“They really target people for helping other people”: The criminalization of mutual aid during encampment sweeps in Los Angeles, CA

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.