About Us

CID: Safety Not Sweeps is a coalition of families, community leaders, mental health and homeless rights advocates, LGBTQ members, racial justice organizations, and many other concerned community and civil rights organizations and leaders committed to supporting CID: Safety Not Sweeps. We believe that we can all come together to improve our lives in the Chinatown-International District and Little Saigon.

Goals

1. Engage the public on the violent nature of “sweeps” and displacement. Who they harm, what really happens, and why the worsen our quality of life in the Chinatown-International District and Little Saigon. Sweeps actively make everyone in the neighborhood less safe because they worsen the conditions that lead to isolation, harm, and violence. Factors that lead to decreased safety include housing instability, poverty, exploitative employment, and police misconduct.

2. Gain material improvements for all people in Chinatown-International District and Little Saigon. The City of Seattle can provide short-term and long-term improvements to our quality of life, but not if they continue to conduct sweeps. We engage with people in our community who are furthest from racial and housing justice to develop real solutions.

3. Produce a public record of opposition. We want to have it on the record that people in the Chinatown-International District and Little Saigon oppose sweeps and the harm they create for our people. The City of Seattle has a history of neglecting and under-resourcing our neighborhood, perpetuating a cycle of poverty and homelessness, which absolutely decreases public safety for all.

4. Build relationships and supporters in preparation to influence budget decisions: We want to build a network of supporters to dialogue with elected officials during Seattle’s budget process. We want the City of Seattle to adopt our alternative plan for ensuring safety and social services for everyone in the neighborhood. At minimum, we want to build and expand a network of care and support in our neighborhood with lasting relationships that nurture instead of punish.

What does CID: Safety Not Sweeps do?

CID: Safety Not Sweeps calls on the City of Seattle to place a moratorium on sweeps and redirect funding into these areas:

Maintaining sanitation and safety at current encampment sites
Funding and resourcing community-based responses to public safety
Providing long-term housing options to mitigate the housing crisis

Values

We believe the City of Seattle should stop targeting our neighborhood through the criminalization of poverty and encampment sweeps under the guise of public safety.

We believe the CID is our cultural home and source of livelihood for our working class communities.

We believe in real safety through comprehensive housing solutions that address our immediate requests for social services, sanitation, and neighborhood safety that does not punish.

We believe our neighborhood is acutely experiencing the impact of large-scale problems that have led to the current crisis. At the end of 2020, the United States saw the sharpest rise in poverty in 50 years.

We believe working class people are facing a rising cost of living and a housing crisis.

We believe our housing crisis is acutely felt in the CID, a neighborhood historically redlined and cut in half by I-5.

We believe the COVID-19 pandemic and anti-Asian violence have significantly added to concerns about community safety and health, especially for resident elders.

We believe the Mayor and City of Seattle have invested heavily in brutal encampment sweeps, which are not a substitute for the care our neighborhood deserves.

We believe the legacy of racist urban renewal policy and redlining has resulted in systemic disinvestment and de facto discrimination along racial and socioeconomic class lines.

We believe encampment sweeps do not repair nor rectify the decades of neoliberal policies of spending cuts and privatization that has resulted in the housing and social crisis today.

We believe sweeps are not a substitute for sanitation, substance use, mental health, and housing services.

We show up to our neighborhood every day to clean, repair, and alleviate conditions in our limited capacities.

We believe it is disheartening, to say the least, to feel the city’s presence through waves of police, with city officials now absent from our community meetings.

We believe workers and neighbors are acting as de facto first responders, intervening when there is a mental health crisis, feeding people, and intervening in cases of overdose.

We believe we cannot continue picking up and cleaning up after the sanitation problems that the City has worsened through its sweeps.

Our Letter

tinyurl.com/Little-Saigon-CID-Statement

Get Involved

Thank you for your interest in getting involved! There are many ways to help with this campaign, and since this is such a grass roots type of campaign, all roles are vital to our success. The primary goal of our campaign is to share and dialogue with people about signing on. This could mean outreach in the community or conversations online.

If that is something you'd like to do, please share!

Sign-on: tinyurl.com/Little-Saigon-CID-Sign-On

If you would like to put on an outreach event, teach-in, or get in touch, please contact us at: