Jeremy Miller has filed a racial harassment and discrimination case against Santa Cruz’s Homeless Services Center, where he formerly worked.
Jeremy Miller, a former employee at the Homeless Services Center, is sitting on a couch in a River Street office in Santa Cruz. Wearing a checkered red, white and blue shirt, Miller, an African American, is quiet, but articulate. Sitting across from him is his lawyer, Jonathan Che Gettleman (his parents named him after Che Guevara), who is representing Miller in a racial harassment and discrimination case against his former employers.
“He was someone with integrity, and I felt like it was an important case,” Gettleman says of his decision to take on Miller’s case against Santa Cruz Homeless Services. “[The case] teaches important lessons about race, about how poor people are treated. There was a very clear injustice, and I didn’t expect there was any other help he might get.”
Miller started working at HSC in March 2012, as a campus supervisor—similar to a security guard without a weapon. According Miller’s complaint, he was routinely called “nigger,” “pimp nigger” and “boy,” among other offensive slurs, at work. The suit also alleges clients at the center threatened to kill Miller and his family. Shelter managers, according to the complaint, ignored these issues and overrode Miller’s orders when he issued temporary bans on individuals.
Then, on July 4, he was fired. Gettleman and his associate Eric Nelson filed suit last week.
Gettleman thinks shelter administrators let Miller go because it was easier than dealing with blatant racial harassment.
“There’s a lot of heat the homeless services takes at any one time, mostly because the city sees it as a haven of drugs and bad behavior,” Gettleman says. “They don’t want to draw any more attention, or have any more controversy.”
Attorney Tom Griffin, who represents the Homeless Services, describes Miller’s dismissal differently. According to Griffin, working security at the shelter is a tough gig, and not everyone is up to snuff. “It is an organization that provides services for a very challenging cohort,” Griffin says. “You necessarily take on many medical and psychological and social problems that the homeless population has. Not everybody has the skill set and the personality to effectively deal with those issues. I think, as it turned out, Mr. Miller wasn’t effective at doing that.”
Gettleman, though, points out that during Miller’s year and half working at the Center, he received a “Brightest Future” award for “outstanding hard work and dedication at the Homeless Services Center.” Gettleman says Miller received positive evaluations, and was invited to speak to students at UC Santa Cruz.
Miller became homeless after losing his job, the suit goes onto say, and later tried to receive services at the shelter, but faced more harassment and threats to his family. Miller is seeking damages for emotional pain, suffering and loss of income—including, Gettleman says, severance money, as well as mismanaged breaks and unpaid overtime.
Donald Frazier, executive director for the BOSS (Budding Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency) shelter in Berkeley, says his staff handles most harassment incidents with conflict resolution. But if someone threatened to kill a staff member, that would change things.
“We would probably call the police on a threat as serious as that,” Frazier says. “Nine times out of 10 they end up leaving on their own, but we still report it.”
Gettleman acknowledges the situation is complicated because some of the people who receive services have mental illness that might contribute to their volatility, but he says that’s no excuse for bad behavior.
“You shouldn’t have to be subjected to racial hostility,” Gettleman says, “just because you need homeless services and there are people there who have mental health issues. I know those people need services, too, but there has to be some standard of behavior.”
Gettleman says the case will come down to “what the law requires to prevent hostility in the work environment.”
Fraizer says working at a shelter is no easy task for anyone.
“That’s really unfortunate, and I can’t get in the middle of it,” Frazier says, “but I’ll tell you running a shelter has a lot of stress in it. But in terms of taking care of the staff, we have their backs, because it’s certainly important to mitigate conflicts.”
