These sorts of laws do sometimes use ‘health and safety’ as cover (yeah, like the possibility that the do-gooder feeding the homeless hasn’t taken a food services cleanliness exam and been restaurant inspected is actually high on the list of health risks faced by the homeless); but they basically boil down to a more euphemistic phrasing of “The homeless are filthy nuisance animals, aiding, abetting, or attracting them to places where they might offend decent people is forbidden.”
9 Likes
I wasn’t suggesting a protest circumvention per se, just wondering how on earth you can distinguish between a charitable owner of a working grill and someone who’s ‘purpose’ is to feed the homeless.
Can charitable owners of said food-dispensaries be arrested for helping out their fellow man?
“Your short by a dime, don’t worry about it. Oh, hey, you’re not homeless are you? Cause if you are, Imma need to see those cents.”
2 Likes
It sounds really bad, but I suspect the situation is at least analogous to something that’s happened locally where I live in California. Local religious groups have been handing out food and sometimes old clothes to the homeless in a local urban park. The result was that a) there was an enormous mess that they didn’t clean up afterwards - their “good deed” having already been done, and b) the homeless started hanging out in the space full time. This resulted in a park that’s in the middle of a relatively built-up area, and should have gotten a lot of local use, to be almost empty, only used by the homeless (no one wants to use a playground when it’s got needles and drunk homeless people sleeping in it). We might write that park off as the cost of providing needed services to a vulnerable group, but that’s not even true. The food is completely unneeded - there’s a homeless shelter, literally just a few blocks away, that was throwing out uneaten food every day, and they’re providing nutritious meals, whereas the groups giving food in the park are mostly handing out bologna sandwiches and other junk.
So the city does the decent thing - in fact, has the best possible response - they ask, “What do the homeless actually need to make their lives better, and how can people who want to do good make the most positive impact?” So they form a task-force that includes city/state service providers, the religious groups and the homeless themselves, they figure out exactly what kind of goods and services the homeless actually want/need to improve their lives and they set up a system by which different groups can pool and maximize their contributions, no matter how small, to provide concrete benefits to the homeless.
So what happens? After all the time, effort and development of smart solutions, the groups go back to handing out sandwiches in the park. Because, it turns out, they don’t actually give a shit about helping the homeless, they just wanted an opportunity to proselytize to people while feeling good about themselves. The people who appear to be doing good are actually just a bunch of assholes. I don’t know if the city passed a law against handing out food, but they should have.
2 Likes
Yeah, I was gonna buy a beer for my buddy who lost his job to help him commiserate. But now I’m worried that men with guns will come and arrest me.
5 Likes
The problem your neighbourhood seemed to suffer from is not charitable people but people who were causing fire hazards and not disposing of waste.
That those people also happened to be ‘charitable’ is a coincidence and not (and should not be) a crime.
The littering and other stuff is the crime.
Not the charitable humanity.
11 Likes
You have a good point, people who are “doing nice things” aren’t always actually helping. Still, the situation you describe has some other questions that could be asked. If there were adequate services in existence, why were people going to the park to get sandwiches instead of using those services?
I’ll admit that the situation may be way more complex than we are giving it credit here, but as several others are pointing out, passing a law against giving away food or giving away food to the homeless doesn’t really make any sense. It seems pretty unconstitutional. It also comes across as exceedingly heartless.
13 Likes
So, because some people aren’t altruistic, then we need to make altruism illegal?
5 Likes
You write about the homeless like they’re pigeons. They are people, and they’re able to make decisions for themselves about where to congregate. Also, if you don’t want people to be free to congregate somewhere, maybe you shouldn’t have a public park there.
If the food at the shelter was better, then why weren’t people going there? Maybe it’s because homeless people are incapable of making intelligent decisions, and need the government to step in and decide for them. OR maybe it’s because a shelter is often a restrictive environment which doesn’t tolerate certain types of unusual behavior, drug/alcohol addictions, and which requires adherence to arbitrary rules which are enforced in a way that many people see as intolerable. OR maybe it’s because they’re adults and they can decide for themselves what kind of food they prefer.
There’s a lot of people whose diets I would enjoy dictating, but I can’t because that’s not my business. It doesn’t become my business just because these people are poor.
I like the way you phrased this, because it implicitly excludes homeless people from the category of “people”. The park should have gotten a lot of use by locals, but it’s only being used by the homeless (who aren’t locals?). It’s basically empty because there’s no people around, only the homeless. “No one” wants to use the playground, and by “no one” of course you mean “no one who’s not homeless”. You’re not the only one with this attitude that homeless people are just not part of society, it’s all over the place once you start looking for it. Feel free to tell me all about how that’s not how you meant it, though.
How would you feel if the city government formed a task-force of some church people, some NGOs, and some random middle-class people and went about deciding what you actually wanted/needed? And then if your behavior didn’t correspond to their findings, they passed laws which criminalized deviating from their determinations about what you need?
