten, adrift and in a state of profound civic despair, Baltimore’s leaders came to a fundamental consensus: reducing violence had to take priority over everything else. It was defining the city and was the only thing voters cared about.The first time Brandon Scott saw someone get shot in Park Heights, he wasn’t quite seven years old.Scott, a former city council member, had long been a keen observer of violence-prevention strategy before becoming mayor in 2020. An academic consensus looking at research done in Chicago and elsewhere about violence had long suggested that a dollar spent on policing reduced violence less than a dollar spent on intervention. But political leaders find it hard to justify cuts to police budgets under the best of circumstances. And Baltimore in 2021 did not have the best of circumstances.Scott had been mayor of Baltimore for about three months when the American Rescue Plan Act (Arpa) passed in Congress, giving him an option to supercharge his violence-prevention strategy without a massive political battle. The $1.9tn economic stimulus package passed in March 2021, sending $1,400 checks to taxpayers, paying unemployment benefits at a higher rate and granting money to cities to recover from the pandemic however they saw fit. Using Arpa money, the city could fund the new data-driven project without using the police budget, sidestepping the thorny “defund the police” rhetoric that had hamstrung previous efforts around the country.“When we said we were going to reduce violence by 15% from one year to the next, folks laughed at me,” Scott said. “Folks said that we couldn’t do it this way. The only way that we could do it is we went back to zero-tolerance policing, which actually didn’t do it in the first place.”Against a Baltimore police budget topping half a billion dollars – the largest police budget per capita of any large city in the US – Baltimore’s political establishment gave its new millennial mayor room to experiment with $50m in Washington’s money.View image in fullscreenTrust was in short supply after years of scandal. The first step was to get everyone on board – the cops, the hospitals, the jails, the schools, the social services teams, the state government and the feds. Scott appointed Richard Worley as the city’s new police commissioner in June 2023; Worley was a life-long Baltimore officer picked in part to bring the rank and file in line with Scott’s antiviolence program. Scott emphasizes partnerships as an important part of the plan’s successes.Other federal grants, from the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, emerged in 2022 to help support the network of non-profits needed for the plan. The funding came from the first federal gun-control legislation enacted in 28 years, with the support of 15 Senate Republicans and $250m over five years for community violence-intervention programs under the Department of Justice.Baltimore’s approach is tailored and personalized. The social worker who knocks on someone’s door carries a letter written for that person from the mayor, with an offer of help – and a threat.“We focus on the individuals and groups that are most likely to be a victim or perpetrator of that gun violence, and we go to them,” Scott said. “They actually get a letter from me. And if they don’t do that – if they don’t take us up on that help to operate their lives in a different way, to not put themselves at risk of being a victim or perpetrator or get involved in illegal and violent activity, then we remove them through our law enforcement partnership with the police department that obviously works at my direction, or with our attorney general, our state’s attorney and our federal law enforcement partners, and we’re holding people accountable.”Crime charts start showing the decline in September 2022, when the comprehensive plan had been up and running for about a year, Scott said. About three out of four people offered services by the program accepted them, and the city today has less violence than at any point in his life, he said.“Of the folks that we’ve been able to work with through our partners … 95.7% of them have not been re-victimized, and 97.7% of them have not recidivated,” Scott said. “You’re talking about, in any city, a very relatively small group of people who are at the highest risk. For us to be intensely focusing on them, and to have that few of them become victims again, or recidivate into their previous life, is very impressive.”No one got killed in Baltimore last week. Also, the local paper’s reporters are quitting in droves. Surely, this is a coincidence.Summers bleed Baltimore. School is out. People congregate. Tempers flare. But between 27 July and 2 August, the homicide line of the Baltimore police department’s weekly crime report posted a shutout.Baltimore’s strategy revolves around focused deterrence. Take the kind of targeting advertisers use to put an ad up on your phone for mouthwash on a day you forgot to brush your teeth, and apply it to murder. Only, instead of an ad, someone at high risk for violence gets a case worker knocking on their door.