Knock LA

On paper, the city comes with brooms.

The brutal reality of encampment sweeps is one of the most important political facts about homelessness in Los Angeles, and one of the least honestly discussed.

When the public imagines the state arriving to clear an encampment, it usually imagines a police officer. A gun. A cruiser. A command barked through a loudspeaker. That image is not wrong, but it is incomplete. In LA, some of the city’s most consequential acts of force against unhoused people are not initiated by armed officers. When the public imagines the state arriving to clear an encampment, it usually imagines a police officer — a gun, a cruiser, a command barked through a loudspeaker — but in Los Angeles, some of the city’s most consequential acts of force are carried out by sanitation crews, operating within public works systems, municipal codes, and the bureaucratic theater of “cleanliness.”

The city doesn’t just use the language of crime to criminalize poverty. Sometimes it uses the language of trash.

That distinction matters, because the difference between calling something “policing” and calling it “sanitation” is the difference between public outrage and bureaucratic acceptance. One sounds coercive, while the other sounds necessary. One triggers civil liberties concerns, while the other suggests public health, order, and common sense. But when a government repeatedly removes people from public space, seizes their belongings, destabilizes what little shelter they have, and returns again and again under color of administrative procedure, the distinction begins to collapse. A “cleanup” is not just a cleanup.

Los Angeles formally governs encampment removals through a tangle of municipal rules, departmental practices, and interagency coordination. One of the most central legal tools is Los Angeles Municipal Code Section 56.11, which regulates the storage of personal property in public areas and gives the city authority to move or impound items under a wide range of conditions. The code also authorizes removal of tents in certain circumstances and allows impoundment after notice in others. The law is written as a property and public-right-of-way regulation, not a criminal punishment, but for the people subjected to it, the lived result can be indistinguishable: loss, displacement, instability, and fear. 

The LA Sanitation department’s CARE and CARE+ operations have become some of the most visible and routine mechanisms through which the city manages encampments. Officially, these operations are framed as cleaning, access, health, and service coordination. In practice, they often require unhoused residents to move themselves and their belongings out of designated areas for hours at a time, under threat that items left behind may be discarded, impounded, or destroyed. As recent reporting has noted, CARE+ operations can require residents to vacate targeted areas from early morning until late afternoon, effectively turning survival into a recurring logistical battle. That recurring battle is not incidental but, in fact, the point.

Public officials often defend sweeps by insisting they are not punitive, but necessary to keep the streets sanitary. The city is not “targeting” people, the argument goes; it is simply keeping sidewalks passable, reducing debris, addressing health hazards, and balancing competing public uses of shared space. That framing is politically useful because it allows government to present repeated displacement as neutral maintenance rather than an exercise of coercive power.

But sanitation is not neutral when it decides whose possessions count as “debris,” whose shelter counts as “obstruction,” and whose continued presence in public space is treated as an administrative problem to be managed. A tent is not just a tent when it is someone’s home. A cart is not just a cart when it contains the archive of a life.

And this is where official language becomes morally revealing. The city’s terminology — “bulky items,” “storage violations,” “obstructions,” “cleanups” — often performs a quiet act of conversion. It converts the visible material evidence of human survival into municipal nuisance, reducing blankets into encumbrances, medication into property, and community into clutter. Once that conversion happens, removal can be narrated as upkeep rather than violence.

That linguistic transformation is one of the most powerful technologies in urban governance. Before a city can displace people, it has to redescribe them.

Los Angeles has been fighting over this terrain for years. Court cases, legal settlements, and advocacy challenges have repeatedly forced scrutiny onto the city’s treatment of unhoused residents’ property. In 2019, advocates and unhoused plaintiffs challenged the city’s enforcement of 56.11, arguing that the ordinance and its implementation enabled unconstitutional seizure and destruction of essential belongings, often with inadequate notice and impossible standards for retrieval. Public legal filings and advocacy groups have documented how people can lose tents, bedding, IDs, medications, family keepsakes, paperwork, and assistive devices. 

