Isaiah John, who has lived in a tent on a little triangle of grass across from the main campus of Denny Park for about a year and a half, was planning to continue to do so June 28.

“It’s my home. I live here,” he said. “I’m not a homeless person. I keep telling people that over and over. If this is my home, I’m not homeless.”

Unfortunately for him, the city had other plans. Seattle Parks and Recreation (SPR) had posted notice of a sweep exactly three days prior and, at 9 a.m. sharp, showed up with four Seattle Police Department (SPD) officers in tow to execute it.

Though John was the longest resident of the grassy patch, his encampment was shared with two couples and a single man, who had abandoned his tent at the time of the sweep. SPR employees quickly dismantled that man’s tent and threw it in a garbage trailer.

John, however, was not going so easily. While the couples both accepted tiny home placements offered by the city’s HOPE Team — one in Skyway and one in the nearby Lake Union Village — John initially refused his offer, reiterating that the park was home to him.

“I think they made an offer to someone that doesn’t need an offer. What if someone knocked on your door and said, ‘Hey, I got an offer for you, but you’ve got to move’?” he said, adding that he much preferred his tent setup.

“This is bigger than a tiny home. Why would I leave my home to go live in a tiny home? This is a better living environment than that. And I have freedom: the freedom to come and go, have people come stay, visit, whatever,” he said.

The SPD officers, however, were not swayed by those arguments, threatening to arrest him for trespass if he did not leave by 10 a.m. After briefly discussing his options with mutual aid volunteers from Stop the Sweeps, John came to the conclusion that his was a lost cause; it was better to leave with his stuff than be arrested and lose everything.

“I ain’t trying to go to jail, and I ain’t trying to have them toss my life in the garbage. Apparently, that’s what they’re prepared to do. Toss a human life into the garbage? That’s disgusting,” he said.

John approached the officers and SPR staffers, communicating to them that he would leave voluntarily. He then returned to his camp to begin packing, aided by three Stop the Sweeps workers. SPR employees occupied themselves with the belongings of the two couples. After the couples packed their personal effects, SPR helped them load tubs with extra items for storage, tossing whatever remained into the trash trailer.

Though he was unhappy about it, John continued packing assiduously. However, when the city workers had mostly finished packing up his neighbors, things got tense. At around 10:15 a.m., an SPR worker cordoned off the area with caution tape, declaring it a work zone. That person then approached John to tell him he had 15 minutes to pack. After a brief back and forth, John was told that he had as long as it would take the worker to smoke a cigarette. Then the cleanup crew would take over packing and removing the rest of his things.

At that point, John had packed up only a few items from his patio area and hadn’t started clearing out his tent, which, in addition to personal items, contained a queen-sized mattress, dresser and chair. Faced with an impossible task, he grew agitated. Regardless, he and the mutual aid workers kept going, moving items off the grass, under the cordon and into a growing pile on the sidewalk next to their coffee and hygiene table.

True to his word, when the city worker finished smoking, the whole crew descended on John’s tent. When John protested, the four SPD officers formed a line and walked him and the Stop the Sweeps volunteers out of the cordon.

“You fucking lied to him. He trusted you,” shouted Joy, a Stop the Sweeps volunteer who only gave her first name, to the four officers forcing them out of the camp area. She said that this was the first time she’d seen the city impose a time limit on someone who had agreed to leave.

“You’ve never done this before,” she chided the workers and officers. No explanation was offered as to why it was urgent that John’s items be removed by 10 a.m. or why he was excluded from the process. Upset, the Stop the Sweeps crew wondered aloud if the cops had a lunch reservation to make.

John, clearly distressed, chain-smoked and opened his second beer of the morning, frantically negotiating with the workers about how to handle his belongings.

“That ain’t garbage: it’s my life,” John shouted at a woman from SPR. 

Officer Brian Blase leaned in, telling her, “He’s just being crazy.”

“I’m not being crazy. I’m being violated,” John retorted.

An hour later, his stuff was arranged in a neat pile on the sidewalk, ready to be transported to a new camp location one block away. He had all of it, he said, except his wooden floor panel, which SPR workers had thrown in the trash trailer. Once it was in that trailer, he said, they told him they weren’t allowed to retrieve it. A spokesperson for SPR did not return requests for comment on whether this and the time limit were official SPR policy.

As of June 30, John’s tent remained in the back corner of a gravel parking lot one block down from its previous location.

Read more of the July 6-12, 2022 issue.

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