“We’re talking about young people at elevated risk,” said Kurtis Palermo, who runs the youth violence-prevention non-profit Roca in Baltimore. “We’re not talking about the young person who says F-you to his teacher, or tells Mom, Dad, Grandma they don’t want to do XYZ. We’re talking about kids who literally have probably two tracks: jail and death.”Palermo knocks on doors while a cop is carrying the mayor’s letter. As often as not, he has to knock on a door a dozen times before he finds his charge.The process often begins after a shooting. Case workers at local hospitals treating gunshot victims will take note of a patient’s history and their friends and family. The data is combined with school records, police records, social services records and whatever else might be relevant; then the violence-prevention team will have a quick meeting. When they determine someone has enough risk factors, they intervene.View image in fullscreen“It could be anything from information that is gleaned on jail calls, video evidence, you know, whatever it is, and then the connections to other people,” said Terence Nash, chief of the group violence-reduction strategy (GVRS) in the mayor’s office of neighborhood safety and engagement.About 570,000 people live in Baltimore. If 200 people are murdered in the city in a year, the average person’s risk would be about one in 2,850. But almost all the violence is concentrated among a tiny, impoverished and identifiable subset of that 570,000: 2% or less of the city, Nash said. If 80% of 200 murders are in this cluster, then most people are facing a murder risk of a bit less than 14,000 to one, while the high-risk cluster’s odds are about one in 71.There’s no single factor that is perfectly predictive, Nash said. But as connections accumulate with other people at risk for violence, a threshold is crossed. The process is epidemiological, treating violence like an infection to track.Two types of people are most vulnerable, Nash said: people in their early 20s who are feuding over trivial matters, “someone looked at somebody wrong, somebody bumped into somebody”; and older people in the drug game, “more around violence that has to do with their criminal enterprise, and so it’s much more calculated”.Critically, it’s not every young person with an Instagram beef, and not every Sandtown neighborhood street dealer that rises to their attention. The risk factors create a reasonable, articulable – and legally defensible – basis for contact. The team looks at each person individually, and crafts an approach for each one, Nash said.“This is not magic. It’s hard work,” Nash said. “It takes attention to detail.”Jaylen was in a hospital bed recovering from a gunshot wound when a life coach with Youth Advocate Programs (YAP) approached him. Jaylen had, he said, been in the wrong part of West Baltimore at the wrong time. He wasn’t especially receptive at first to a life coach, of all things, he said.“I thought there was a catch,” the 20-year-old said. “I thought I’d have to pay them back in the future.”Jaylen couldn’t say much about his life or where he was: people might still want to hurt him. But it took a couple of months of outreach for the offer of help from Teshombae Harvell, Jaylen’s life coach, to look real. It took consistency.“It’s about the follow-up,” Harvell said. “Today they might say get the F out of here. Tomorrow, they could be wanting services, because something tragic happened where they need change.”When someone gets shot, Jaylen expects someone to retaliate, he said: “Back and forth, back and forth. It’s never-ending.”What Harvell offered – what no one had offered in a credible way before – was a plan for the future, and perhaps the realization that he had a future. Jaylen had thought about killing someone before, he said. He felt as if the prospect of surviving long enough to have a legit life wasn’t worth considering.Now he has a driver’s license and wants to become a plumber. Helping fix some of Baltimore’s stubborn oversupply of abandoned houses would be a living, and ironically would be paying back the city for its help.“The only way programs like YAP or GVRS are going to be successful is for people to buy in,” said Harvell. “They can’t be spectators on the outside, looking in, wondering if it’s going to be a success or a failure.”Brandon Scott’s approach offers benefits to get people out of the street and off a violent path: housing, victim assistance, drug treatment, mental health services, job training.“There’s the carrot and stick,” said Ivan Bates. “We’re the stick.”Bates had a pretty good track record of getting drug dealers off the hook before winning election as Baltimore’s state’s attorney – what most places call the district attorney and chief prosecutor. Baltimore’s history of light prosecutions for handgun cases is a legacy of questionable policing practices – weakly supported cases landing in court – and a negative view of mass incarceration by prosecutors.