You might have seen the city had a crew at Brown’s Corner Park earlier this week cutting down trees.
That happens to be the same park on the east side where police recently pushed out people living in a homeless encampment.
Get the backstory
I asked the Department of Public Works about what was going on there. A spokesperson told me they were clearing brush, invasive vegetation and trees as part of work the department does at parks across the city.
Most of the work appears to have been focused on the southeastern corner of the wooded area, pushing into the space where encampment residents kept their tents, canopies and other belongings.
A subscriber to my texting group sent a photo of people’s stuff piled up.
I asked DPW what happened to those things, and the spokesperson said if there were any items obstructing the work zone, those things were “hauled away” from the site.
Service providers who worked with people at the encampment told me no one is living there anymore, and DPW said no one was there during the clearing.
The trees and vegetation had provided partial cover for the people who lived back there. I asked if the work had anything to do with the encampment, and DPW said no. The work is “routine maintenance,” a spokesperson said.
But some residents of nearby Irvington shared their skepticism on Facebook, saying it looked like the city just wanted to keep people experiencing homelessness out of the park.
To catch you up on what’s happening
I got a tip a few weeks ago that police were threatening to remove people living at the homeless encampment.
I asked Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department about that, and a spokesperson told me they’d received more than two dozen complaints this year.
Meanwhile, the person responsible for the bulk of the trouble had moved on from the encampment, and other residents were trying to clean the area in hopes that they could stay.
One of the residents, Humberto Acebedo, told me it was a big task. And he wasn’t sure where he would go if he got kicked out.
That didn’t work, though.
When I visited a week later, Acebedo and another resident were preparing to leave, saying they’d been threatened with arrest for trespassing.
Mirror Indy reporter Tyler Fenwick covers economics. Contact him at 317-766-1406 or tyler.fenwick@mirrorindy.org. Follow him on X @ty_fenwick.
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