But I was even a bit shocked in the first paragraph:
>He woke up to a police officer arresting him for violating the city’s ban on lying down in public places.
Is that legitimately something that can happen? If so, find it mind boggling that you could be arrested in America for falling asleep on the pavement/sidewalk!?
There are certainly valid points on all sides of the debate, and "lying in public" laws can definitely be abused to harass individuals, but there are also some valid rationale for why they exist in the first place.
I mean if someone gets drunk and falls asleep they are not necessarily homeless.
It seems that there's this discussion between false alternatives like "let people do anything" and "let's punish people harshly for minor things". How about offering better alternatives, giving people instructions first before any worse consequences etc.
* No permanent structures.
* You need to move every X days.
* You cannot stay in the park/forest/etc for more than Y days/month.
Cities could forbid tents and count hours rather than days. Criminalizing the act of napping in a park seems like a huge overreaction to peoples' fear of tent cities. If you've never taken an afternoon siesta along a local greenway, you should try it sometime. Bring a blanket and a book, but don't forget to check for sharps before you lie down.
That's not a welcome idea at all, and it deserves no validity.
Moving all these people to a different city/town/location is not "solving" the issue.
Yes, but it's a little more complex/subtle than that may make it seem. Some things to consider:
* Arrested doesn't mean convicted. A cop may take someone in ("arrest" them) to get them off the streets and give them a night in jail to sober up. Then they get let out without pressing charges. In some cases, this may end up being a net benefit for the person, in others it obviously isn't. Your country probably does the same thing. I assume "drunk tanks" are pretty universal.
* Police officers have a lot of discretion on which laws they enforce. There is a downside to this in that it lets them use that discretion in biased ways, but—ignoring that for the moment—it does mean that many times cops are more lenient and compassionate than the law implies that they should be. You rarely hear about those stories on the news but talk to a cop or do a ride-along and you'll see that they spend most of their time not arresting people and instead giving them warnings.
* Honolulu has a famously bad homeless problem, while also being heavily dependent on tourism for its economy. There are a lot of "beach bums" that move to Hawaii without any plan to provide for themselves and if Honolulu doesn't do anything about them at all, they can end up harming the place's overall economy, which would then make it harder for the city to afford the services these people need. Doing nothing is not as innocuous as it might seem.
* In general, a society must do some enforcement of public spaces. Otherwise, they cease to be public spaces. I live in Seattle which also has a lot of homeless people. Some of them build encampments in public parks. This means that, de facto, those are no longer public parks. They're private property because the public no longer has access to them—the squatters in the encampment will run them off.
The name for a place where you can choose to be and no one can kick you out is "private property". If you don't want all of your public spaces to turn into private spaces, then you do have to prevent people from unilaterally privatizing them to some degree. Of course, it's not black and white and there are good discussions to have about where you draw the line. Obviously people need to be able to spend some time in a public space. Is napping OK? Sleeping overnight? In a tent? In a shelter made from pallets and tarps?
Many of the laws that draw the line harshly are driven by the observation that when you give a little, some people (not all) will try to take more and more. So it's not so entirely that lawmakers are heartless sadists who don't even want to have to see a homeless person, so much as a fear that if you let someone take a nap, they'll sleep overnight. Let them sleep overnight and they'll build a structure. Let them build a structure and they'll start fires. And at that point, it becomes really hard to keep that place available to the public.
It is a hard problem and anyone who thinks it is black and white is choosing to not see all of the complexity.
One who has no home has fewer options on where to plop with all their things.
Individually, one could analyze each situation, collectively and systemically speaking, you will ALWAYS have homeless people when there is no housing safety net. there are a myriad of things can can occur in individual lives.
Homeless tourism is something that should be worked out between the desirable locations and the locations of origin that likely kick the responsibility can down the road in running homeless OUT of town, and hence to SF or wherever.
Honolulu and beach bummmery is something I've no knowledge of. Actual homelessness is something that doesn't occur much anywhere else I've seen in the world to the same level as it does in USA. I suppose that many places have folks migrating to the city from countryside regions in the hopes of a job and potentially falling on their face. I'm not sure where those folks are in many nations that I've seen (about 50, mostly Europe, South America, Asia, and North America)
I think in general society and government does and should presume that people can figure out most solutions to their own problems. Our instutitions provide a framework for people to figure out how to live, and help them do with things that require scale, but I don't think it's reasonable to say that the government needs to give everyone a "designated place to go".
> Actual homelessness is something that doesn't occur much anywhere else I've seen in the world to the same level as it does in USA.
There are a few things uniquely driving homelessness in the US:
* The opioid epidemic thanks to Purdue pharma.
* The deinstitutionalization movement was stronger here than in other countries.
* Not having free healthcare.
Outsourcing, automation, and the shift to an urban service-oriented economy is probably part of it too, but I don't think that's a huge driver. Most of the homeless stories I hear start with one of:
"I got hurt at work, and was prescribed Oxycontin. I ended up addicted and when the subscription ran out, I ended up on heroin..."
"I was mentally ill and unable to hold down a job because of it..."
"I got cancer and once all the medical bills piled up, I ended up deep in debt and couldn't afford to pay rent..."
The residents of that neighborhood don't have the power to end capitalism or the money to secure homes for all who need them (bare minimum $500k each). But they do have the power to get an ordinance passed.
