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I do not believe there is any cognizable principle of law that says that the State needs a complaint from the owner of a property in order to enforce generally-applicable criminal law.
If you can provide some more citation here perhaps it would illuminate why the city thinks they cannot clear out the encampment as a matter of enforcement of criminal law.
Because there is no crime. Pennsylvania trespass laws fall into three categories:
Criminal Trespass is the most serious (it's a felony) and involves either breaking into an occupied structure or using deception to gain access to an occupied structure.
Simple Trespass requires proof that the defendant entered the property for the purpose of engaging in damaging acts, like setting fires, threatening the owner, or engaging in vandalism.
Defiant Trespass is when you either remain on the property after being told to leave or ignore a posted warning, fence, or other clear indicator that you should keep out.
In other words, the act of simply remaining on public property without permission isn't actually a chargeable offense in Pennsylvania. Even if it were, they'd still have to prove that the defendants lacked permission to occupy the premises, and it's going to be hard to get a property owner in court to testify if they can't even be bothered to make a phone call about a homeless encampment on their land. Add to this the fact that it's not the job of police to know exactly who owns what property, e.g. everyone in Pittsburgh is familiar with the PPG Building but PPG never actually owned it. The current owner is HRLP Fourth Avenue LLC, a company that I can't find any information about meaning it's probably a subsidiary of another company that I'm not searching through incorporation records to find out. The police are only tracking this information down and getting the okay if the encampment is big enough to make the news or get a lot of complaints. They aren't doing this every time two guys are sleeping under an overpass.
But that is merely one offense.
An encampment on a railway is surely breaking a dozen other laws. It seems totally probably that they are otherwise totally law abiding.
I never said these encampments were on railways. Railroad companies own a lot of property that's near railways but not on the railways themselves. In fact, the actual rail property is likely to just be an easement and not owned by the rail company itself. I mean, yeah, if you look closely enough you can probably find evidence that they're breaking other laws, in which case you get to arrest them for a summary offense, ticket them, and let them go back to wherever they were camping. You certainly can't remove them from the premises (that for all you know they're allowed to be on) just because they commit some minor infraction. And even if you can, why would you? If they really have nowhere to go then you're just moving them to some other place they can foul up so they can do it again. Police have other things to focus on than playing whack-a-mole with encampments that are out of the way and that no one is complaining about.
You certainly can arrest them for those offenses. I don't suggest that as a first course of action, but I do think if they are fouling up an area with trash and human waste, a graduated set of consequences culminating in arrest is the only thing that will actually stick.
The goal isn't to play whack-a-mole, it's to make clear them that living on the streets and encampments is not viable and they need to accept shelters & treatment, even when they don't like the rules and conditions there.
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