On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments over whether a small Oregon city can cite and prosecute homeless people for sleeping in public places when they have nowhere else to lay their heads.
If the case reveals nothing else about the state of our country, it reveals this: We continue to fail the homeless people who live among us, and no court ruling in the world is going to solve the underlying problems: the lack of affordable housing. , widespread income equality, substance abuse, and a shamefully insufficient social safety net.
opinion columnist
Robin Abcarian
Grants Pass is a city of about 39,000 with a homeless population of about 600 and only enough shelter beds for 100; just one of many American cities (especially in the West) that has been dealing with the homeless problem for years.
San Francisco, Los Angeles and other municipalities filed friend-of-the-court briefs supporting the law. Homeless advocates say cities want more power to sweep up encampments. Cities say they desperately want some clarification and guidance from the courts.
In 2019, in a case known as Martin v. Boise, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said cities cannot punish homeless people for sleeping on public property in the absence of an alternative. At that time, the Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal.
But he did agree to take up the Grants Pass case after the Ninth Circuit ruled in 2022 that citing and arresting homeless people who have nowhere else to go is a violation of the Eighth Amendment's ban against cruel and unusual punishment. If a city cannot offer shelter, the court said again, it should not be able to impose criminal restrictions on public camping.
Listen, I don't think homeless encampments should be allowed to displace children from parks, as they did during the pandemic, nor that tent camps should be allowed to proliferate on city beaches and sidewalks, blocking rights of way and spilling waste on the streets. That is not safe or healthy for anyone. Obviously, cities should have the right to regulate the use of public spaces. But harassing homeless people with endless tickets and fines? It may not be unusual, but it's definitely cruel.
For all of Los Angeles's failings, when COVID-era homeless encampments were cleared from Oceanfront Walk in Venice and along stretches of Venice Boulevard, intense efforts were made to offer people places in shelters or hotel rooms, and a series of social services. Under the circumstances, that approach seemed as humane and balanced as possible.
But Grants Pass, which does not operate a single homeless shelter and relies instead on a Christian rescue mission that requires daily church attendance, passed a law allowing police to cite, fine, and then arrest and even jail repeat “offenders” simply for sleeping in public places. land, regardless of the fact that there were no alternatives available.
This is the very definition of criminalizing homelessness.
Attorney Theane Evangelis, representing Grants Pass, disagreed: “These laws address everyone's conduct,” she told the justices. “There is nothing in this law that criminalizes homelessness.”
But, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted, the law really only applies to homeless people. She noted that, according to testimony from the police chief and Grants Pass officers, “if a stargazer wants to go out at night with a blanket or a sleeping bag to look at the stars and falls asleep, they don't arrest him.” . Babies who have blankets on them are not arrested. People who are sleeping on the beach are not arrested, as I usually do if I have been there for a while. Only people who don't have money are arrested. [another] home.”
It is not that human beings can control the need to sleep, any more than they can control the need to breathe or eat.
“Sleep is a biological necessity,” said Justice Elena Kagan, one of the court's three liberals, who seemed hostile to the law. “Sleeping in public is like breathing in public.”
“It seems cruel and unusual to punish people for acts that constitute basic human needs,” Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson said.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. then asked: “So if someone is hungry and no one gives him food, can they prosecute him if he breaks into a store to get something to eat?”
Of course you can, said the Biden administration lawyer, who did not side with either side but made a third-way argument about reasonable powers to prohibit homeless people from sleeping outdoors.
What really leaves a sour taste about the Grants Pass ordinance is that we know it was not enacted to solve the complex problem of homelessness. In 2013, during a community roundtable discussion on “current vagrancy issues,” Grants Pass City Council President Lily Morgan gave away the game: “The goal,” she said, according to Oregon Public Radio, “is to make it uncomfortable enough for them.” in our city, so they will want to move forward.” (The majority of that city's homeless people, according to court testimony, are from Grants Pass.)
This is inconceivable. But from the arguments, it is not clear that the court will say that Grants Pass went too far and violated the constitutional rights of “vagabonds.”
“One point that was raised by Justices Kagan and Sotomayor in different ways is where people who have nowhere else to go can be expected to go when cities prohibit them and at the same time do not provide them with resources,” Charley Willison, professor of health public at Cornell and studies homelessness, he told me in an email. “This gets to the heart of the problems facing many cities in the United States.”
One of the original plaintiffs in the case, Debra Blake, slept in Grants Pass parks for years. Local police had repeatedly told her to “move on,” according to court documents, but there was nowhere in town where she could legally sit or rest. The police had repeatedly woken her up and told her to move. She was ticketed, ticketed, charged with criminal trespassing and at least once jailed overnight.
At the time of his death in May 2021, at age 62, he owed $5,000 in unpaid fines.
For the crime of sleeping homeless.
