Denver Housing Advocates Worried City Systematically Violating Lyall Settlement

By Robert Davis

Housing advocates in Denver are growing increasingly concerned that the city government is not abiding by the terms of the settlement in Lyall et all. v. Denver and is using smaller homeless sweeps to isolate vulnerable communities into a single area before conducting larger sweeps under the guise of public health and safety. 

Tracking recent sweeps, Denver Homeless Out Loud (DHOL) has noticed a pattern emerging. The group says the pattern appears to move homeless communities toward City Park, where the city can then conduct a larger sweep of those communities at one time. 

“What we’re seeing is a systematic attempt by the city to get rid of its most vulnerable residents,” Benjamin Dunning, with DHOL, said. “We all know Denver doesn’t want homeless people around, but the way they’re going about getting rid of them is inhumane.”

Systematic Removal

During a sweep of a homeless community at 24th and California near Lawson Park on September 10, police officers provided the community with less than 24 hours’ notice and allegedly accosted some residents for perpetuating homelessness in the city by refusing to go into shelters or accept help from service providers. 

“They told us yesterday that we need to be out of here by 8 a.m.,” a community member named Rose told DHOL’s Terese Howard in an interview published on Facebook. “They also said that anything we don’t take with us, we won’t get back.”

“The notice they gave us about the sweep called us incumbents, not people,” another community member said. “So, it seems like we lost our rights as people, according to the police department.” 

Another sweep near the Blair Caldwell Library conducted in late July moved nearly 50 individuals out of the area under similar conditions. 

DHOL contends that the most disturbing aspect of these two sweeps is that they are moving communities away from the services they need and toward a centralized location where communities can be closely monitored by the city. 

“We’ve been tracking these sweeps for some time now,” Dunning said. “So far, we’ve noticed the city pushing communities toward parks, but we are still collecting more data at this point.” 

Lyall Violations

According to the terms laid out in the Lyall settlement, the city must provide at least seven days’ notice to homeless communities before a sweep may be conducted. It must also provide written notice of scheduled cleanups by Denver Public Works, and provide a means of returning any property taken during those cleanups to its owner. 

Howard argues that these notices clearly violate multiple parts of the Lyall settlement. First, the notices explicitly state that homeless individuals have 24 hours to vacate Lawson Park. Second, police officers set the notices by individual’s tents instead of handing them out. 

Cops also threatened to tape off the area and call it a crime scene, making it a crime for any homeless individuals to enter the park and retrieve their belongings if they are not present for the sweep. Officers also threatened to arrest Howard if she films the event. 

Denver Police Department’s code of conduct does not allow an officer to arrest a citizen for filming police activities. The department recently settled a lawsuit filed by the editor of Colorado Independent after she was arrested for filming an interaction between police officers and a mentally disturbed individual. The terms of that settlement also required police officers to undergo First Amendment training. Additionally, Denver police officers and other city employees are supposed to undergo annual sensitivity training to learn how to better handle encounters between homeless people and government officials.

Services – Not Sweeps

These issues point to a problem writ-large with the way Denver is abiding by the terms of the Lyall settlement, according to Howard. 

Howard said that DHOL will continue to monitor the city’s response to the settlement and will continue to speak out when the city fails to abide by its terms. 

“Now, even more people without housing are scattered around the city, without property, separated from their communities,” she said. “We need services – bathrooms, trash cans, showers, and hand-washing stations – not sweeps.” ■