As a medical student who works with unhoused people, an upcoming Supreme Court decision and Philly's decision to triple its police force in Kensington have me worried.
Tears streamed down her face as she continued talking to me: “They push me out of the shelters each day. They push me off the benches each night. I wake up to their bright lights in my eyes and my things thrown all over the ground.”The “they” in her story, of course, were police. “Why can’t they just leave me alone?” she asked me., considered the most important case about the rights of unhoused people in four decades.
But I quickly felt at ease once the patients and I began talking. They told me about family photo albums, nostalgic horror movies, and pets they needed to get back to. Sometimes, I’d get cussed out in a rage — it stung but didn’t mean I was in danger. Across the unit, people shared stories about random assaults and aggressive police confiscations, consistent with research that unhoused people arewhen they got out, disrupting whatever tenuous progress they had made, social connections they had, and limited resources they could access.