By Paul Boden
Paul Boden (left foreground) spoke in Fresno on March 21 about homeless people’s rights and what can be done to protect them. More than 200 people, including 50–60 homeless people, attended the forum at the Unitarian Church.
“They want us out of our community!”
“We’re always told to move on, but to where? There are no places for us to be.”
The Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP) and the USA-Canada Alliance of Inhabitants (USACAI) are calling on our members and allies throughout the United States and Canada to join us on April 1 for a bi-national day of action against the ongoing criminalizing of poor and homeless people in our communities.
We are building a movement to reclaim our communities for all members—not just those who set the rents. To build this movement and assert our human rights, we must make clear the myriad of ways in which our community members are treated as though they are less than human. We must “connect the dots.”
Over the past 30 years, neoliberal policymakers have substituted private gain for public good; they have abandoned economic and social policies that supported housing, education, healthcare, labor and immigration programs. The WRAP and the USACAI are at work identifying and tracking such policy, legal and funding trends in order to publicize their spread and their effects. This is not a matter of theoretical analysis: This is an investigation of the policies and tools by which more and more people have been made to suffer.
Connecting the Dots
Three decades ago, the deregulation of financial industries came simultaneously with the withdrawal of government support for affordable housing. Just since 1995, the United States has lost more than 290,588 existing units of public housing and 360,000 Section 8 units, with another 7,107 approved for demolition/disposition since March 2011. At the same time, some 2.5 million foreclosures have taken place since 2007, an additional 6.9 million foreclosures have been initiated and a projected 5.7 million borrowers are at risk.
In those same 15 years, more than 830,000 new jail and prison cells have been built; draconian immigration laws and eligibility screening criteria have been implemented in housing, healthcare, education and jobs programs; and America’s three largest residential mental health facilities are now all county jails (Los Angeles, Chicago and New York).
A New Wave of Criminalization
The year 1982 marked the beginning of homelessness as a “crime wave” that would consume the efforts of U.S. police forces over the next three decades. Crime statistics show that across the country, millions were sitting, lying down, hanging out and—perhaps worst of all—sleeping. To take one city as an example, by the end of 2011, these new crimes constituted roughly one-third of all prosecuted offenses in San Francisco.
We all suffer from governments that waste resources and refuse to develop real solutions to social problems, but the people whose survival is criminalized suffer the most.
Over the past year, the WRAP has led a survey effort with its West Coast grassroots members and allies in Portland, Berkeley, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Denver, Houston and Worcester, Mass., documenting homeless people’s experiences with the criminal justice system for survival-related “crimes.”
The USACAI has helped the WRAP to take this effort broader nationally by reaching out to their members and surveying homeless people in cities throughout the United States on these issues. Survey forms in English and Spanish are available if your organization wants to help build on this initial effort. The WRAP is now releasing preliminary results from discussions with more than 668 people.
More than three-quarters of survey respondents (78%) reported being harassed, cited or arrested by police officers for sleeping outside. Seventy-five percent reported the same for sitting or lying down and 76% for loitering or simply “hanging out.” These were far and away the top crimes for which homeless people were charged. A sad corresponding fact is that only one quarter of respondents (25%) believed that they knew of safe, legal places to sleep. In California, the public lodging law makes sleeping outside always illegal for homeless people. The law, by its nature, makes a large class of poor people inescapably criminal.
It can feel easy to scoff at these crimes: Most of the relevant laws, nationwide, are summary offenses (“infractions” in California; “violations” in some other states), which means that they can’t directly result in any jail or prison time. However, 57% of respondents reported bench warrants issued for their arrest as a result of these citations; that is, if they couldn’t afford to pay the fines that these tickets carried, or if they were unable to make court dates, then they became subject to arrest.
Using the Word “We”
Core to our success in this survey research was the active, engaged outreach of volunteers from nearly a dozen organizations throughout the United States. Using an organizing method that the WRAP members have developed and polished on the streets of cities on the West Coast, they were able to procure good information and, far more important, begin conversations within our communities about the real nature of criminalization and its impacts.
By seeking out homeless people in the places where they really spend time and engaging our communities on their own terms, we were able to develop true, communal knowledge, founded in collective experience, and we are able to use the term we to talk about our communities in ways that isolated “experts” never can. We are organizing in a more honestly democratic way.
What We Need
This is not about caring for or even advocating for “those people.” This is about all of us. As aboriginal leader Lilla Watson said, “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
The rise of repression in the United States and Canada is a war against all of us. We need all of us to act in this struggle for dignity, fairness and human rights. The people who pay for and profit from the criminalization of homeless people are the same people who benefit from our nation’s refusal to meet basic human needs. They are using these laws to do what invading armies do: They attack us at our most vulnerable flanks—the communities of poor and homeless people who have been subjected to shame and blame for decades.
The sit/lie law that Seattle passed in 1993 is nearly verbatim to the sit/lie law that San Francisco passed in 2010. The sit/lie law that San Francisco passed to use against homeless people is the same sit/lie law that the San Francisco Police Department now uses to harass Occupy protesters.
If you are not homeless, if you are not the target now, then understand that you are next. Isolated and fragmented, we lose this fight. But we are no longer isolated.
We can only win this struggle if we use our collective strengths, organizing, outreach, research, public education, artwork and direct actions. We are continuing to expand our network of organizations and cities, and we will ultimately bring down the whole oppressive system of policing poverty and treating poor people as “broken windows” to be discarded and replaced.
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Paul Boden is the organizing director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project. Learn more about the project at www.wraphome.org. Contact Paul at wrap@wraphome.org.
Human rights please.