So there's been a fair bit of discussion about how the ACP has bogus chapters, that they're forging signatures etc. but I want to hone in on this social media post one of their chapters made recently. The post links directly to the tweet but for posterity here's what it says:
Our group in the Bay Area encountered sidewalks that were full of garbage including needles and glass shards. We spent a few hours cleaning it up.
Now these streets are safe for use and have reopened a path to a local church.
Having looked at these pictures, I'm not buying it for a second.
Look at how all of the trash is located within that one small stretch of sidewalk. Notice how it doesn't continue over the road in the longer shot?
Notice how there's very little that is actually waste, like from food packaging or shopping or disposed paper like receipts and stuff? Instead it mostly looks like a couple of people got a few boxes of clothing, emptied the clothes across the sidewalk, threw the boxes around a bit, then took a photo of this scene before any of it could get wet or grimy, as if it happened immediately before the cleanup occurred?
I'm no specialist in this stuff but all of those clothes look completely dry and unblemished. I can't wear something white for more than half a day without getting it stained but to think that there is plenty of pristine white clothing sitting on a sidewalk for days without accumulating grime and dirt and dog piss is pretty remarkable. Any actual papers in the photo look like they've come straight out of someone's recycling bin in their office, virtually untouched and still shiny white rather than random bits of paper that have blown around and soaked up who knows what and having been torn and trodden on and ripped.
Also when an area accumulates trash, this has a flow-on effect where other people are encouraged to throw their trash in that spot too so it's very common to see accretion where old mattresses and discarded furniture starts piling up very quickly, not to mention all sorts of plastic waste. Even if nobody adds to the pile, the pile itself becomes a sort of sieve that collects the trash that blows by in the wind.
Where are all the half-empty cups, the fast food bags and packaging, the cigarette butts, and all the other typical trash that normally occurs on any street, let alone a hotspot for trash?
This shit is so astroturfed it's ridiculous. The are staging these photo ops and patting themselves on the back for achieving massive outcomes in the local community by *checks notes* picking up a couple of trash bags full of clean clothes that were left on one small section of sidewalk. Idk who they are trying to convince here.
Here's a screenshot of full tweet for archiving purposes:
why would they take the time to litter a street, and then clean it, when they could just clean an already littered street?
Takes even less to trash a clean street and swap the before and after photos.