The Crime of Homelessness
In San Francisco it is illegal to sleep on the sidewalk, illegal to sleep in the park, illegal to sleep in your car, and illegal to loiter. For a homeless person, this means it is illegal to sleep. Through this growing system of hostile City ordinances that target homeless people, combined with the widespread practice of illegal police profiling of homeless people and an ongoing imprisonment of homeless people in county and state facilities, the City of San Francisco has made it a crime to be homeless.
The most obvious symptoms of our city-wide initiative to treat homeless people as criminals and put them in prison are the current practices of the San Francisco Police Department: Explains Lawyers’ Committee on Civil Rights attorney Elisa Della-Piana, “Wherever homeless people are, wherever the City officials find them, the response is either to move them out of town or figure out a way to arrest them.” Through her Homeless Rights Project, Della-Piana and volunteer attorneys provide free assistance to people who receive criminal citations simply for being homeless.
Della-Piana, who has handled over 1,500 criminal charges against homeless people in the past year, states that, “a police officer is not supposed to detain someone unless there is probable cause that a person committed a crime—but this rule is never followed with homeless people.” From what she has observed through thousands of cases in the past two years, “the police are treating homelessness as probable cause.”
As reported by the San Francisco Chronicle last December, the SFPD relies heavily on profiling to determine who to detain and who to ignore. One major target of this unconstitutional profiling is the African-American community; the other target is homeless people. According to Susan Sward’s report to the Chronicle, black people in San Francisco are arrested at four times the rate of black people in Oakland, and three times the rate of Los Angeles—a city notorious for its corrupt police department. Since a disproportionate percentage of homeless people in San Francisco are African-American, these police profiling statistics directly feed the profiling and arrest of homeless people in the city. They also serve as a testament to the ongoing illegal profiling tactics of the police department.
Beyond illegally detaining homeless people without probable cause, the San Francisco Police Department has also been given a mandate by the legislative branch to treat people without homes as criminals: Over the past decade, a steady series of municipal codes have been pushed through the Board of Supervisors in an attempt to criminalize each symptom of homelessness. In November of 2001, this meant an ordinance making it illegal to loiter near public toilets; in July of 2002, it also became illegal to urinate or defecate in public. Then, in a ballot initiative known as “Proposition M” passed in November of 2003, it became illegal to “aggressively panhandle.”
“These laws are passed to criminalize homelessness,” explains Della-Piana. “These laws are deliberate tools.” Most of these City ordinances have been passed in the past 10 years as part of an effort to get people off the streets by putting them in prisons. Combined with police profiling, they helped incarcerate thousands of homeless people in 2006.
Once a homeless person is detained by the SFPD, officers can choose to charge him or her with City law, which would be an infraction, or state law, which would typically be a misdemeanor. Misdemeanors can land you in jail for weeks, and can be given for such crimes as camping in public space, sleeping in your vehicle, or aggressively panhandling. Between January, 2004 and January, 2006, the SFPD committed over 1,000 misdemeanor arrests against homeless people.
More frequent than immediate arrests for a misdemeanor charge, however, are infraction citations that eventually become warrants for arrest over time. Infraction citations are often the result of some of the recently approved City codes that were named earlier in this article, and are equivalent to a jay walking ticket. Between January, 2004 and January, 2006, approximately 27,413 infractions were cited against homeless people in San Francisco. Although you can’t be arrested for committing an infraction, it still counts as a criminal offense. Typical infraction violations in San Francisco include: sleeping in the park, obstructing the sidewalk, having an open container, and urinating in public. A homeless person who is given a citation by the police is then required to pay a fine of $50 to $500.
If you can’t afford to pay these fines—which is frequentlyly the case for people who are homeless—the court issues a warrant, and you become wanted by the police. These warrants prevent people from accessing the services that they need to exit homelessness: You can’t get public housing if you have a warrant. Social security cuts off payment. Treatment centers cut off services. Employers don’t hire someone with a criminal record, let alone an active warrant for arrest.
