NEWS:

• Incident Report Form for Violence or Harrassment of Person Experiencing Homelessness. The purpose of this incident report form is to assist advocates and people experiencing homelessness in tracking cases of abuse and/or mistreatment.
  
  
• Reporte de un Incidente de Hostigamiento o Violencia en Contra de una Persona Sin Hogar. El propósito de este reporte es para ayudar a los persónas sin hogar y sus avocadores a identificar y documentar casos de abuso y/o de maltrato.

The Criminalization of Homelessness

In cities with an admitted lack of day shelters and few jobs that pay a living wage, people who are homeless sometimes rest at bus stops or on sidewalks. Tucson, Arizona, has made it unlawful to be at a bus stop for more the 30 minutes. Police in Seattle, Washington, have been instructed to fine or arrest people who are homeless for sitting on the sidewalk. In cities with an admitted lack of affordable housing, people who are homeless are forced to carry their worldly goods with them wherever they go. In Beverly Hills, California, it is crime punishable by a fine or jail time to set baggage down on the sidewalks. In Georgetown, a trendy part of Washington, DC, an archaic part of the District Code is being applied to fine or arrest people for storing property (including people themselves) in doorways. There is an estimated 24 million people on the waiting list for public housing in this country. Despite this acknowledgment of insufficient housing options, the city mothers and fathers of Dallas, Texas, and many other cities across this country (including Phoenix, Jacksonville, Columbus, Boston, Austin, New Orleans, Long Beach, Virginia Beach, Atlanta, Sacramento, Tulsa, Miami, and Buffalo) have made it illegal to camp or sleep in a park.

The flaws in this effort to criminalize homelessness are as numerous as they are obvious. Though no one should ever have to sleep in a park or beg for food, making those acts into criminal offenses does not help the people driven by desperation to commit them. These city ordinances (and similar state statues) are misguided because they seek to hide homeless people, not end homelessness. They are unjust because they seek to punish people for being poor. Because people who are homeless don't have the option not to sleep in public, walk through parking lots, set down baggage, etc. these laws are illogical. We have laws against arson because we each have the choice of not burning down buildings. People who are forced to live on the streets don't have options - if they did, they wouldn't be there. Though it is easier for cities to attack homeless people than to attack the root causes of homelessness, it wastes scarce resources and human time, energy, and dignity. It costs much much less to secure permanent housing than to put people in jail and prison-even shelters (still more expensive than permanent housing in the long run) cost less than incarceration.

Thousands of citations have been issued nationwide. Police continuously misapply and selectively enforce existing laws in order to harass people who are homeless and move them from parks to neighborhoods to alleys and back into parks. This strategy demonizes poor people and feeds negative public sentiment to target people who experience homelessness, rather than the root causes of homelessness itself.

In addition to its other effects, the criminalization efforts tear our focus away from long term, permanent solutions in order to fight for the right of people who are homeless to simply exist. Our greatest victories in combating these new civil rights attacks will only secure an already inhumane status quo. With this in mind, we must build a locally-based national movement to protect the civil rights of people who are homeless that can seamlessly-even simultaneously-work to end homelessness once these discriminatory threats are eliminated.

Our Response

Our plan to prevent and combat the violation of homeless people's civil rights focuses on linking homeless individuals and families, and the grassroots efforts that they lead, into a national network in order fortify those local efforts and to strengthen cooperation. This plan will result in a coordinated sharing of strategies, a greater ability to fight effectively, and increased public awareness - all geared toward abolishing discrimination against people who are homeless.

The National Homeless Civil Rights Organizing Project (NHCROP) has established nine field sites in different regions of the country: Los Angeles, CA, San Francisco, CA, Portland, OR, Chicago, IL, Jeffersonville, IN, Cincinnati, OH, Atlanta, GA, Austin, TX, Washington, DC.

Staff people at each location will work to bring together the efforts of all local homeless advocacy groups and to fortify efforts in communities that are resource-poor. People who are or were homeless will be hired to fill field staff and AmeriCorps*VISTA positions created by NHCROP.

It is too often the case that the harshest anti-homeless attacks occur in those communities that lack the resources to organize an immediate, effective response. NHCROP will make it much easier for such locales to hook into the knowledge, experiences and resources of other civil rights efforts in order to improve their ability to best protect the civil rights of people who are homeless.

One of the primary goals of the organizing project is to collect and use video documentation of police and private security guard abuse of homeless people, along with interviews of individuals who are victims of such abuses. Hundreds of hours of videotape have already been shot, and the abuses continue to stack up. Communities that presently document civil rights violations on tape (e.g., San Francisco, Atlanta and New York StreetWatch programs) find that having abuses on tape acts as both a deterrent to future abuse and a powerful advocacy and educational tool. Taking these functions further still, NHCROP will combine the footage to a) show the similarities between tactics used by different local governments, b) organize a well-planned counter-campaign against existing or proposed anti-homeless laws, and c) support groups attempting to set up or expand documentation efforts. Finally, we can use this information as a springboard to pointing out the contradictions in blaming the victim and the lack of appropriate policies for ending homelessness. At that point we will be able to articulate more proactive, cooperative community initiatives and organize for their adoption and implementation.

Focused on the civil rights of all people, NHCROP seeks to address discrimination not only through our organizing, but also in the way we are organized. Our membership is open and is as inclusive as possible. Moreover, we actively encourage those service providers and housed advocates involved to engage people who are or were homeless in this effort. It is our expectation that the bulk of our leadership and membership and all of our new staff will be people who are or were homeless. It is in this way that we seek to consistently address the issues of racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism that can - if we are not vigilant - create incongruities in our values and an imbalance between our internal structure and the outward manifestation of our organizing.

People who have no choice but to be homeless have no choice but to be public. To punish them for this heaps injustice on top of indignity. As one Santa Monica woman who is homeless wondered, "When does it stop? Are we going to push homeless people off the face of the earth? I do have a right to exist. I have the right to food, clothing and shelter because I live."

For More Information

For more information on NHCROP (timeline, staffing, budget, and evaluation) and the success of homeless civil rights efforts, please contact Michael Stoops at the National Coalition for the Homeless, 202.462.4822 or e-mail at: info@nationalhomeless.org.