The Maine American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) put out a press release Tuesday claiming that the rejected Portland City Council order to legalize the city’s homeless encampments through the winter months “would have been a positive first step toward protecting the constitutional rights of unhoused residents.”
[RELATED: Chaos at Portland City Hall as Leftist Protesters Demand Legalized Homelessness…]
After hearing over four hours of public comment Monday evening on the proposal — Order 68 — the Portland City Council shot it down by a vote of 6-3 shortly after 1 a.m.
Maine ACLU legal fellow Heather Zimmerman testified during Monday evening’s City Council meeting in support of the proposed order, saying that City Manager Danielle West’s opposition to the order “wholly failed to analyze the racial impact of the city’s current policies and practices that criminalize and forcibly displace unhoused people.”
The ACLU of Maine has previously warned Portland city officials that their procedure of periodically sweeping the city’s large homeless encampments may be in violation of the homeless individuals’ constitutional rights.
In September, the Maine ACLU joined the Communist Party for Socialism and Liberation and other homeless advocacy groups in a protest against the encampment sweeps outside Portland City Hall.
At the September Council meeting, Zimmerman called the city’s sweeps “inherently racist,” and described them as the “criminalization of homelessness.”
During this Monday’s City Council meeting on Order 68, Portland Chief of Police Mark Dubois gave a harrowing account of the violent crimes and overdoses at the city’s various homeless encampments.
Dubois described aggravated assaults, knife and machete attacks, thefts, sexual assaults, murders, fatal overdoses, and hundreds of calls for service resulting from the encampments.
The Portland Police chief said that “it doesn’t really matter what encampment we’re talking about, we see a significant amount of crime that occurs down there — violent crime.”
In one example, Dubois stated that over a six-month period at the Marginal Way Park and Ride encampment which was swept on Nov. 1, there were 467 calls for service, 36 overdoses, three overdose deaths, and two stabbings — one of which was done with a machete.
Cumberland County District Attorney Jackie Sartoris also spoke in opposition to Order 68 at the Monday meeting, telling the City Council about the issue of women’s safety at the homeless encampments.
Sartoris said that she had met with several women who had lived in the city’s encampments, all of whom told her that they had been coerced into sex or offered money or goods in exchange for sexual services.
The Cumberland DA also said that after looking into police reports from their interactions at the encampments, she found that that most officers were not making arrests.
“Most of the police officers at the encampments aren’t making arrests, I want to be super clear about that,” Sartoris said. “We were seeing on the logs report, after report, after report of encounters that never led to arrest, even when it was technically illegal conduct.”
Sartoris added that increasing or maintaining the city’s encampments places the homeless “in increased risk of harm.”
