Locals walking past freeway exit ramps in Santa Barbara may have seen large pink or orange signs announcing that the areas have been slated for a cleanup.

The postings denote a 72-hour warning for anyone living or fraternizing in a lesser-used public or private area — typically hidden from sight by fences or shrubbery — to remove their belongings.

If they don’t, Santa Barbara police and a team from the city Public Works Department will remove items for them, likely sendito the dump.

Since February, police have assisted in 26 such homeless camp cleanups, sometimes referred to by law enforcement as “raids.”

That’s 10 more than the annual target of 16, but the increase is the result of a backlog from 2013, according to Lt. Brent Mandrell.

Contract negotiations between the municipal departments and the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department Work Alternative Program (SWAP), which assigns those convicted of crimes to work sites throughout the county instead of spending time behind bars, slowed cleanups, he said. SWAP crews typically clean with police protection and public works oversight.

Mandrell said 16 cleanups was a department goal, not a requirement, just as the traffic division aims to reduce collisions by a particular number.

Because most of last year’s 18 cleanups occurred late in the year, Mandrell said crews have been making up for lost time.

“Sometimes we do one at a time,” he told Noozhawk. “If there’s four or five or six, we’ll do it in one day. The more you let them go, they just blow up. This is trash. This is needles. This is drug paraphernalia, used condoms, feces. This is really health hazard stuff.”

Years of practice have taught police to post 72-hour warnings, something Mandrell said the department didn’t do until more recently.

Once crews have identified a problem camp, they collect and throw out tons of trash at a time, keeping any items worth more than about $50 and any identification documents so people can pick it up from police property.

Sometimes patrol officers pick the places, Mandrell said, and more often than not the camps are found along Highway 101 on Caltrans property, near Union Pacific Railroad-owned land or in city parks, where trees and bushes are trimmed.

For example, Mandrell said, 800 pounds of trash were cleaned up recently on West Gutierrez Street, another 1,000 pounds of debris were picked up near the Garden Street freeway exit ramp, and camps are always reappearing along the railroad tracks near Las Positas Road and on certain Eastside streets.

“Some of them are just homeless folks, but some of them are narcotics dealers,” he said. “Camps do have an impact on State Street and areas of town. It’s important that we keep up the camps.

“It’s like the broken-windows theory. If you break one window of the house, everyone thinks they can do it.”

— Noozhawk staff writer Gina Potthoff can be reached at gpotthoff@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.