For whom the Bell Riots toll
Deep Space Nine’s “Past Tense” eerily predicted much of 2024’s homelessness crisis. And it was still too optimistic.
Yesterday Gabriel Bell died. He was gunned down by police and National Guardsmen, along with other poor and unhoused people who rose up for dignity and a better quality of life. Today riots break out in San Francisco. Thousands of homeless people, crammed into a pocket of San Francisco by authorities who want to either punish or push them aside, rise up, seizing hostages and broadcasting their struggles across the Internet. The National Guard and local police will storm in, killing or wounded several people, but the national outrage over the actual conditions inside the “Sanctuary Districts” will lead to their abolition and real, direct help for the unhoused people.
That’s what happens in the first week of September, 2024, at least according to Star Trek Deep Space Nine’s “Past Tense.” The two-part episode, originally aired 1994 and written by Robert Hewitt Wolfe and Ira Steven Behr, sent three of its heroes back to the then-future of Aug. 30, 2024. Over the next few days they found themselves caught up in the “Bell Riots,” the uprising that will leave Bell (officially; he dies early on and Avery Brooks’ Sisko has to take his place) and others dead, but the gears turning to enact real change.
Online, the looming date of the Bell Riots became half meme, half call to action over the last few months. Yes there was some irony to those posts, but there’s also the depressing fact that “Past Tense” got so much correct about where we would be by the end of time Sisko and others arrive in San Francisco. Hundreds of thousands of Americans experience homelessness, struggling to get by while facing increased persecution as officials try to criminalize not having a place to sleep. There might not be official, designated Sanctuary Districts, but:
And despite its accuracy in many ways, “Past Tense” was too optimistic and did not consider cruelty as policy.
This summer, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling on City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, states and local governments announced new crackdowns on encampments and people camping outside – i.e. being homeless. Now people can be arrested even if there aren’t enough shelter beds for everyone on the streets, and there aren’t. California Gov. Gavin Newsom is now actively ordering state agencies to clear encampments and urging local governments to do the same. Los Angeles has said it will not go along with Newsom’s requests — not to say Los Angeles does not have serious issues with violating rights of unhoused Angelenos — even as Newsom visits and destroys encampments in the city. In San Francisco, the city is issuing bus tickets out of the city ahead of any kind of housing assistance. And now, Newsom is threatening to cut financial assistance to cities and counties that don’t go along with his directive.
In the last month Newsom has made it clear. Displace people or lose money.
Walking through the Sanctuary District, Dr. Bashir notes that “Causing people to suffer because you hate them is terrible. But causing people to suffer because you have forgotten how to care, that's really hard to understand.” In Star Trek, the Sanctuary Districts were created to offer housing and services to the poor before falling into a ghetto overseen by apathetic cops and officials. In reality, there isn’t even that. With a shortage of actual permanent, affordable housing, anyone who is in temporary spaces is in limbo while anyone on the streets is facing a police response, destruction of property including IDs, wheelchairs and medicine and with no real political counter. All of this comes as political ads paint unhoused people as violent criminals, people murder homeless Americans and major political candidates are pushing displacement or in the case of former President Donald Trump, camps in the desert where unhoused people can be sent to, with no apparent exit strategy. The Grants Pass decision isn’t a direct death sentence, but it’s hard to look at what it is currently enabling and not see the end result: the poor left to die, abandoned.
The Sanctuary Districts present a different kind of cruelty. But it became a dumping ground. Those who go there are called “gimmes” or “dims” for the mentally ill, while the people who turn to crime out of desperation inside get called “ghosts.” Sisko and the others get thrown in there simply for not having IDs, with no way out. The space was designed for people in need, but anyone who is brought there is seen as a greedy “gimme.”
“Past Tense” came in the wake of the Rodney King Riots and drew partly on that and partly on the Attica Prison riots, particularly in the way the hostage situation was resolved. The state’s response to the uprising is violence. The show — partly due to budget constraints, partly due to focusing on the hostage takers — leaves out the shooting of protesting people in the streets of the district, but the aftermath is visceral, bodies left to rot on sidewalks, wounded people limping away. It feels familiar.