This is a governance structure with life-altering consequences. What the city often records as “property removal” can function, for the person subjected to it, as a forced unraveling of social and physical survival.

That is why it is too simple to describe sweeps as merely ineffective, which suggests failed problem-solving. In reality, encampment sweeps are often highly effective at producing the harmful outcome of making poverty less stable, less visible, and more exhausting to endure.

The question is not only whether sweeps solve homelessness, which they plainly do not, but what they are actually designed to do.

One answer is that they manage visibility. Cities under pressure to “do something” about homelessness often default to policies that can demonstrate visible action without requiring structural transformation. Housing is expensive, politically difficult, and slow, and mental health infrastructure requires long-term investment. Wage stagnation, eviction, disability, and untreated trauma do not fit neatly into a press release, but a sweep offers spectacle. It creates the image of intervention. Trucks arrive. Crews move in. The sidewalk looks different by noon. The state appears active, competent, and responsive.

That visual reset is politically valuable, even if the underlying human crisis has simply been pushed a few blocks away. In that sense, LA Sanitation is going beyond cleaning public space, helping to produce an image of governable urban space.

This is not unique to LA, but what we see here is a particularly sharp version of the phenomenon — because of the scale of our homelessness crisis and the visibility of encampments in public life. The city’s own budget documents make clear that homelessness response is spread across multiple agencies and funding streams, with substantial sums embedded not only in housing and services but in operational and enforcement-adjacent infrastructure. City budget and financial documents also show spending tied specifically to CARE/CARE+ cleaning operations, including contract-related overruns and related support costs. 

The budget tells the truth in a way political speeches often do not, revealing what the city is actually prepared to fund repeatedly:  the machinery of managing homelessness in public space. That machinery involves coordination between sanitation crews, police presence, outreach systems, city council offices, legal authorities, and neighborhood political pressures. Media coverage often highlights the most photogenic or dramatic edge of that system: a mayoral announcement, a controversial enforcement zone, a police clash, a viral video. But the more durable reality is procedural, and the real engine is administrative repetition.

When coercion is distributed across agencies, it becomes easier to evade accountability, because no single office has to own the whole moral architecture. Police can say they were only there for safety; sanitation can say they were only there to clean; council offices can say they were responding to complaints; public health language can absorb all of it and make it sound regrettable but necessary.

Administrative violence has one enormous advantage for the state: it can present itself as professionalism. This matters because it softens the public’s ethical response. People who would recoil at an image of officers throwing away someone’s life can be persuaded to accept the same outcome if it arrives in a fluorescent vest with a sanitation seal on the truck. The optics are less inflammatory and the harm is easier to narrate as collateral.

There is nothing apolitical about deciding that the appropriate civic response to visible human need is periodic removal. There is also nothing inevitable about it. One of the most corrosive effects of encampment policy is how quickly it trains the public to confuse movement with progress. A population rendered permanently movable is easier to manage than a population treated as politically entitled to permanence, shelter, and care. This is not resolution, but circulation. 

The language of “cleanups” buries the fact that sweeps, in addition to removing belongings, enforce a hierarchy of who is allowed to remain.

If a city can use public works infrastructure to repeatedly destabilize unhoused residents while avoiding the legal and political scrutiny usually attached to overt policing, then sanitation has extended far past its jurisdiction. It has become a governance strategy for disciplining unwanted visibility, a way to enact exclusion while preserving the rhetoric of care. The most devastating systems are often the ones that no longer need to sound cruel in order to be cruel. They simply need to sound practical.

That is why scrutiny of LA Sanitation’s role matters so much right now. Debates over encampment bans, public health authority, municipal enforcement, and the rights of unhoused residents are not abstract legal disputes, but arguments that will determine what kind of city Los Angeles is willing to be and what kinds of state power it is willing to normalize in order to keep inequality visually manageable.