Can homeless people be booked by the police for sleeping in parks, under bridges or public places: US Supreme Court to decide
The above image was taken by the author right outside the southern side of White House where the US President resides
US Supreme Court is called upon to decide if the homeless can be
punished by city councils
By Ashe N Ayer
US Supreme Court finds itself on the horns of a dilemma – it's not the
Trump's case of whether he has presidential immunity against criminal cases – but the
homeless who can be found sleeping on public benches, pitching tents in gardens
and driving three-wheeler cycles at busy intersections in the US.
The author has seen many such cases particularly in New York, Washington,
right outside the White House and busy intersections before the Holland tunnel
that connects New Jersey with New York, an underwater pass under the Hudson
river.
It all started, when Helen Cruz pitched her tent in a city park a few years ago and made it her home, she chose the location in proximity to the houses she cleans for a living but, could never afford a home for herself.
“People see the irony of it,” said Cruz, 49. “I never looked at it like
that.”
What Cruz didn’t realize then was that living in a park in Grants Pass,
Oregon, would place her in the middle of a national debate that will reach the Supreme Court on
Monday about whether cities can respond to a spike in homelessness by punishing
homeless people, A CNN report said.
In one of the most significant appeals involving the houseless Americans
to reach the apex court in decades, the justices will hear arguments Monday on
whether the [police can ticket people who live on the streets and that action is “cruel and unusual” and violates the Eighth
Amendment of the constitution.
The case has aroused the conscience of a nation, said to be the richest
in the world with a $27 trillion economy and known to have produced great
philanthrophists from Carnegi Melon in Pittsburg to Bill Gates and others in
the silicon valley.
The city council and state
officials have virtually no clue as to how to respond to a surge in homelessness and encampments that
have cropped up under bridges and in city parks across the nation. It’s also
being followed by people who live in those encampments and are alarmed by
efforts to criminalize the population rather than build shelters and affordable
housing per media reports.
“Nobody wants to be out here,” said Cruz, who has since moved into a
church where she also serves as a caretaker. “We know the parks are for family
and children. The thing is, we have no place to go. There’s no housing.”
Cruel and Unusual?
Between 2022 and 2023, the numbers of the houseless people increased
12%, according to a Department of Housing and Urban Development report
in December.
On any given night, that study found, more than 650,000 people in the
United States are unhoused – including roughly 40% without adequate shelter.
Grants Pass, a city of 38,000 people in southern Oregon, responded by
intensifying enforcement of anti-camping ordinances that bar people from
sleeping in public with “bedding,” which can include sleeping bags or
bundled-up clothing. The city says the prohibitions apply to everyone – not
just the unhoused.
Critics say the only people pitching tents on sidewalks are the homeless people.e dialog
The debate about the houseless people and whether the ordinances apply
to a class of people or to prohibited conduct will feature prominently Monday.
A 1962 Supreme Court decision found that
a California law that criminalized drug addiction – as opposed to drug
possession –amounted to a “cruel and unusual” punishment under the Eighth
Amendment.
“I can see where the policymakers are coming from. I just think that
it’s so broad to say we’re going ticket you for just simply existing,” said
Mary Ferrell, executive director of the Maslow Project, a non-profit that works
with homeless children in Grants Pass. “The sense on the ground is that the
city just doesn’t want people experiencing homelessness – period.”
City officials argue the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on “cruel and
unusual” punishment was aimed at torture or hard labor sentences imposed by
18th century kings, not tickets handed out by police. Homelessness, they say,
is a challenge in terms of public safety and health, not a constitutional
matter for courts to decide.
“The solution,” lawyers for Grants Pass told the Supreme Court, “is not
to stretch the Eighth Amendment beyond its limits and place the federal courts
in charge of this pressing social problem.
The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the city,
holding that it could not “enforce its anti-camping ordinances against homeless
persons for the mere act of sleeping outside with rudimentary protection from
the elements, or for sleeping in their car at night, when there was no other
place in the city for them to go.”
A 2019 study found 602 people who were homeless in Grants Pass and
another 1,045 individuals who were “precariously housed,” according to the
plaintiffs. Meanwhile, the city has extremely limited shelter space. “There is
no difficulty in determining that the people who were living outside in Grants
Pass were doing so because they had nowhere else to go,” said Ed Johnson at the
Oregon Law Center, who represents the plaintiffs.
‘No compassion in Stepping over People’
Besides embarrassing politicians who claim to be working for the people,
the homelessness issue has also put some
government leaders in a delicate situation.
California
Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, told the high court last month that people
experiencing homelessness shouldn’t be criminalized, but he also warned the
justices against a broad ruling that could tie the hands of government in dealing
with encampments. “There is no compassion in stepping over people in the
streets, and there is no dignity in allowing people to die in dangerous,
fire-prone encampments,” Newsom told the court in a brief which clearly
revealed that he was not taking sides with anyone.
The Biden administration has
tried to walk the tight rope. It is
urging the Supreme Court to block Grants Pass from “effectively criminalizing
the status of homelessness,” but it also suggests the matter should be returned
to a lower court for a case-by-case analysis of whether the individual people
ticketed, in said, and then have to pick up her belongings and move. Each
violation of the fact, had nowhere else to sleep.
Cruz described
receiving so many tickets that she’s still struggling to pay them off more than
a year after she moved out of the park. She’d receive a ticket, she rdinances
carries a $295 fine, which increases to more than $500 if not paid.
After two tickets, police can order a person to avoid a park for 30
days. Anyone who violates that order can be sentenced to 30 days in jail. For
Cruz, the ticketing felt like harassment, an effort to nudge people
experiencing homelessness out of the Grants Pass entirely the CNN report said .
But she said, “I’m not going anywhere. And I’m not gonna let anybody.
Around one in every 500 Americans was experiencing homelessness in January 2023. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) counted 653,104 homeless Americans in its annual point-in-time report, which measures homelessness across the US on a single night each winter. That’s a 12.1% increase from the same report in 2022.
Who is considered homeless?
The HUD’s definition of homelessness includes both sheltered and unsheltered people. Sheltered people are living in emergency shelters, transitional shelters, safe havens that serve homeless individuals with severe mental illness, or hotels/motels. Unsheltered people live outdoors, in cars, in abandoned buildings, or in other places unfit for human habitation.
People staying with friends are considered homeless if they cannot stay there longer than 14 days.
Who is homeless in America?
Nearly 250,000 homeless Americans — 37.3% of the entire homeless population — identified as Black, African American, or African in 2023. By comparison, this demographic made up 13.6% of the US population in 2022.
Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders had the highest rates of homelessness at 122 per 10,000 people in that racial category. These rates could be partially a result of the high cost of living in Hawaii — in 2022, it was among the states with the highest rates of owners and renters who were housing-burdened.
Homelessness rates vary by race and ethnicity, with Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders having the highest rate. Homeless people per 10,000 people, 2023.
Comments
Post a Comment