I’m trying to collect my thoughts on reframing the narrative/myth that homeless encampments *create* more violence due to the concentration of violently marginalized and colonized people.

This narrative/myth is used as rationale for clearing camps but it’s an inaccurate one.

Mayor Frey and many others claim there is an *increased safety risk* at the Powderhorn Sanctuary camps.

Safety risk for whom? Because the predatory and violent elements associated with homelessness and street-based life pre-existed the visibility it currently has.

Homeless folks are more likely to be *victims* of violence (including State violence) than there are to be perpetrators of violence.

You just weren’t being forced to pay attention to it before.

But encampments and camp life are often *protective factors* against this violence. More people’s needs can be met, people are not alone or on the street all night, and shared work and shared values develop.

There are violent things that have happened and will continue to happen to people who are Native, Black, poor, invisibilized and ostracized people until we collectively decide to care about *all* members of our communities- whether they are visible or not.

So the dynamic that Frey and others are naming “increased violence” or, inversely, “less safe/ty” happening at Powderhorn Sanctuaries is actually that people who have been *relatively more insulated from certain kinds of violence* are in closer PROXIMTY to said violence.

The other thing that I do not see showing up enough in the conversation of the Powderhorn Sanctuary specifically and the crisis of houselessness generally is how this is only the latest iteration of settler colonial violence against Indigenous people & resulting displacement.

We cannot tell the story of the Minneapolis Sanctuary Movement in this particular moment if we are not talking about the Minnesota history of violence against the Dakota and Anishinaabe people. We have to talk about the disproportionate representation of Native people in tents.

We must end evictions- all types of eviction and displacement- on stolen land. And we certainly cannot pretend to repent for the history of colonial violence we have participated in as a city/state while forcibly moving Native residents from site to site.

It is dishonest to suggest that unsheltered residents of the parks are the driver’s of neighborhood safety concerns because that fails to incorporate a meaningful power analysis.