NOTES BY NORSE: On Wednesday morning Santa Cruz police ramped up their attack on Freedom Sleepers at City Hall. A group of 20 people for the 11th Tuesday night weathered the high-intensity klieg lights, belching diesel engines, “no parking zones” and First Alarm Security surveillance to demand that the “no shelter, no sleep” policies of the Santa Cruz City Council end.
Homeless people and their housed supporters were driven onto the concrete sidewalk with the arrival of 14 police officers around midnight. One homeless woman–April– was given a $198 citation for “being at City Hall after dark”; the next day she was seen being carried in a stretcher near the SCPD HQ. Adding abuse to injury, police then conducted a second raid against protesters in sleeping bags who moved to the sidewalk to be “legal”, rousting with demands they leave so that “sidewalk cleaning” could be done.
Two hours later, for the first time in several months, a sidewalk scrubber machine arrived. The operator told one activist that he’d never done this before, i.e. that it was not a regular cleaning activity-./ The activist inferred that this was a new harassment tactic to discourage both protest and homeless people sleeping publicly in groups (where it is actually safer for them). Freedom Sleepers announced they will be back at City Hall for their 12 protest next Tuesday.
Vancouver, Washington ended its nighttime sleeping ban in a second vote of its City Council Monday night. But Santa Cruz bosses refuse to respect the basic survival need of sleep for those they want out of sight and out of town. Perhaps a pinch in the pocketbook may add some punch to the dozen protests. It’s not clear how much funding comes from federal sources, but if cash to the cruelty-coated policy of City Manager Martin Bernal is cut off, otherwise bigoted budget-minded bureaucrats may think again.
The River St. Shelter recently “liberalized” its policities allowing phone sign-up’s (831-459-6644) for its (lengthy) Waiting List. While on the list homeless people who get Sleeping Ban tickets supposedly get them automatically dismissed short of court. Of course, throughout July and August, the River St. Shelter’s own logs show it had none on its Waiting List that were dismissed. And requests to write a letter to the courts specifying that the shelter was full elicited a firm “no”. This was a 180 degree change in policy from previous years. But if their funding is threatened, will the compassion-challenged “service providers” suddenly shift course? If they have to show a record of abandoning NIMBY drive-out-the-poor criminalization policies or face a cash cutoff, things may change. To get the bucks, they and their friends in the police department may have to start respecting human rights long ignored.
TO FOLLOW THE LINKS IN THE ARTICLE BELOW, GO TO: http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/09/22/3704274/hud-homelessness-criminalization-funding/
Criminalizing Homelessness Can Now Cost Cities Federal Money
by Scott Keyes Sep 22, 2015 2:22pm
After arguing last month that local ordinances criminalizing people for being homeless are unconstitutional, the Obama administration will now tie federal funding to whether municipalities are cracking down on criminalization measures.
Every year, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) gives out $1.9 billion in grants to local Continuums of Care, public-private partnerships that tackle homelessness in a specific area. These grants are doled out in a competitive process whereby applicants must fill out a lengthy questionnaire about how they plan to use the money, as well as their current policies.
Last week, though, HUD announced that it would begin asking applicants to describe the steps they are taking to reduce the criminalization of homelessness. Ordinances that criminalize homelessness, also known as “anti-vagrancy” or “quality of life” laws, include making it illegal to sit down on a sidewalk, ask passersby for spare change, or sleep in a public place. Applicants for the federal money will have to show they are engaging with local policymakers or law enforcement about criminalization policies, as well as implementing new community plans to ensure homelessness is not criminalized. Failing to combat such ordinances will hurt a Continuum of Care’s chances of winning new funds.
The change comes after the administration filed a brief in federal court arguing that criminalization violates the Eighth Amendment’s protections against cruel and unusual punishment.
Maria Foscarinis, Executive Director of the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, hailed the latest move. “We welcome the federal government’s direction of tax limited dollars to the places that will most effectively use that money to address homelessness,” Foscarinis said in a statement. She also noted that HUD is giving sufficient weight to criminalization policies that the question “in many cases could be the difference between receiving funding and not.”
The Obama administration has made a pattern of connecting federal funding to desired outcomes in localities. Its signature education achievement, Race to the Top, encouraged schools across the country to raise their standards by making it a prerequisite to receive more federal funding. Obamacare ties some hospital funding to how effectively they avoid preventable infections and patient re-admissions. Homeless advocates hope that connecting HUD funding to the fight against homeless criminalization will have a similar impact.
It would come at a time that these policies have been popping up at an alarming rate. A study this year from the UC Berkeley law school identified over 500 anti-homeless laws on the books in just 58 California cities, while researchers at the Seattle University School of Law found criminalization ordinances in Washington had risen over 50 percent since 2000.
Criminalization policies are problematic not only from a human rights perspective, but also because they’re costly and counterproductive. A new report from the California Homeless Youth Project argued that “saddling a young person with a criminal history impedes their efforts to obtain a job, housing, safety net resources, and education, including both secondary and post-secondary education.” Criminalizing homelessness also hurts taxpayers. When accounting for law enforcement and emergency health care costs, numerous studies have found that leaving homeless people on the streets winds up costing taxpayers more than three times as much as simply giving them housing and supportive services.