Homeless Court serves the homeless -- with community service
I have two stories to tell today about the homeless. Their juxtaposition is almost as incongruous as the composite photo shown at the left. Official Santa Ana/Orange County, represented in a story from the Orange County Register, congratulated itself last week on its approach to the problem of homelessness. Occupy Santa Ana contends that the efforts are flawed right from their conception through to their execution — and today plans to drive home the point. These two worldviews barely meet.
I received a “press release” last night (which I put in quotes because, while cc’d to over a dozen Occupy Santa Ana and Occupy Orange County supporters, it was addressed to me, Vern, and one other person. It’s awfully timely, so let me start there.
Today, Tuesday April 10, at the west end of the Santa Ana Civic Center’s “Walk of Honor” at Ross St., Occupy Santa Ana will hold a somewhat ingenious action on behalf of the homeless. It will demonstrate to beyond a reasonable doubt that, despite what the County says, the county’s homeless have no place available to sleep.
“There are plenty of shelter beds available,” says Official Orange County. “Oh yeah?,” says Occupy Santa Ana. “Let’s see.” So, from 2:00 to 6:00 today, Occupy Santa Ana will renew its “telethon” for homeless shelter beds. It will, it is safe to say, discover that they will have filled up well before 6:00 — meaning that those people who are without a room for the night are homeless out of necessity.
“Necessity.” That’s a loaded word, because “necessity” is a legal defense to some crimes. If you truly have to do something, like jaywalking to get away from advancing zombies, the law grudgingly grants you the right to do it — or at least it’s supposed to. There are limits to this — the harm one sought to avoid must have outweighed the danger of the prohibited conduct charged; one must have had no reasonable alternative; one must have ceased to engage in the prohibited conduct as soon as possible; and one must not have created the danger one then sought to avoid — but if something is truly necessary then you might be able to claim a right to do it. (Note: yes, people have tried to say that civil disobedience is itself necessary because of some urgent political problem. It doesn’t qualify.)
What are “necessities”? We sometimes use the term to include the likes of toothpaste and underwear, but in the sense above not even food and water would always qualify as such. A necessity is most unequivocally something needed urgently. If you’re starving or dying of thirst, then food and water would count. But for most of us, the truly urgent necessities are ones imposed on us by the limits of our bodies. We need to breathe. We may need urgent medical care. We need to sleep. We need to urinate and defecate. Sometimes these needs become extremely urgent. At that point, the necessity defense might be raised.
Sometime soon — most likely within the next 18 hours or so — you, Dear Reader, are going to fall asleep. Your body just won’t allow you to stay awake any longer; sleep becomes a necessity. And, if you’re homeless, what the hell are you supposed to do about it?
For most Orange County cities, the answer is: you’re supposed to get yourself to Santa Ana. Santa Ana, of course, would prefer a different answer, but the Board of Supervisors decided long ago that it was to be the rug under which the problems of our wealthy county would be swept. So, Santa Ana will find a place for you to sleep, and other cities will nudge you or perhaps even transport you there. (The unfairness of this to the city of Santa Ana probably shouldn’t require comment — yet it probably will. Unless directly affected by it, people often don’t think this sort of thing through.)
So that’s what Occupy Santa Ana will do this afternoon — document the necessity for people to sleep on the streets. (They are also setting down a baseline — because the Armory in Santa Ana, where many homeless stay, will be closing soon, and the number of available beds in Orange County is going to plummet.)
Having established that a necessity defense is appropriate, Occupy Santa Ana will hold a press conference starting at about 6:00. After that, people — some homeless, some perhaps not — will probably engage in organized civil disobedience. They ask for witnesses and supporters — equipped with candles, sweaters/jackets, cameras and phones — to show up for an action that is supposed to last until dawn.
What is supposed to happen to those who participate? Well, Orange County and Santa Ana have an answer — and it doesn’t involve honoring the necessity defense. This past Thursday, the Register introduced its readers to the Homeless Outreach Court — a seemingly benign and humanitarian idea that demonstrates the total disconnect between officials and activists.
I found a nice little blurb on the Court on as official a site as one could hope for: a web page of one of the County Supervisors, Shawn Nelson. Here’s what his page had to say:
Supervisor Nelson was on hand to deliver the keynote address to the 2011 Humanitarian Award presentation held by the Homeless Outreach Court. The Court honored Dr. Clayton Chau of the Orange County Health Care Agency for his tireless activism and work to improve the effectiveness of the Homeless Outreach Court. Since its inception, the Homeless Outreach court has been successful in integrating rehabilitation services for low-level misdemeanor offenses of homeless individuals, while providing them with links to necessary supportive services for future success.
