In June 2024, this e-mail showed up in my Inbox.
“Good morning Michael,
My name is [redacted] and I’m working on the new series Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent. We’re currently in pre-production on seasons 2 and 3 in Toronto.
We have some scenes coming up in our first episode of the second season where we’d love to be able to use some of your “I Support My Neighbours In Tents” signs as background decor in our park set. We’d only be using them as intended and never shown in a negative light.
Thanks for your help Michael and please let me know if you have any questions or concerns.”
They’re referring to this artwork designed in 2021 for Toronto’s Encampment Support Network (ESN). It was displayed on windows and lawn signs as one component of a campaign pressuring Toronto to end encampment evictions, and has since been reused and repurposed in other cities.
I was a supporter of ESN at the time, and provided a number of different graphics for the group. I would later become an organizer with Encampment Support Network Parkdale (ESNP) from 2022 to 2024. ESNP was also asked by the show about artwork permissions, and also declined.
A few weeks later, Law & Order Toronto built an encampment in Bickford Park as a film set. The park remained open to the public throughout the shoot, but the set was well-guarded.
A lot of these details were not visible in the final episode, but the signs on the set clearly had two main visual reference points: signage and slogans designed by ESN organizers, and the artwork, signs and graffiti designed by former encampment resident J the Letter.
J lived in the encampments at Trinity Bellwoods and Lamport Stadium. In 2021, both encampments were violently evicted by militarized police. Documents obtained through freedom-of-information requests revealed the City of Toronto compiled dossiers on individual encampment residents, including J, obtained through extensive surveillance.
The Law & Order encampment episode aired on February 20th, 2025. The name of the episode and the fictional encampment is “White Squirrel City,” an explicit reference to both Trinity Bellwoods’ “Bruce Lee City” encampment and its “White Squirrel Brigade” in 2021.
The episode depicts an encampment resident, “The Mayor of White Squirrel City,” being killed by a mob of teenage girls akin to how Kenneth Lee was murdered in 2022 while homeless.
The episode is as cheap and insulting as you’d expect from a regional spinoff of a decades-old franchise whose season two premiere was unceremoniously scheduled to compete against the 4 Nations Hockey Face-Off finals.
Aside from the Trinity Bellwoods encampment and Kenneth Lee’s murder, the episode touches on a few other hot button topics: a tent fire, hysteria around needles in parks, TikTok and influencer moms. I’m not a Law & Order watcher, but I know this is par for the course for this franchise’s formula of transforming actual life-and-death events into weekly procedural fodder.
The episode shows a few “different sides” to its subject matter while avoiding taking on any politically volatile positions. Like most pieces of popular media, it depicts someone experiencing homelessness as being deserving of sympathy or pity, but never grants them agency. They don’t act for themselves, and are instead left to the whims of other characters’ charity or scorn.
After cycling through a few red herring suspects (e.g. a wealthy NIMBY and a “bad apple” encampment resident,) it turns out the mastermind behind the murder was the victim’s abusive ex-wife. She manipulated a group of unwitting teenage girls into killing him before he could re-enter his daughter’s life. She also happens to be an overbearing mom who ropes her daughter into cringey TikTok videos.
In the episode, one encampment resident talks about the reasons someone might be sleeping in a park: “People think that it’s laziness or lifestyle . . . but sometimes it’s just plain old grief.” Not cited in the Law & Order writers room are the social causes behind homelessness, including the state neglect and housing market speculation that caused a 25% increase in homelessness since 2022.
Also unmentioned are the social causes of homeless death. Encampment evictions, lack of housing or even temporary shelter spaces, police violence, slashed social services, and the ongoing restriction of unhoused people from public life led to 135 homeless deaths in Toronto in the first half of 2024 alone. Those 135 deaths are killings state policies carried out. There will not be Law & Order episodes about them.
The new episode isn’t the sort of thing that’s worth a play-by-play breakdown, but I did laugh at an early scene where the cops show up at the murder site. An officer tells a detective, “I’m guessing [the victim’s] homeless.” The detective corrects him: “It’s ‘unhoused.’ That’s the word we’re using these days.” A police force ensuring they use politically correct terms for encampment residents while harassing, surveilling, maiming and evicting them felt like a very apt snapshot of 2025.
It doesn’t take long for me to spot the lookalike of the artwork the production’s prop department originally asked me to use. It appears very briefly. The show’s detectives interview a documentary filmmaker who lives near the encampment, whose window displays an “I Stand With My Unhoused Neighbours Sign” under a rainbow pride decal. The sign is referenced by the detectives.
I’ve drawn a lot of political lawn signs, but sometimes feel a bit ambivalent about how useful they actually are. They are the definition of a symbolic gesture, the sort of advocacy over action that runs the danger of abstracting or obscuring the stakes of the actual issues at hand. As a visual artist by trade, I of course broadly believe in the power and potency of symbols. But there was an unsettling “funhouse mirror” effect to seeing a facsimile of my art used as set dressing in a piece of low budget copaganda: an abstraction of an abstraction.
I remember getting annoyed seeing the “I Support My Neighbours In Tents” graphic I drew displayed in restaurants or coffee shops that I knew had anti-poor or anti-homeless policies, like cashless checkouts, or customer-only washrooms. This is one of those things that seems hypocritical but isn’t actually when you think about it. After all,‘I’m not against homeless people, I just don’t want to see them’ is essentially the underlying ideology behind Toronto’s approach to encampments anyway.
The City has continued to carry out encampment evictions since the much-publicized 2021 Bellwoods and Lamport clearings, but in a way that has prioritized keeping tent numbers low to reduce their “visibility.” Hamilton’s encampment protocol outright cites “five tents” as the permissible upper limit.
(This is also how some politicians are framing the dismantling of Ontario’s supervised consumption sites: by claiming they are fine with them in theory, but they should only be located away from public spaces.)
Toronto’s 2021 encampment evictions received widespread scrutiny and criticism. Organized resistance to those evictions from encampment residents extracted material concessions from the state and galvanized massive amounts of public support.
This Law & Order ep is not the first time I’ve seen a political moment become aestheticized or abstracted by a tawdry piece of media, and it won’t be the last. Still, it remains surreal to watch how quickly these moments become grist for the content mill — tacky facsimiles of real life traumas.
Law and Order’s encampment plot reduces “homelessness” to an individualized problem — the product of personal tragedies but not of material conditions or state policies. It takes a housing crisis that is ongoing and memorializes it. It deploys symbols of survival and resistance for use as flavourful decorations in a plot about a villainous TikTok mom.
I’m not particularly worried about the influence of a throwaway episode of a cop show not many people seem to watch. But what should be worrying is how this process of abstraction isn’t unique to Law & Order.
So let me propose a more grounded cold open Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent could use for a future episode:
It’s the dead of winter, in the middle of a snowstorm. There is an exterior shot of a bar adorned with progressive-coded symbols: an “I Support My Neighbours In Tents” sign, various flags, maybe a “There Is No Planet B” sticker. A woman walks in from the cold. Maybe she’s carrying a few bags. She sits down and doesn’t order anything. After a while, the owner comes out from his office and tells her she’s going to have to leave if she doesn’t spend some money. The woman asks to stay a bit longer but the owner refuses. This escalates into an argument. The owner calls the police. The police come.
”Look, it’s not a crime to be homeless, but we can’t have her scaring off customers,” explains the owner. The police officer interjects: “The correct term is actually ‘unhoused.’
The woman receives a ticket, and spends the rest of the night outdoors.
This article appeared in the 2025 April/May issue.