I visited Los Angeles a couple of years back, one of the first places we went was a McDonalds. Some guy was dozing sat at a table (with a coffee in front of him). A cop came up to him and told him he'd be reprimanded if he caught him napping like that again.
In all my life living in the UK I've honestly never witnessed something like that. It may seem minor, but seeing an armed cop come up to someone and reprimand them for dozing off? I have no idea why a waiter couldn't have dealt with that. It's not like the McDonalds was even full or anything.
On top of this, the advertising boards saying stuff like "No homeless shelter in our community, keep it safe!" was just completely lacking in compassion.
I think a lot of people out there just don't see homeless people as deserving of empathy. At least, that's the impression I get.
I also find it profoundly ironic that America is supposedly the "land of the free", but you can get arrested/in trouble for:
- Drinking in public (even in parks or at the beach) - Sleeping in public (apparently) - Jaywalking - Eating on public transport
I just don't understand all these weird and arbitrary rules they have out there.
But you live in the nation that invented the ASBO.
> - Drinking in public (even in parks or at the beach) - Sleeping in public (apparently) - Jaywalking - Eating on public transport
These are local laws, not federal, so not universal across the US. And in all of the places around the US that I have lived, these sorts of laws are rarely enforced (at least not as a primary offense).
Fixed that for you.
It has nothing to do with anything, nothing to do with any legal reality, nothing to do with the constitution, the structure of the government, the declaration of independence from the UK, life in practice within the US, or any comparison to any other developed nation at the time it was written (1812) or now (2021). American exceptionalism relies on completely ignoring countries with Human Development Index or rights that are at parity or better, and relies on hyperbolic comparisons to the worst countries in the world.
Hope that helps you understand your experiences here! Without context, the cognitive dissonance (confusion from competing ideas and observations) can be very confusing!
"The Vagrancy Act was passed in the summer of 1824, which means it is now just shy of its 200th birthday. And if it held any relevance then, it certainly doesn’t now.
At its core, The Vagrancy Act is a way to punish people “in any deserted or unoccupied building, or in the open air, or under a tent, or in any cart or waggon, not having any visible means of subsistence”. Essentially, it criminalises homelessness. For homeless people, both begging and rough sleeping are things out of their control, and the Act does little to get to the root of why people are homeless in the first place."
https://centrepoint.org.uk/about-us/blog/everything-you-need...
Also: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/nov/12/new-home-off...
Although I really really doubt anyone here would be arrested for having a doze on the pavement.
It seems to be declining, but according to the BBC, as of a few years ago there were more than a thousand people arrested for just that.
Only if you count religious giving.
And why wouldn't you, you ask?
Well, even churches themselves say that six per cent or less of religious giving goes to 'charity'. The rest goes to church upkeep and events, church childcare, etc.
In fact, an ECCU study (http://web.archive.org/web/20141019033209/https://www.eccu.o...) stated that "local and national benevolence" receives 1 per cent of religious givings (2% going to church adult programs, bible study, etc, and 3% to youth programs and evangelization).
So we should probably pump the brakes on patting ourselves on the back for "highest rates of charity", considering that some of what is characterized as charity is "erecting the world's largest cross two miles down the road from the church which has the current world's largest cross".
How much of this comes from "tithe 10% to your church"?
Even when it’s not a formal tithe, American charity skews heavily towards giving to churches.
1. Largest incarcerated population on earth. 2. No public health system until Medicare (60s). 3. Very difficult to discharge debt, for citizens, easy for business. 4. Impossible to discharge student loan debt. 5. Allowing of predatory loan practices to incur this debt. 6. Many public schools are absolutely horrible. 7. Mostly no recourse for violent and corrupt police. 8. Most if not all of the federal policies go to help the donor class at the expense of the citizenry. On the occasion where policies help the citizenry, it's a coincidence. 9. Systemic racism in many aspects of the government, particularly the justice system. 10. Very little social safety net for the poor. In fact, many poor are incarcerated. 11. Very strict justice system where just about anything is a felony. 12. No voting rights for felons. 13. Vicious drug war. 14. Patriot act. 15. Skyrocketing healthcare costs. 16. Skyrocketing educational costs. 17. MANY charities have a 90+% administration fee (meaning only 10% goes to the actual group in need). This is perfectly legal. 18. Many regressive taxes (gasoline, cigarettes, alcohol, groceries). 19. Many instances where regulation isn't even done, or done so poorly, companies can do whatever they want (see nutrition labels for an example). 20. Not much done in anti-trust laws. 21. An insane amount of tax dollars goes to the war machine and soldiers get a minuscule amount. They are treated pretty horribly afterwards. 22. Government fully supports offshoring of jobs to slave-like conditions in China and elsewhere. 23. Loophole system where the well off pay very little taxes while the majority of the tax burden goes to the middle class (by income). 24. Massive income inequality and therefore political power and influence. 25. The amount of state funding for prosecution dwarfs the amount of funding for defense in most states.
These are just off the top of my head. I could probably do 20 more pretty easily.
Regarding charity, that's the citizenry. By and far the citizenry are decent people, it's the state that's cruel. Also we aren't "by far the most charitable country on earth," we're slightly about Myanmar, but we are still the top. In really poor states like West Virginia, the citizens are extremely charitable to each other. I would guess because they all need it desperately. Perhaps being so charitable is actually a symptom of the widespread cruelty of the state's policies.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/most-char...
https://studentaid.gov/manage-loans/forgiveness-cancellation