You should read that Register article linked to above. It tells the story of how hard and benignly the police and courts work to serve the homeless population. (Do you smell a whiff of PR? An Occupy Santa Ana activist was informed that it was the last article in a series that was being done on the homeless issue. The series had been started by crusading reporter Yvette Cabrera, recently and somewhat inexplicably let go from the Register. One wonders how she might have written the story. Check out the comments for some sense of how it was challenged.)
Aside from some factual disagreements — are there only 5000 homeless in Orange County, as the government contends and the Register accepts, or more like 50,000, as activists allege? — the Register article shows a stark disconnect with the perspective of Occupy Santa Ana. One fact on which everyone can apparently agree is that many more people are being ticketed for what the city calls “camping” (and what others of us might call “sleeping.”)
Although the stepped-up enforcement has resulted in an increase in illegal camping tickets – one homeless woman got seven tickets in one week, according to a Public Defender case manager –[Santa Ana Police Sgt. Enrique] Esparza and others say the goal of the heightened enforcement isn’t punitive.
“The last thing that we try to do is criminalize (the homeless),” says Esparza, 45. “We try for a balance. On the one hand, we have these homeless people who are in a bad situation, but we also have thousands of county employees and jurors who come here to work every day, who have the right to feel safe.”
Even if punishment was the goal, the tickets would be of questionable value. The cost of one camping ticket is $500, and few people sleeping at the Civic Center have the cash to pay it.
Instead, Esparza and others say the idea is to get the homeless to show up at a nearby government building and stand before a judge at a place many people don’t even know exists: Homeless Outreach Court.
I’m not as cynical as some. I believe that most police, most of the time, truly do want to help the people they serve — including the homeless — rather than suppressing them. I believe that the officers interviewed in the article do get more job satisfaction out of helping people than dominating them. But read those paragraphs above again. In fact, first read them in the context of the enthusiastic boosterism of the Register writer, then again in isolation here.
There’s an increase in enforcement — seven misdemeanor “camping” tickets in a week for one woman! — but it isn’t punitive! No, no — “the last thing they try to do is criminalize the homeless” — except that it’s apparently not last last. In fact, it’s “built into the system” last. It’s using the legal system to coerce people to go before a judge at the Homeless Outreach Court. It’s that kind of “last thing they try to do” — the sort of thing that they admit that they do intentionally.
Indeed — and I’m not blaming Sgt. Esparza here, who probably not only believes what he’s saying but whose good fortune within the SAPD may depend on his not perceiving the contradiction that others so dearly want him not to acknowledge — the logic here is twisted.
I presume that careful readers will already note that there’s not even a pretense of recognizing the possibility of a “necessity defense” here — why should there be, given that the point is not to “criminalize the homeless”? (Not being criminalized, what do they need with a defense?) But let’s get beyond that, and beyond the logic of charging people $500 that the city knows that it won’t collect, to the crux of the situation: why use such a convoluted means to get services to the homeless?
The Homeless Outreach Court wants to make services available to people. Let’s pretend that there are only two possibilities, with no shades of gray in between: either these are services that the homeless apparently want, or they are services that they don’t want. If they are services that they want, then why do they need to be forcibly brought into even a “friendly” court in order to get them? Would it not be cheaper to send out, oh, social workers rather than cops dragging people off to judges? Cost aside, wouldn’t it be more respectful of their rights than to use dubious arrests as a pretext to get them into the system as opposed to, oh, just inviting them to make use of the services?
And the notion of sentencing people to community service to pay their fines? These are homeless people — give them a job and some money or services for it! Why do we want to manage our social work through the court system?
Offhand, I can think of two reasons why the city would want the message of desirable and available services to be delivered by an armed police officer and a stern judge rather than a social worker — even one with a police escort, if necessary — and neither one really matches the friendly tone of the Register article. One is that they would prefer to intimidate the homeless into compliance rather than to treat them as people with dignity and agency. The other is that they want to make the experience of being in Santa Ana unpleasant enough that they might get the hell out of the county.
Let’s review a smaller excerpt from the above once more:
“We try for a balance. On the one hand, we have these homeless people who are in a bad situation, but we also have thousands of county employees and jurors who come here to work every day, who have the right to feel safe.”
Fear and disgust are different things, although one effect of greater “civilization” is to lead people to confuse them. I don’t think that county employees and jurors actually fear the homeless, for the most part. I don’t think that they think that they are going to be physically attacked or receive a communicable disease by passing by them. (If it is really a matter of fear, then some lesser approaches to the homeless problem may be appropriate — including educating employees and jurors about the dangers that the homeless do, and don’t, face.) I do think, though, that lots of people find the homeless to be disgusting — and that it is reducing this disgust, rather than the prospect of direct harm, that policies towards the homeless tend to serve.
