Pro tip: If you’re relying on the Supreme Court’s extreme right-wing majority for guidance, you’re doing it wrong.
But that’s exactly what the Fresno City Council and Fresno County Board of Supervisors did in August as they rushed through harsh new ordinances intended to violate people’s constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment. Their actions followed the court’s 6-3 decision in June to overturn the Grants Pass case, named for the Oregon town that enacted a law targeting homeless people with criminal penalties.
Rather than heed the words of liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Democrats have joined Donald Trump’s MAGA movement in attacking people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, in this case the poorest of the poor. Writing for the three-person dissent, she pointed out the homeless crisis stems from a variety of “interconnected issues, including crippling debt and stagnant wages; domestic and sexual abuse; physical and psychiatric disabilities; and rising housing costs coupled with declining affordable housing options.”
Sotomayor could have been writing about Fresno specifically and its politicians’ long history of ignoring affordable housing needs while in service to profiteering developers. “The only question [before the court],” she wrote, “is whether the Constitution permits punishing homeless people with no access to shelter for sleeping in public with as little as a blanket to keep warm.”
Instead of listening to the voice of reason, a new generation of ambitious politicians has eagerly returned to Fresno’s tough love roots as home of the now infamous Three Strikes and You’re Out law, which mandated long prison sentences for people who committed nonviolent crimes, inflicting generational harm on thousands of poor families statewide.
Whipping up hysteria is the MAGA way, and it’s a movement with red and blue wings where ideology supplants critical thinking and opinion becomes fact. Every sitting City Council member is either currently running for higher office or will be.
Local political wisdom has it that the tougher on crime you are the more voters like it. But crime is down while homelessness is up, so unhoused people now serve as convenient targets and must be criminalized. Their lives have become political stepping-stones for County Supervisor candidates Garry Bredefeld and Luis Chavez; Tyler Maxwell in his campaign for mayor; and Annalisa Perea, Miguel Arias, Nelson Esparza and Michael Karbassi’s reach for the Statehouse.
The direct result of their blind ambition will be the cruel deaths of people forced to live on the streets, and high temperatures will become the primary cause. July was the hottest on record in Fresno as global average temperatures set four new records in a single week amid a run of the 13 hottest months ever. And it’s only going to get worse.
Capricious local Democrats and Republicans continue to ignore the inescapable realities of climate change and the need to radically alter their current political priorities. According to CalMatters reporter Lynn La’s July article, extreme heat is costly and deadly in California, “Low-income communities, older adults and outdoor workers are disproportionately harmed by extreme heat…Black, Native American and Hispanic Californians also had the highest heat-related death rates compared to Asian and white residents.”
The people that elected officials have condemned to death are not strangers. Three out of four are locals, their former neighbors. As La’s colleague Marisa Kendall reported in her July article “6 Myths About Homelessness in California”:
“The vast majority of people who are homeless in California are from California—and most are still living in the same county where they lost their housing, according to a recent large-scale survey of unhoused Californians conducted by the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative. The survey found 90% of participants were from California (meaning they lived in California when they became homeless) and 75% lived in the same county where they were last housed. And 66% were born in California, while 87% were born in the United States.”
Other major myths, several of which City Council members and County supervisors used as justification for their votes, include the following:
Myth: Everyone living on the street is addicted to drugs or mentally ill
Myth: People who are homeless don’t work and don’t want to work
Myth: People who are homeless don’t want shelter or housing
“We, the community behind me, put you in those seats, and you’re sitting there right now using your power to kill us. Every unhoused individual out here right now is walking on death row. You have now signed every unhoused individual in Fresno their death certificate,” Dez Martinez told the Council as reported on ABC30 Action News by Nic Garcia and Kate Nemarich.
“If you guys cared about anybody else, you guys would work with a solution to figure this out instead of just criminalizing people,” said Krystal (no surname given), who has lived in a shelter for two years. “It’s just really hard. When you get to become homeless it’s hard to come out of it. Especially when you have to do everything just to survive. I didn’t think it was actually going to be that hard until I became homeless myself.”
And the planet, the state, the valley and every town in it will continue to see increased impacts—and the accompanying deaths—from an increasingly destabilized weather system and a society that casts aside the injured and incapacitated, pathetically represented in office by a political class running on myth, superstition and fearmongering.
