Dumpster diving is not a crime. Canât be. I donât care what anyone says.
Foraging the urban wasteland.
Looks up âskip.â
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
-Anatole France
How is it in our âenlightenedâ modern age we still criminalize the homeless and the destitute in exactly the same ways we did during the 1800s?
âThe total value of the items taken allegedly amounted to ÂŁ33â No, the total value was zero or they wouldnât have binned the shit.
Yeah, that struck me, too. They were trespassing, but hopefully the defense will be able to use the fact that they were literally stealing worthless garbage to get theft charges thrown out. (Is it âburglaryâ if you break into someoneâs house to take out their trash?)
Breaking into a house for any reason is technically breaking and entering, so it isnât really an apt comparison to mere trespassing.
A better analogy would be taking something out of the trash can / bin someone leaves in their yard or on their carport or whatever - that way thereâs no âbreakingâ or âenteringâ, as the yard is open and accessible to anyone who wants to walk in, making it simple trespass.
Because we never stopped loathing them?
Well in most of America the answer might be, âDonât know, I shot an intruder in my home.â
I donât know about the burglary aspect, but itâs still breaking and entering.
Isnât it strange that weâve made greater strides towards righting the wrongs of racial slavery, patriarchal dominion, and oppression over sexuality than we have toward having pity on the poor bastards that our economic, legal, and social systems fail to provide for?
Burglary is the act of breaking in, not the theft.
I didnât mean to imply the two situations were equivalent, but it sounds like they had to go over a wall to get the trash, and the âtheftâ has turned simple trespassing into a burglary charge [or rather some 19th century vagrancy act version of burglary]. I canât imagine that that they would have bothered to prosecute if this was just a matter of climbing a wall (which is functionally all this situation amounts to).
To be fair, itâs breaking and entering with intent to commit a crime, often interpretted as an intent to commit a felony specifically.
Of course, itâs a âcommon lawâ term, so that makes it somewhat wishy-washy. Best to be more specific and separate out the breaking and entering, and the theft itself, I say.
[Edit: someone already pointed out the intent bit.] Iâm unclear what theyâre actually being charged with in this case, but it seems like the intent to commit a crime is a key part of it, turning simple trespassing into something substantially more serious.
Of course they would bother to prosecute! The authorities want to look tough on âcrimeâ by punishing some poor starving bastards who took food that was going to the landfill, because catching actual criminals is a lot harder and isnât a ready source of instant publicity for their re-election campaigns!
Thatâs like saying âI canât imagine that big bloke with the arms like meathooks would have bothered to beat his scrawny classmate senseless behind the schoolhouse unless the little guy deserved itâ, or telling a victim of domestic abuse, âMrs. Stewart, you must have provoked him.â
Bullies are cowards who prey upon the helpless to fuel their own egos. Anyone who prosecutes a homeless person for taking food that is otherwise going to rot is a bully devoid of human empathy, and who values their own ego and outward appearances more than they value the lives of those monstrously less fortunate than themselves.
Right, and here, without a âtheft,â itâs just trespassing. But I guess if the trash hasnât been put out for collection, itâs not technically trash yet? (Or is that even a distinction, given that theyâre using an old vagrancy law under which to prosecute them?)
They deserve life in prison. Too small not to go jail.
Have you noticed how intense the fights get over whether, say, homosexuality is a âchoiceâ or whether itâs an inborn characteristic can get? Or the spats over whether some unenviable statistic about the current status of blacks or women or others is due to historical wrongs?
Why? Because even total assholes find it hard to continue beating up on people for things they have absolutely no control over forever. The pleasure of moral rightness just doesnât last. People who âchoseâ to be whatever depraved subhumans we are talking about today, though, nothing is sweeter than punishing the wicked for their crimes.
For some reason, and against apparent logic (even economists who donât start laughing uncontrollably when you say âtrickle-down economicsâ tend to concede that some amount of unemployment is âstructuralâ) weâve concluded that people choose to be poor because⌠um⌠government cheese and laziness are totally an attractive lifestyle or something.
This makes minimal sense; but it classifies the poor as sinners rather than victims, so the open season continues (in this vein, you may notice that even die-hard haters-of-the-poor will have a largely ad-hoc âvirtuous poorâ category, who are seen as victims for some reason or other. This group tends to be a lot smaller than the set of poor people, so it isnât very socially useful; but it allows a comparison of how people, even a single person treat âpoor as victimsâ vs. âpoor as morally defective parasitesâ under controlled conditions, so itâs useful for study purposes.
So to sum up, you think the difference, then, is that being poor is still seen as being the poor personâs fault? That the public perception is that if only they were smart enough and hardworking enough they could claw their way up from the gutter to become CEO of a Fortune 500 company?
The American Delusion lives on.
Itâs repetition of divide and conquer tactics. The powerful create a narrative that drives animosity towards the lowest on the rung, constantly reinforcing that they are stealing the scraps from those one step up, where less and less is to be gained because itâs taken by the master. It maintains the status quo of kicking the dog, instead of biting the master, who beats up on everyone. No one wants to be that dog. So itâs easier to retrieve the leash, or whip, so the master can beat the dog and keep him in line, than it is to fight the master, who might make you the dog next.