24 Likes
Ever been to Florida? I guarantee that there are a host of Christians down there saying “Well, they broke the law!”
5 Likes
Well, I guess we can be thankful the headline isn’t “90 Year Old Man Shot to Death by Police for Feeding Florida’s Homeless.”
14 Likes
If it had been private property where the homeowner could have stood their ground…
3 Likes
Or public property and someone was black…
3 Likes
It makes perfect sense, if the goal is to make your city so inhospitable to poor people that they are forced to “voluntarily self deport”. It’s been done in tons of cities. The plan really is to be so awful towards people who become homeless that they decide to move to another city. Voila, the homeless problem (in your city) is solved!
Unfortunately, the courts have decided that it’s not unconstitutional to ban serving food in public. Food Not Bombs - an anarchist group which feeds the homeless - was arrested several years ago in Orlando for illegally serving food there. They took it through the courts and the courts determined that serving food - even as a political protest - is basically not protected speech.
It’s worth emphasizing that a number of cities have passed laws like this, and city councils all over are watching this situation closely, considering whether to pass a similar law locally. If we want to discourage this from spreading, we need to make an example of Ft. Lauderdale.
9 Likes
It says in the article he dropped the plate right away, and raised his hands to show he had no food in them.
7 Likes
It’s not so much of the homeless going to the park to get sandwiches, but that they were already hanging out in the park, and the food being delivered meant that they didn’t have to walk a few blocks, so they could stay in the park, socialize and do drugs, which is part of the reason why they weren’t hanging out at the shelter to begin with. (Though they still could have gotten meals there, and, in the process, get connected with other services.) The park is a transit hub that also brings in the drug-dealers.
It’s charitable to describe them as “charitable.” It turned out they were providing an unneeded “service” for entirely selfish reasons, and, in fact, were interfering with efforts to get more meaningful services for the people they were ostensibly “helping.” And there was no “coincidence” involved - the act of “charity” involved dumping a bunch of (what would immediately turn into) trash in the park. They “distributed” old clothes by just leaving a big heap for people to go through, etc. So now we’re back to the start - arresting people for “charity.”
Well, because everyone involved wasn’t altruistic. If any of the people involved actually cared about being altruistic, they would have been involved at the shelter - but they couldn’t have given religious lectures in that context.
NO. /facepalm Come on. What I’m saying is that it’s basically empty because a tiny number of (the more dysfunctional) homeless drug addicts ended up monopolizing a space that could have been used by a significant number of people (and yes, there are, in fact, a large number of people in the surrounding area). The playground is completely unused by children because there are usually homeless people passed out in it and/or needles, broken bottles, vomit, etc. The city could deal with the situation by having the police arrest people in the space for public drunkenness, but they (quite rightly) do not, instead preferring to nudge people towards other locations where they have access to various services.
Again - as I said, the homeless were themselves actively involved in the task-force. They were, in fact, the ones deciding what services they wanted; the others were there to enumerate the services already provided, what further services they could provide, how they could coordinate to fill in the gaps, etc. When the religious groups simply returned to handing out sandwiches, it was a big “fuck you” to everyone involved, especially the homeless who had actually articulated what they really wanted.
This whole issue isn’t so different from, say, a taco truck drawing a large crowd to an area not designed for that number of pedestrians and creating a huge mess - the city wouldn’t be out of line to ask them to move to more appropriate location. That’s essentially what’s happening here - the city is absolutely not saying, “Don’t feed the homeless,” what they’re saying is, “Do it through existing venues that don’t make such a mess and don’t attract people away from places where they can get the services they need.”
4 Likes
At that one shelter…ok. So because everyone at one shelter was acting horribly, we need to arrest people for helping out the homeless? It still doesn’t make sense to me.
3 Likes
My entire point is that you arrest them, if warranted, for what they are doing illegally.
Conflation of the concepts of both ‘helping’ and ‘charity’ with an end result, detached from the ideas by both hysterical ideation and illegal implementation, is not helpful and in fact contrarian.
The road to Hell may well be paved with good intentions but that doesn’t mean you can’t use the law as it was intended to curb the actual problem behaviour rather than adopting the language the perpetrators are using to excuse their behaviour and then making that ersatz, phantasm of an idea illegal.
2 Likes
Federico Fellini, Nights of Cabiria, and the man with the sack:
By the time the film was released, this scene had been cut. The reason isn’t documented, but Fellini, who died in 1993 at the age of 73, and his biographers blame the Roman Catholic Church. The Vatican had various objections to the movie, particularly its depiction of priests as venal dispensers of hokum. As for ‘‘the man with the sack,’’ as the eliminated scene is referred to by scholars and film buffs, it may have been believed that the church was made to look remiss in its responsibility to take care of the homeless.
good ole’ Florida Friday!
3 Likes
Jesus wouldn’t stand for it, he’d put on his gear and do what he does best… kick ass…
3 Likes
