January 4, 2012

San Diego police use encroachment ordinance to disrupt Occupy

Within 15 minutes of arriving at the plaza outside of City Hall here, where Occupy San Diego continues to congregate during the daytime and hold their daily general assembly meetings at night, I saw firsthand what the local activists have been dealing with.

“Code Blue,” yelled out a woman named Lynn Leseth.

Code Blue, she explained to me later, was the signal to alert activists that the police are on their way. And, sure enough, there they were, two San Diego police officers making their way over to the small group of activists milling about near a fountain and sitting on a set of stairs.

“They’ve been on a rampage against us,” said Leseth, who is homeless and unemployed but maintains a blog called OccupyIt. “They come by every 20 minutes. they do it nonstop.”

Activists here say police won’t allow them to keep anything on the ground. After Leseth informed the others that officers were coming, many of the 20 or so occupiers here picked up their backpacks and bedrolls and quickly, if not for long, dispersed from the area.

Occupy San Diego activists return to the steps near City Hall shortly after a visit from the local police.

If they don’t, Glen Escobar said, they are cited for what he called “an obscure municipal ordinance they call encroachment.”

The two officers confirmed as much.

I asked them why people aren’t allowed to put their belongings on the ground.

“Because they are encroaching if they do,” Officer Hendricks said.

I asked what that meant and he said, “You can look it up.”

Henricks said he didn’t have time to explain it because he had to go to another call. Although, just as Leseth had predicted, they were back in about 20 minutes.

Here’s how the San Diego Union Tribune (recently renamed UT San Diego) defines it: “The ban on unauthorized encroachments, enacted in 2007, makes it illegal for anyone to ‘erect, place, allow to remain, construct, establish, plant or maintain’ any object or vegetation on public property.”

According to a Nov. 8 article, lawyer Bryan Pease, who represents Occupy San Diego, is seeking to stop the city from using the ordinance to prevent activists from occupying the plaza in front of City Hall.

“The city ordinance makes it illegal to put down any object on public property,” he told the newspaper. “It’s so overbroad, it’s violated every day, by everybody. It’s unenforceable.”

Shortly after the officers left the plaza, the occupiers returned to their spots near the fountain and on the stairs. When the officers returned about 20 minutes later, they picked up their stuff and disassembled again. I watched this process repeat itself three times before sitting down to write this post.

— Bob Plain