We don’t want our streets to smell like urine — this is much more a matter of disgust than of fear. Well, I’m down with that! But I’m going to suggest something radical — that if we don’t want streets to smell like urine, we can pay for there to be some easily accessible portable toilets out where the homeless will be and for them to be reasonably well maintained. If we don’t like their unshowered smell — and most of the homeless I’ve met through the Occupy movement could do without it themselves — then we can make sure that there are safe and accessible places for them to shower, and even to wash their clothes. If we don’t like them carrying their stuff all over the place, we could give them storage lockers.
“SOCIALISM,” I can hear some of you muttering. No — just good old American pragmatism and thrift. We will spend a potentially unlimited amount on intimidating and suppressing the homeless without even considering that it might just be less expensive to provide them with their necessities — as well as more humane.
Some of you will surely disagree, and that’s fine. Others of you may have your interest piqued. For you, there’s the chance to participate in the Occupy Santa Ana “telethon” from 2:00 until 6:00, to see the press conference following, and to watch whatever coordinated action might take place thereafter (with the possibility of arrests for — you guessed it, “camping.”) They’re not asking for people to get arrested between tonight’s dusk and tomorrow’s dawn — but they do invite people to come watch, witness, and learn.
With the decimation of the middle class and the rise in foreclosures, homelessness is likely to be on the rise for the next few years at least. We can make it illegal — “camping,” sleeping in cars, etc. — all we want. But that won’t make the problem go away — no matter how civilized we convince ourselves we are being.
An OSA commenter notes that the Armory closes at 6:00 today until cold weather returns, which is the reason for the timing of today’s action. Here’s a press release from a couple of weeks ago:
Awesome article. That was like O.C. Homelessness 101, 201 and 301.
Thanks — well, you guys deserve the publicity, and you gave me the right articles to look through (though I found one on my own.) This page has 137 distinct hits so far today, so I hope that some of them translate into people attending.
Thanks to some pressing work demands, I’m suddenly looking iffy for legal observer duty tonight, but if I can make it for 4 hours or so I will. Which 4 hours would you pick, if it comes to that?
there were two very interesting articles in the los angeles times this weekend regarding the homeless. and remember, the los angeles times is not a bastion of republicianism. one article dealt with an order from a los angeles superior court judge regarding the “possessions” of the homeless and one dealt with the increasing problems the police and community were having with the homeless in venice.
the gist of both articles was the question of how far can the courts and society go in protecting the rights of the homeless at the expense of the people in the neighborhoods who are not homeless, who own property and businesses and who, perhaps, simply have to travel through areas where the homeless congregate.
in downtown los angeles, it is now illegal to remove the “possessions” of the homeless so that the homeless can pile up what most would consider trash and neither the city or the people who live and work in the area can remove it. on the surface, this might make sense since many of these people carry around whatever they have in shopping carts, wheel barrels and other things. but what is happening in downtown los angeles is that these people are piling up old, rotted mattresses, bags of stale food, soiled clothing and other items that attract rats, maggots and other non friendly insects and vermin, thus creating a serious health hazard
in venice, the homeless, to earn a few dollars, are acting as “enforcers” for the illegal vendors that populate the boardwalk, intimidating the licensed vendors and bothering the established merchants who pay things like rent and taxes. again, there is a court order preventing the police from removing these people from the venice boardwalk.
now, i am all for helping the homeless and, in fact, give money to a couple of organizations that try to feed, clothe and sustain people, especially families with small children, while they get their lives back together. but, i also remember a time when the homeless basically took over almost one half of the parking structure by the courthouse. the inconvenience was tolerable but the fact that a majority of the female attorneys who had business at the courthouse were scared to park in the lot was emblematic of a greater problem. and, even today, the walk from the courthouse to the county buildings is sometimes little more than running a gauntlet of less than pleasant exeriences
my question is, as someone who appears to be sincere about this issue, how do you reconcile the various competing needs and rights of these groups so as to provide the homeless with services and opportunities while protecting the rights of taxpayers, homeowners, business people and the casual passerby.
Good questions, willie. I think that the first thing to do is to address the concept of “necessities.”
People need a place to sleep, and if they have no other place to sleep, I think that society either gives them a reasonable place to lie down or else lets them lie down where they will.
People need a place to excrete, and if they have no other place to excrete, I think that society either provides them with a place or put up with unpleasant smells and surprises — the latter being something I don’t favor.
