NOTE TO READER: Chris Nunez is right-on in his questioning of the connection between high property crime rates, violent crime rates, and homelessness. The Public Safety Task Force heard that these crimes are committed by the “sons and daughters of the residents” and not by homeless people in any statistical way. Instead, homeless people are characterized as “criminals” when they break a series of laws passed, apparently, just for them. These include laws which outlaw the act of sleeping at night, the use of a blanket, sitting on a sidewalk, asking for food after dark, BEING in a public parking lot or garage longer than 15 minutes, or sitting on a park bench longer than 1 hour. When a homeless person gets a $162 citation for sleeping when they couldn’t afford a $75 a night motel room, they are further criminalized for not paying the fine. Our jails are full of homeless people with little effect on public safety. This is truly a Mean Town in a Mean Season. —Becky Johnson of HUFF
Chris Nunez : In the heart of the mean season
Chris Nunez
It’s the “mean season” — and just in time for the cold and gloom of winter, a killing winter.
Responses to the recent Sentinel article about homelessness reinforce what has been shaping up for the better part of a year now. But what was not said shapes this communal discussion as much as what was stated in this article and the comments that followed.
At one of the Public Safety Task Force meetings, the director of the Santa Cruz Homeless Services Center pointed out that all across the country 80 percent of the homeless population is made up of locals who actually had a residence in the very cities in which they are now homeless — they are our neighbors!
But readers of this newspaper article or of the comments would never know it. The homeless have become nameless and faceless and expendable — responsible for their own poverty. Yet the very fact that homelessness is spread all across the nation should make it abundantly clear that there is something larger at work here — there is a systemic problem beyond the control of those caught in the untenable position of being without shelter, without an address — perhaps employed but still without shelter, others without jobs or prospects.
There is a seeming connection being made between high property crime and violent crime and the high rate of homelessness. Correlation does not necessarily mean “causation” but there is also a strange and implied “guilt by association.” Is it accurate to equate property crime with violent crime, or is this playing fast and loose with unrelated facts? What is this kind of logic that throws a community into a panic?
These are straw man arguments, smears and slurs that allow no opportunity for response from the nameless individuals or group(s) being attacked. And the arguments impute ugly characteristics to these individuals and group(s) — laziness and arguments about the supposedly undeserving poor — knowing nothing about any of the nameless individuals being attacked.
Some in the community seem to think that bringing back the chain-gang type of penalty with hard labor is the way to handle what is essentially a problem of homelessness. This is where the failure to distinguish between those who break the law and those who are merely without shelter makes for bad logic and poor decisions about the community’s options. To equate all homeless with criminals and criminal behavior does not make sense. We’ve never had chain gangs in California that I’m aware of, so I must wonder where such ideas come from.
There is an assumption that “spending piles of money on services” alone will end homelessness and frustration that it hasn’t. Jobs are needed by the homeless, the underemployed and unemployed. And the “job makers” of this nation have failed or refused to invest in creating jobs — yet it’s the jobless who are blamed for the situation. One of the realities is that over the past 35 years while the economy has been sliding down distancing the difference between the working middle class and the top 1 percent, that those candidates for election or re-election have used “get-tough-on-crime” campaigns to garner votes. Candidates of both parties do this — the Bushes and Bill Clinton, and Joe Biden did this — and it worked — that’s why they do it. Fear is truly our enemy, but fear also paralyzes and panics individuals and communities. Fear makes groups susceptible to “moral panic,” the fear of the unknown or of the vaguely suspicious because “they are different from us.” It’s the mean season, and we have ceased to be good neighbors and there are consequences for that — we have ceased to be the commonwealth our founders intended us to be — are we destroying the dream of a democratic nation?
“Each man for himself” is not something our founders would have said.
Chris Nunez of Santa Cruz has a master’s degree in theology from the University of San Francisco, and is a fellow in the graduate program in pastoral ministry at the Jesuit School of Theology at Santa Clara University.