Yep. Here in LA, several local city governments have been caught putting obviously-unwell transients into ambulances (and all the locals think, "Oh, how nice, they’re helping that poor sick old man!) and then driving them to downtown LA’s Skid Row and dumping them on the sidewalk.
Their excuse was that, well, Skid Row is where all the homeless services are located, after all, so the guy will have a much better chance of getting the help he needs here, rather than in their scenic little seaside burg where there aren’t really any homeless services.
Back in the day, “vagrancy” (basically, “no lodgings and no visible means of support”, i.e., being homeless) was illegal, and vagrants were usually offered a choice of “get out of town or spend the night in jail.” Sometimes with a bus ticket to the nearest city, sometimes not.
In some more lenient small jurisdictions, this basically meant turning the otherwise-unused drunk tank in the local jail into a temporary shelter, because it was better to feed the guy and give him a place to sleep than worry about him robbing the locals or burgling their chicken coops. Then in the morning, off to the city limits or the bus station, and don’t come back, ya hear me?
In somewhat less lenient jurisdictions, any vagrants foolish enough to think a night in jail would beat a ticket to bigtown or a night sleeping in the woods would soon be shown the error of their ways.
If your night in jail involves a shave-and-insecticide delousing, a firehose shower, a hard metal cot and a damp, thin blanket, or any of the myriad ways a prisoner can be humiliated and abused without quite breaking the law (or sometimes just straight-up beatings and physical abuse, legality be damned) you’ll probably be less inclined to chance repeating that experience the next time you’re offered a “jail or GTFO” choice.
Ah, the Good Old Days, when white people were happy. No homeless people sleeping on the streets in our little town, nosirree bob.
(-:
(My Da spent his early adolescence in the hobo jungles of the Great Depression, until he lied about his age to get into the CCCs. But even as a respected middle-class family man in his later years, he never forgot about the “Forgotten Men”, so I’d heard many a hair-curling tale of small-town sheriffs and “mopery and gawking” busts, long before I hitchhiked my way across America as an undercover antiwar radical and collected my own ‘war stories.’)
But these days, busting people for vagrancy is unconstitutional. “Mopery and gawking” is out of fashion as a booking charge.
Town cops have to work harder today to ‘solve’ their ‘homeless problem’, so they’ve taken to having ambulance drivers provide transport direct to Skid Row.
“You don’t see homeless people sleeping on the streets” is not necessarily an indication that transients thereabouts are well-cared-for.
Could be, but I’d say our prior experiences clearly suggest it’s not a reliable assumption.