I think that sometimes people don’t fully think through the implications of not having a place to excrete. What the hell is one supposed to do? Lie down until the feeling passes? Go back in time and earn enough money for a motel room?
So, start there. I think that letting them have a place to shower would also make everyone’s life happier. How much money do cities spend watering the lawns of municipal golf courses, for sake of comparison?
Next, you’re absolutely right that homeless people’s collections of items — which many see as trash — are part of the problem people have with them. So, again — would it be worth giving them a safe and secure place to store their property? Yes, it would cost something — but would it really cost more than other solutions that just make them miserable (and are largely designed, I think, to drive them into other venues)?
Imagine if homeless people could stow their things, have showers and fresh clothes, and then just hang out in public areas. Why, one might not even know that they’re homeless at all! What would society do without all that fear?
understand your point but, in some regard, isn’t doing what you suggest simply enabling them to continue to live off society. and by that i mean that if we give them food, a place to relieve themselves, showers, a place to store their stuff, what incentive do they have to do anything other than continue to live of the largeness of others
@Willie
I think your question is fair but it’s a sign of how messed up our values are that it needs to be asked.
Being homeless is NOT FUN… even under the best of conditions, if you have some food in your stomach and a safe place to rest your head, your dignity is constantly under attack, the feeling of comfort becomes a distant memory, and even the most sane of us can “crack” after a while.
So no, making the homeless safer and not chronically hungry will NOT make those who were already struggling to get out of the lifestyle decide to stay longer for kicks.
BTW, let’s focus both on how to help them out of the lifestyle as well as showing them compassion in the meanwhile, the two are by no means exclusive.
The homeless are homeless for a reason. They need services to help them get back on their feet. I went to Necessity Vilage to see for myself what was going on. I found out that most shelters are open for women, confidential domestic abuse cases, and youth. Even the shelters that accept women who are seeking shelter from domestic abuse have to show court papers, like a restraining order to prove they are in need. There are literally no shelters for men. Some phone numbers do not work. When I arrived at 5pm there was a church feeding them and the majority without shelter were men. Making homelessness a crime will do nothing to help the problem. I read that millions of people are a paycheck away from losing their home.
My question is…what are all those churches doing to help with this issue? Don’t they preach about helping the downtrodden? They have space available for their coffee socials that they can use. If the answer is, they are not zoned for that service, I say do it anyway. Its time these houses of worship that preach to love thy neighbor to take a stand and practise what they preach.
Willie, that is primarily what sales tax is for, and alcohol tax and cigarette tax and car registration etc. etc.
This society will continue to descend into polluted madness as long as it continues to judge people’s societal worth by how plugged into the economic engine they are. In other words, it is time to stop giving more credence to those that show up to the factory and produce more polluting, unnecessary widgets just to produce more profit for the corporate share holders and more perceived societal respectability. If Jesus were walking the grounds of Orange County today, I am sure that he would be more concerned about finding a locker for his extra robe, a descent place to do a dump in privacy and a safe patch of grass to sleep on and conduct sermons on, than be concerned about how much material product he was pushing to keep society’s addictions/distractions going. I am not a Christian, but I do possess a similar idealism.
Greg, it looks like the action will be going for more than 17 hours. So you will have your pick of more hours to check on the bunch down there. Last I heard, they were going to be down there from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. all week, or until they are hauled into jail for trying to sleep with a blanket or sleeping bag on public grounds. They claim they are willing to receive citations and then challenge them in court. Better get some lawyers down there!
See my new post on the overnight activities. Please feel welcome — and others, too — to add updates as they occur.
double eye,
so essentially your argument is “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”. it does not work as demonstrated by the soviet union, china, cuba and many other failed societies. when the means of production are controlled by a very few and then distributed to the masses, the disparity between classes is greater than what we see in a capitalistic society. now, are there problems here, absolutely, but if we keep forcing a growing minority to support a growing majority, at some point that minority throws in the towel and we all lose
inge scott makes a very good point about the absence of the church in this matter
I think that there may be a middle-ground between protesting a lack of services for the homeless, while ticketing them $500 for being homeless, and instituting a freaking gulag, don’t you? Don’t worry, willie, I think we’ll be able to pull the brakes on Occupy well before everyone gets lines up against the wall and shot. I suggest that we concentrate on the problems at hand in society more than distant theoretical ones.
I was gonna say – “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” – is a fine ideal, very Christian or humanistic. I don’t remember if it came from the Bible or someone associated with Marx, or some third source. Just because some totalitarian regimes have tried to (partially) exploit this egalitarian sentiment in no way discredits it.