“I was the one who was beating the brakes off the state,” Bates said. “Look, my law partner and I went 25, 26 straight jury trials against Baltimore city prosecutors representing some pretty rough people, you know. And when I come and say that the street – the criminal elements – do not respect that approach, I’m not saying it because I read in a book. I’m saying it because I lived it.”After defeating Mosby and assuming office in January 2023, Bates immediately reversed her policy of non-prosecution for low-level offenses like drug possession, prostitution and trespassing. He successfully lobbied the Maryland legislature to increase the penalty for illegal gun possession from three years to five years. And he started putting people in prison.View image in fullscreenIn Mosby’s last two years in office, 2,186 people faced felony gun charges. Mosby dismissed about 34% and another 30% received plea bargains, mostly without imprisonment. In Bates’s first two years, the number of cases increased a bit, to 2,443. Bates only dismissed 19% of the cases, and only 10% received plea agreements. The rest were convicted – an increase of about 1,000 people sent to prison – which includes a 70% increase in homicide convictions.“Everybody has a plan. The mayor had his plan. The police department, they have their plan,” Bates said. “And when I came and I ran for office, I had my plan. The plans have to work together as one.”Bates is quick to attribute the city’s reduction in violence to a team effort. For example, without victim assistance – which is supported by a federal grant – prosecutions that would have fallen apart in previous years concluded in convictions because witnesses could be found to appear in court. Police now are actually focused on removing illegal guns from the street, he said.It also requires people to have an out. Without a path off the street, people on the edge in Baltimore will do what they must to survive, he said.He rejects the suggestion that his approach is a return to mass incarceration. Prosecution is not zero tolerance and it is not indifferent to a defendant’s conditions.“We have focused on violent repeat offenders, not the first-time kid,” Bates said. “Remember, 5,000-6,000 individuals are doing this type of behavior. So, we’re not here to go back to mass incarceration.”But he’s sensitive to how this approach plays out in five years.“My No 1 worry is, when individuals come home, we have to have something for them,” he said. “Did we actually prepare them to come home? … Look, I believe everybody pays a debt to society. We move on, and then we as a society put them in a place that they can win. And if we didn’t, then we’re going to see these numbers bounce back up.”Sean Wees from Safe Streets said stopping a shooting might come down to noticing that a kid on a street corner has holes in his shoes.“So we asked the little kid, are you hungry?” Wees said. “That could lead to a conversation where you find out this kid is not eating. But we have the resources, or if we don’t have them at that time, we find the resources to help this family out. And now that key individual, that target individual, is the father of that child … We fed his child now, we’ve started to build a rapport with this guy, because he’s going to be appreciative of the work that we just did. That’s how this works.”View image in fullscreenOne might think that the thing that prevents expanding the work is personnel. Very few people have the street credibility, the devotion and the nerve to be successful. But Wees said the constraint is actually money.“I love this work, because I’m always trying to save an individual life,” he said. “I’m good with this work. The time and the money don’t match right now, but guess what? I still do this work … You get more money, people will put in more time.”For the first time in forever, Charm City’s leaders are all pulling in the same direction, and crime is falling through the floor. They’ve placated violence in inventive and predictable ways. They are, of course, justifiably concerned that Donald Trump will undo their successes on Republican “screw cities” general principles.Trump closed the White House office of gun violence prevention on the first day he took office. Three months later, the Department of Justice cut the $300m allocated to community violence-intervention grants in half, including many in Baltimore. The cuts were part of a larger $811m culling across the office of justice programs, Reuters reported. Funding for gun-violence victims’ services, conflict mediation, social workers, hospital-based programs: gone.Scott blasted the cuts to the program’s partners as dangerous and reckless.“You’re talking about an administration who has said for years that they want to drive down crime in these cities,” he said. “The truth is no one cares if the mayor is a Republican or Democrat in any city when it comes to gun violence.”The youth antiviolence organization Roca had three grants terminated, one in Baltimore with about $1m left unspent. The termination letter said the grant did not align with its priorities including “directly supporting certain law enforcement operations, combating violent crime, protecting American children, and supporting American victims of trafficking and sexual assault”.As applied to Roca, the rationale is absurd. But they could see it coming, said Dwight Robson, a Roca executive.