They really target people for helping other people”

The criminalization of mutual aid during encampment sweeps in Los Angeles, CA

Bibliographic Data

ID12664762
AuthorsNicolas Gutierrez (0000-0002-5277-8581, University of Southern California, corresponding author), Megan Welsh (0000-0002-0019-0735, San Diego State University), Megan Welsh Carroll (San Diego State University)
Year2026
Publication date2026-03-03
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePunishment & Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1462-4745 • E-ISSN: 1741-3095
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/14624745261428582
OpenAlexW7134960811
LanguageEN
References cited41

As many U.S. cities face year-over-year growth in homeless populations and a continuous dearth of affordable housing, municipalities like Los Angeles increasingly “manage” homelessness through punitive systems of criminalization, policing, and invisibilization. While scholars have documented the punishment regime inflicted on unhoused people, less research has focused on the private citizens, often organized as mutual aid groups, who intervene to counteract—and help encampment residents survive—this regime. Drawing on in-depth interviews with mutual aid helpers and encampment residents in Los Angeles ( n = 24), we examine how some private citizens work to redress the harms of displacive, destructive, and sometimes deadly encampment sweeps while supporting the basic needs of unsheltered Angelenos. These helping efforts are frequently met with arrests, citations, immigration consequences, restrictions on movement, and threats of further punitive action. This article also shows how helpers assess the legal, physical, and psychosocial consequences of these repressive measures when deciding whether and how to continue their mutual aid work. Through risk mitigation strategies, helpers—individually and collectively—learn to diffuse, divert, and deflect risk and thus overcome the City's attempted repression. We conclude with a call to dismantle the expanding punishment regime that now, through the criminalization of helping, targets those who support unhoused communities

Criminalization · Mutual aid · Punishment (psychology · Punitive damages · Redress · Work (physics · Crime Patterns and Interventions · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Homelessness and Social Issues