Perhaps because of its idealism in how people might perceive the homelessness crisis, “Past Tense” ends up missing the mark in some ways. But other elements of its depiction of homelessness and the cruelty towards the poor are dead on. The very nature of the Sanctuary Districts are conjured up both to imagine an idealistic but flawed “solution” and dispel common myths about homelessness. As Sisko, no one with criminal backgrounds is allowed in. The “ghosts” are people who turned to crime out of a lack of support. Crowd shots or close ups emphasize that the homeless people in District A are families. Bashir has a brief smile seeing a child jump rope while he and Sisko explore.
In the Star Trek universe, the Sanctuary Districts are eventually abolished, Bell’s sacrifice and actions having illuminated the injustices being done inside them. In reality, homelessness is not so easily resolved.The Tenderloin or Skid Row aren’t physically blocked by a wall. Instead general senses of what a neighborhood’s barrier is play a role. Certain local laws, such as Los Angeles’ 41.18 define where people are blocked from camping. Rather than specific Sanctuary Districts, homelessness in the United States is spread all over areas, either in historically concentrated spaces such as Skid Row, or slowly accumulating across metropolitan regions as inequality worsens. People are displaced again and again, making it harder for service providers to build trust or track those they’re trying to help. And this happens as more people fall into homelessness.
The Sanctuary Districts are the “only way to keep…those people off the streets,” one partygoer says to Chris Brynner, the rich Bay Area tech CEO, elsewhere in San Francisco. Even if the districts were created with some level of service and assistance in mind, they’ve become a dumping ground for the undesirables, or at least those who the rich don’t want to see. The rich people at the party aren’t talking about permanent housing or fixing inequality, they’re talking about being able to ignore poverty. Sound familiar?
At the time it was a cautionary tale. As we hit the date of the fictional riots, it’s a what if. Poverty and homelessness weren’t new, but the story extrapolated an idea of how local and national government might handle them. In 1994 the writers of this Deep Space Nine episode imagined the homelessness crisis of 2024 as one of neglect where airing the truth could lead to chance. In real 2024 the crisis is one of those in power and wealth being intentionally cruel to the poor and trying to keep them out of sight.
In “Past Tense,” the big hurdle to overcome was broadcasting the truth about the Sanctuary District’s failings to the public. The hostage taking and the violence gets attention, but Sisko and others share the stories and testimonials of the people inside the district. In reality, it’s trying to share what the actual truth of homelessness is, getting past the misinformation that makes it easy to ignore why people experience homelessness. A common refrain from reactionaries is that people live on the streets too mooch off of benefits, or decline shelter beds to stay reaping some apparent money hose for services. For California alone, reactionaries love to talk about how unhoused populations are all from out of state, being shipped in on buses or traveling to the state or specific cities specifically for those benefits. Outside of the fact that that is simply not true — almost every unhoused person in San Francisco or Los Angeles are actual locals, people who were neighbors to housed people but fell into homelessness — the idea that swaths of people are spending resources to travel to live in dirty streets for marginal assistance is idiotic. And yet, people believe it.
What makes “Past Tense” so compelling, and perhaps why people kept bringing up the Bell Riots even prior to 2024, is because it took something very real and took it to a seemingly logical conclusion. This isn’t new for Star Trek, real-world issues are its bread and butter — the people who complain that modern Star Trek is “woke” are idiots — but playing out society’s failings to the most vulnerable in a near-contemporary setting created a tactile story. It’s one that’s remained relevant for 30 years. But as much as Wolfe and Behr tried, they could not imagine just how cruel 2024 could actually be.
Gabriel Bell is dead. Maybe his dream isn’t.
Today’s Panic Links
Robert Hewitt Wolfe, posting on his Tumblr account ahead of the “start” of the Bell Riots, asked that people who can please donate to foodbanks. It’s not the most revolutionary thing, but it will help people. It will save lives. Wolfe made his donations “in memory of Gabriel Bell.” I recommend doing the same.