“Initially, it was a huge blow. We were estimating that we were going to serve roughly 60 fewer young people a year,” Robson said. After an outcry, funders outside the federal government, including the city itself, started to step in, who “made it clear that they don’t want to lose momentum” in Baltimore.Support in other places, like Boston, is fleeting, in part because they’ve done their job too well, Robson said: “Boston is the safest big city in America. And you know, the homicides and crime just aren’t on people’s radars to the degree that it is in Baltimore.”Roca has appealed the decision to cut their grant, and a coalition of non-profits is suing the Trump administration, arguing that the cuts were made unlawfully.The real threat posed by the cuts is continuity, said Stefanie Mavronis, director of the mayor’s office of neighborhood safety and engagement (Monse). The violence-intervention plan has worked in part because it has been consistent. People are so used to the presence of Monse staffers around crime scenes and in high-violence neighborhoods that some people have come to expect a knock on the door after a shooting.View image in fullscreenIf Monse’s partners start disappearing, and if they can’t back up promises of help made to victims – or shooters – then things may fall apart, she said.“We’ve got to make the investment in the service side of things,” Mavronis said. “We can’t just make empty promises to folks who we are telling we have the services for you to change your life.”Baltimore’s leaders, both in city hall and in the streets, have been putting their reputations and capital on the line, in some cases risking their lives.Budget cuts while they’re winning makes it look like they want Baltimore to lose. The exasperation is plain.“We have the lowest amount of violence that we’ve seen in my lifetime, and I’m 41 years old,” Scott said. “If everyone says that they agree that this is the top issue, that we have to make sure that more people are not becoming a victim of these things, why change it? Why disrupt the apple cart, if the apple cart is producing the best results that we’ve seen in a generation?” More

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      Trump cracks down on homelessness with executive order enabling local governments

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      The federal government is seeking to crack down on homelessness in the US, with Donald Trump issuing an executive order to push local governments to remove unhoused people from the streets.The order the US president signed on Thursday will seek the “reversal of federal or state judicial precedents and the termination of consent decrees” that restrict local governments’ ability to respond to the crisis, and redirect funds to support rehabilitation and treatment. The order aims to “restore public order”, saying “endemic vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, and violent attacks have made our cities unsafe”, according to the order.The action comes as the homelessness crisis in the US has significantly worsened in recent years driven by a widespread shortage of affordable housing. Last year, a single-day count, which is a rough estimate, recorded more than 770,000 people experiencing homelessness across the country, the highest figure ever documented.Cities and states have adopted an increasingly punitive approach to homelessness, seeking to push people out of parks and city streets, even when there is no shelter available. The supreme court ruled last year that cities can impose fines and even jail time for unhoused people for sleeping outside after local governments argued some protections for unhoused people prevented them from taking action to reduce homelessness.Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told USA Today, which first reported on the executive order, that the president was “delivering on his commitment to Make America Safe Again” and end homelessness.“By removing vagrant criminals from our streets and redirecting resources toward substance abuse programs, the Trump Administration will ensure that Americans feel safe in their own communities and that individuals suffering from addiction or mental health struggles are able to get the help they need,” she said.The president’s order comes after last year’s US supreme court ruling, which was one of the most consequential legal decisions on homelessness in decades in the US.That ruling held that it is not “cruel and unusual punishment” to criminalize camping when there is no shelter available. The case originated in Grants Pass, Oregon, a city that was defending its efforts to prosecute people for sleeping in public.Unhoused people in the US have long faced crackdowns and sweeps, with policies and police practices that result in law enforcement harassment, tickets or jail time. But the ruling supercharged those kinds of aggressive responses, emboldening cities and states to punish encampment residents who have no other options for shelter.In a report last month, the American Civil Liberties Union found that cities across the US have introduced more than 320 bills criminalizing unhoused people, the majority of which have passed. The crackdowns have taken place in Democratic- and Republican-run states alike.Advocates for unhoused people’s rights have long argued that criminalization only exacerbates the housing crisis, shuffling people in and out of jail or from one neighborhood to the next, as they lose their belongings and connections to providers, fall further into debt and wind up in increasingly unsafe conditions.During his campaign last year, Trump used dark rhetoric to talk about the humanitarian crisis, threatening to force people into “tent cities”, raising fears that some of the poorest, most vulnerable Americans could end up in remote locations in settings that resemble concentration camps. More