Eventually, many of these warrants become prison or jail terms: “Almost 90% of all homeless people in San Francisco have been incarcerated in their lifetime,” reports Dr. Margot Kushel, Assistant Professor of Medicine at UCSF, whose 2005 study of incarceration and homelessness in San Francisco was recently published in the American Journal of Public Health. This research, with a sample size of 1,426 homeless and marginally housed adults, also found significantly increased health risks for those who had been incarcerated for extended periods of time.
Dr. Kushel is not alone in recognizing this trend of putting more and more homeless people in prison. Dr. Renée L. Binder, MD, founder and director of the Psychiatry and the Law Program at UCSF, explains that, “jails are de facto assuming responsibility for a population whose needs span multiple service delivery systems.”
According to her research, homeless inmates in San Francisco had a length of stay that was 4.5 days longer on average than non-homeless inmates. Homeless people are typically forced to stay in prison for longer periods because they are unable to make bail, they are less likely to be released on their own recognizance, they have a chain of unpaid citations due to their poverty, and they have likely already been arrested for being homeless and thus have a criminal record that mandates tougher sentencing.
Proposition M, which was passed in November of 2003, and became active in May, 2004, demands that the police cede their mentally ill and addicted charges to the Department of Public Health. As is clearly written into the Municipal Code, “The people of San Francisco find that people who aggressively or improperly solicit because of drug or alcohol dependency or mental illness should be diverted from the criminal court system to a program of screening, assessment and referral operated by the San Francisco Department of Public Health.”
When the new ban on aggressive panhandling took effect in 2004, the director of Public Health, Dr. Mitch Katz, told the press, “We’ve learned that just throwing the homeless into jail doesn’t really change their behavior, so that’s not what’s going to happen. It’s a last resort. What will happen is that we will be engaging them, helping them understand that they have other choices.”
But according to Doctor Margot Kushel’s 2005 study, 29% of the homeless people in her San Francisco study had been arrested at least once just this past year, and more than 85% of the participants had been arrested and jailed some time in the lifetime.
Meanwhile, San Francisco’s police budget has grown by 48 million dollars over the past 3 years, rocketing from a total of 294 million dollars in 2004, to 342 million dollars, in 2007. That’s almost a 20% increase in spending on the police within a very short window of time and is simultaneous with a rise in arrest rates of homeless people.
Megan Corcoran, Director of Policy and Communications at the San Francisco-based Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice is direct about Proposition M: “The diversion effort is a farce,” she states matter-of-factly. “With any diversion program, you want to think it’s going to work, but with this one it feels like the stick is bigger than the carrot, and the carrot isn’t even accessible.” It’s common sense that once you start policing an issue like panhandling, you’re going to be giving more citations to homeless people, and eventually putting more homeless people in jail.
Although homelessness is a state of crisis that results from the lack of affordable housing, the lack of available addiction treatment, and the prevalence of poverty, the City of San Francisco has made the criminal justice system into the primary response to homelessness.
Explains Della-Piana, “This is a trend that exists across the country. There are more and more laws making it possible to treat homeless people as criminals.” Although the executive branch has a lot of discretion in how to address homelessness, it has been narrow in its approach despite a wide variety of clearly defined alternatives.
Dr. Binder, who has been working in the field of mental health for decades, reports that, “we have many programs that are available and that are effective, but these programs need more funding.” Some of the options she recommends are the behavioral health court in San Francisco County, which changes the designation from “defendant” to “client” and ultimately mobilizes the resources of government programs, including housing. Another area in need of funding is a voluntary system of case management services, or voluntary diversion programs for people with mental illness. Explains Dr. Binder, “There are clearly things that we can do and that we can put our resources into—it’s not like we don’t already know what to do.”
Instead, San Francisco puts homeless people in prisons and jails.
If you are homeless, and have received a citation from the San Francisco Police, check in with the Coalition on Homelessness Civil Rights Workgroup between 9:00 a.m. and noon on Mondays or 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. on Wednesdays to see if Elisa Della-Piana can help represent your case for free. If you would like to become involved in defeating laws that target homeless people, come to a weekly Civil Rights meeting on any Monday at noon.
Jeremy