And “abilities?” I think you would agree with helping these homeless INCREASE their abilities so they can contribute to society. That’s part of the equation.
RED-BAITING ALERT.
to each according to their need is already somewhat applied in the US and all developed countries (esp those outside the US)… it’s what keeps us from barbarism.
“IT NEVER WORKS!” Okay, I’ll call up my distant Scandinavian relatives and let them know all the listings that put them at the top of quality of life for decades have been a farce.
But seriously, NEVER FORGET that the use of famine as a political weapon by monsters like Stalin and Mao was the EXACT OPPOSITE of “to each according to their need.”
Out of respect for their victims let’s use our heads and not exploit such tragedy as a justification for further cruelties against the poor.
i always strive for a middle ground but the conversation always seems to be how do we provide more services for the needy and not how does the provision of those services and the expansion of those rights affect the people who have to pay for those services and impact the rights of those being compromised in the process. life is, unfortunately, unfair and, at the end of the day, some are not going to make it and while we have an obligation to give everybody an equal opportunity and while we live in a society where we can, and should, provide a safety net for those who cannot make it, the rights of those society is helping should not superseed the rights of those who are providing that help.
How are “the rights of those who are providing that help” being superseded? (Now if you were talking about the bailout of the financial companies, I’d get it.)
All right: “some are not going to make it.” Do we give them a floor level of subsistence, or do we try to make sure that their existence is a bad as possible so that other people think twice about bucking the system? Right now, the wealthy are doing well in part by ensuring that more and more people are so desperate that they won’t challenge the power structure. That’s not a middle-ground position.
per my initial comment way back when, if you look at what is happening in places like downtown los angeles and venice where the homeless are essentially taking over areas and disrupting businesses, the people that pay the taxes that support the services being provided, those are the people whose rights are being superseded (and thanks for the spelling correction)
You load a lot of freight onto the phrase “taking over.” Are they being unsightly and smelly? Given them a place to clean up. Aggressively panhandling? We already have laws for that. Loitering near businesses and warding off customers? That can be addressed with more minor fixes.
Here’s an idea — give some communities a lot of money, paid for by other communities, to build shelters with facilities nearby where homeless people can stay. Then treat the homeless like people whose mere presence would not normally be termed “taking over.”
greg,
read the article in the los angeles times that was published over the weekend. it is not the simple inconvenience of a few high end dinner patrons who cannot get into this weeks trendy restaurant in downtown. these people are leaving piles of feces stained rags on top of moldy mattresses in front of operating businesses. they are infested with rats and maggots and are a serious health hazard.
yeah, if we had tons of money, we could do all the things you want to do, many of which i support, but the bottom line is that the money has to come from somewhere and if the businesses who pay taxes are not able to survive, and i am not talking huge corporations, i am talking about sole proprietorship restaurants and mom and pop shops, then we lose both the sense of community that these small businesses bring to the area and we lose the revenue that they generate
If only they could stop defecating, things would be so much easier!
WHERE DO YOU WANT THEM TO DO IT? Or do you just want to invest in corks?
I’m all for feces-stained rags not being left on moldy mattresses; I’ll bet that most of the homeless are, too. What facilities should they use? Shouldn’t an analysis start there?
obviously we all want them to do it in a clean, safe environment. but who pays for that and where does that money come from. and the larger point is that if we provide them with loose shoes, a warm place to shit and other aspects of society without requiring them to participate in society by doing something other than shitting on our front stoop aren’t we enabling them to continue to not contribute to society.
it is a circular question and, honestly, i do not have the answer. at the end of the day, i have to respect the fact that you are sincere in your optimism and hopefully you will respect the fact that i am sincere in my pessimism
My experience with emergency winter shelter(s) in several areas was they were NOT in any way accessible… Strangers lined up like sardines on the floor under sometimes used blankets. Yes, one place had cots! and you better have somewhere else to store most of your necessities. A pre -dawn wake-up call and maybe some kill ya diet of donuts maybe coffee and hit the road. After a fun night of no sleep you can trek maybe for miles to your stuff (and your places you need to be that day) see if it is still there.
It’s not the nicer or safer like set ups like Red Cross for the middle class emergencies … so depending where I was, I braved rain and cold for access to more basic comfort for my painful body, actual sleep, safety, and to be near things I needed. Since most longer term shelters and few in OC are for families or substance recovery there is no place for the many disabled homeless.
I challenge everyone to find real helps and transition for single adults with physical and mh disabilities to get into accessible affordable section8 housing – good luck on your quest.
Thank you for the informed and impassioned comment.