Penalizing Poverty: The potential danger and double standard of a vigilante court system for homeless people
In his October 26, 2006 State of the City Address, San Francisco’s Mayor Gavin Newsom emphasized the city’s quality of life—the banal, in-your-face issues of pot holes, litter, poor sidewalk and park maintenance, and weightier concerns leading to the creation of, “a new focused enforcement program to target and address… quality of life infractions.”
“This will be a pilot project,” he stated. “We’re going to start small. But the DA and I are optimistic that Focused Enforcement will make our city safer-and help those who need a little bit more encouragement to get off the streets and get the help they need.”
Oddly placed in the context of, “a surge in violent crime,” the Mayor’s remarks highlighted nonviolent, victimless quality of life infractions like sleeping in parks, urinating on sidewalks, and being drunk in public. Newsom heavily implied the major perpetrators on whom he would focus the enforcement effort were homeless people.
Later in 2006, on December 14, as part of his Third Annual State of the [sic] Homelessness Address, Mayor Newsom introduced his Community Court initiative after studying “best practices” promoted by the New York-based Center for Court Innovation, whose members, he said, are traveling cross-country spreading that model to cities like San Jose.
The District Attorney’s office has directed San Francisco’s 12 established community courts since 1999, staffed by a panel of local residents who hear cases involving misdemeanor crimes (petty gambling, shoplifting, assault and battery, etc.). Each lay volunteer panel, “makes clear to the offender the neighborhood impact of the crime, and determines a mix of community services, direct restitution and/or fines.” This is intended to ease court costs, lighten sentences, and encourage community involvement and responsibility.
Mayor Newsom’s “innovation,” seemed like a new twist on the old community court idea, but once again targeted the homeless population in that it dealt with quality of life infractions attributed most often to unhoused people.
Calling, “our current system for dealing with quality of life… abjectly ineffective,” Newsom admitted, “I get what everyone else gets. We are failing to deal with our chronic street population,” and, ” our substance abuse challenges.” He saw the same people everyone saw every day: “the person that you have to step over on the street corner.”
But, when he woke up in the morning and shaved, he looked in the mirror and said, “I have got to be responsible to deal with this. It is a great weight.”
He further defined “focused enforcement” stating, “We are going to focus on chronic public inebriates—serial inebriates first.” In October and December 2006, when he uttered these words, he must have realized that he himself was an undeclared serial inebriate. Standing before his morning mirror or San Francisco citizens and leaders, did an anchor heavier than mayoral responsibility terribly weigh him down?
In early February 2007, after admitting to having had an affair with his former appointments secretary, Ruby Rippey-Tourk, wife of friend and aide, Alex Tourk, Newsom redirected San Francisco media attention to his treatment for alcohol abuse.
The public confessions and apologies that followed were reminiscent of President Clinton and others whose consultants advised it politically smart to come clean and seek rehab. The humble mea culpas of a fallen leader invariably warm American voters’ hearts. Newsom then launched his re-election campaign.
Because of Dr. Mimi Silbert’s effective work with homeless people and substance abusers, Newsom or his handlers may have chosen his rehab to be done in connection with her Delancey Street Foundation. Or Newsom may have chosen Delancey because he has known Dr. Silbert for years.
The nature of his “counseling” association is marked by pure, class privilege: He will not fulfill the live-in requirement as homeless and drug-addicted people do. Nor will he partake of the work program in the restaurant or in the sale of Christmas trees in the lot. His community service will consist of duties he already performs as Mayor. Hopefully, if he sits in group sessions, he will interact with homeless clients and come to understand their suffering.
In October 2003, just before Newsom’s mayoral win, I contacted Jim Gabbert, “legendary” KGO radio talk show host. He announced on-air that he had been approached to run for mayor and learned that a Newsom political consultant reported cooking up Care Not Cash as a simple idea, quickly grasped by voters—an easy sell void of sincere compassion for the homeless.
