Are Police Going to Start Ticketing the Homeless for Sleeping?

I wish I had more time to dig into this issue, but here’s what I know . . .

I attended the Capital Neighborhood Inc meeting last week and a lieutenant was there reporting on some of the things going on downtown. He said that there is a noted increase in the homeless population right now, especially around the capital square and that the businesses are complaining about the impact they are having on them. It sounded like there were some legitimate concerns about garbage and human waste. But it was unclear about if it was about that, or the homeless sleeping on the benches around the square. Anyways, the lieutenant said that they were going to give people warnings for a week and then the police officers would have the discretion to start ticketing the homeless.

Every year in August there seems to be an upsurge in homelessness, so that didn’t necessarily surprise me. I asked the lieutenant (I wish I had caught his name!) if they were doing anything to track the increase that they were seeing, so that we could determine why it was happening. He said they were not and he didn’t see why they would. He thought that a large part of it was people coming here from northern cities (Minneapolis) and traveling south for the winter. I think its more than that, that it has to do with our economy but I can’t prove it. And of course, if the police aren’t doing anything to document the increase, so its hard to say.

Anyways, I checked in with some folks to find out what they had heard and this is what I was told.

{X} who currently sleeps outside says this is true. Cops started giving people warnings sometime last week and then said they’d be back in a week to enforce. {X} talked to someone from the downtown police later Friday afternoon and was told people would be cited based on some city ordinance banning sleeping on benches. It’s not clear to me if they’re just targeting people on benches, or also people on sidewalks, etc.

I’m confused, what good does it do to ticket homeless people for sleeping on a bench? Do you think they are going to pay the fines? With what? And if they have the money, isn’t it better spent on a security deposit for a new place to live? And they still need a place to sleep, where is that place? Can’t we come up with a better solution to the problem of homelessness and the problems the businesses face than ticketing people for sleeping on benches? And probably just displacing people to cause problems elsewhere? And isn’t the real problem, the homelessness itself? What are we doing about that?