Yet David Miree, a Newsom press aide, insisted that Newsom has done more to address homelessness than any prior San Francisco mayor.
In his State of the Homelessness speech, Newsom proudly announced, “since we have started [our program], 4,795 human beings are no longer out on the sidewalks and streets.”
I asked Miree, “What is the Mayor’s purpose in instituting community courts to deal with quality of life crimes blamed on homeless people? Don’t the words, ‘crimes’ and ‘courts’ automatically criminalize them?”
“We do not criminalize them,” he said. “[Our goal is] to get them off the streets [and] into whatever type of program they need, enhance their quality of life, getting them off drugs or [addressing] the precipitating factor as the reason why they are homeless. We try to look at those things, identify them, and assist in helping them find a healthy alternative.”
“Then why put the ‘focused enforcement’ in terms of crimes and courts?”
Miree said, “Whether or not you are homeless or a business person, if you are participating in behavior not healthy to yourself, the community, or the environment, like public urination, littering, or drinking, a public official’s main concern is to ‘make enforcements’ to help lessen those types of infractions, whether or not they are from homeless people, business people, visitors, or what have you, [and] provide a safe and healthy environment for all residents.”
I observed that I live in Pacific Heights and walk all over the city. Public drunkenness is everywhere: Neither Haight Street kids nor Marina techies are ticketed. Is this a double standard?
Miree stated, “Those quality of life citations would apply across the board to everyone,” who showed a repeated pattern of “serial inebriation.”
“The Mayor’s word was ‘serial’ inebriates, meaning over and over again. Correct?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Miree.
I noted that the press reported Mayor Newsom himself was observed publicly drunk on several different occasions, at least one while he was officiating with mayoral duties.
When the Mayor made this homelessness address, he had not declared his alcoholism. “You say it applies to everyone who is publicly inebriated. Is this not a double standard?” I asked.
“Let me say clearly for the record,” stated Miree, “I am by no means commenting on a very personal matter for the Mayor, not [having] a direct, [or] indirect, effect on public safety or public health.”
“This is both personal and a matter of public policy,” I urged.
Doesn’t the Mayor make policy decisions directly and indirectly, affecting the public safety and health of everyone in the city? Is it not essential that his mind be clear?
Coalition Concerns
A Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review article, “The Future of Community Justice,” isolates disturbing problems in types and attitudes of community court participants:
“Current community justice practices share a common defect: they rely on groups of volunteers that are often not representative of the community and that are prone to being dominated by a vocal and active minority.”
In some regions, a small number of activists participate, besides the usual business district leaders who dislike homeless people taking up their sidewalk space. These self-selected, biased groups represent a mere sliver of the community.
Active Crimes, Status Crimes
However, the more serious concern is not with the form of the courts, but the fact that they will punish people for the social status in which they find themselves:
Active Crimes
The crime of stealing is an action, which unlawfully deprives another of her or his property.
Classist Status Crimes
Quality of life “crimes” are classist status penalties: They punish a person not for negative actions, but for his or her social class or income and housing status. Levying penalties upon homeless people does not “cure” their situation. In fact, it is a double abuse—first for being poor, and second for trying to survive poverty. Almost all of these infractions are acts of survival.
How is it fair or legal to fine: A mother attempting to shelter her child from rain or snow in an abandoned building or under a bridge? A veteran with flashbacks anesthetizing himself so he can sleep on cement? An old man with untreated prostate cancer relieving his full bladder? A disabled woman resting her sore legs or back? A starving man begging drivers for food money on medians or rights of way?
Even the “public drunkenness” of “serial inebriates,” as the Mayor well knows, can be caused by the sufferers’ use of alcohol or drugs, the only anesthetic available to deaden stress and pain—the savage pain of homelessness.
The difference, however, is that Mayor Newsom can afford a roof under which to drink. One serial inebriate, at least, will not be sent to San Francisco’s quality of life community courts.
Carol