Next to its tenacity, one of the Coalition’s greatest strengths is its longevity. No, Gavin Newsom didn’t say that and he probably never will. In fact I can’t think of any Mayor who has praised the Coalition’s longevity, and that’s okay. They’re all gone and the Coalition on Homelessness is still here, working its ass off. 20 years of busting its butt. 7,300 days, 240 months, 960 weeks, and an absolutely amazing number of hours dedicated to one mission and one mission only: Creating a community that has no need for a homeless coalition.

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Many white people in the United States grew up singing and playing this nursery rhyme, sometimes with a decidedly racist twist. Turns out it actually has more classist British roots, and the original words were either, “catch a tinker by the toe,” or possibly, “catch a beggar by the toe,” but no one knows for sure. Of course, children in the good ol’ US of A had to put their own little turn to the words. Today, we politely use the phrase, “Catch a tiger by the toe.”

The nasty little rhyme flew unsolicited into my mind when I first caught wind of the bumbling series of mishaps impacting poor people who were unlucky enough to be housed at a City-owned building popularly know as 150 Otis. An unbelievable yo-yo of events that has taken place at this site can only leave a caring person with bi-polar thoughts. Either City administrators are completely incompetent, or incredibly mean. But whatever the verdict, homeless people have been kicked out and other presumably more deserving poor folks moved back in, not once, not twice, but three different times:

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Gavin Newsom’s recent ordinance to amend the Park Code to allow police to crack down on residents of Golden Gate Park is part of a larger pattern of the use of punitive action before mayoral elections to win votes.

In the 2003 election, then Supervisor Newsom faced off with then Board of Supervisors President Matt Gonzalez, Tom Ammiano, Angela Alioto, and Susan Leal. Newsom proposed and actively campaigned for Proposition M, a measure that would disallow “aggressive” panhandling in parking lots and near ATMs. Proposition M was a ploy to use punitive action against the homeless for political gain.

Newsom shamelessly exploited the stereotype of panhandlers as drug users by showing a slideshow of people injecting heroin at a fund-raiser for the proposition. He also used a report citing 169 homeless deaths during the 2002-2003 fiscal year to push his cause. Proposition M aimed at diverting homeless people to drug treatment programs, even though Newsom failed to spell out those programs, as the Chronicle reported. As the Street Sheet would later report, voters were told no one would be jailed for panhandling; however, when the promised drug treatment programs failed to appear, panhandlers were, in fact, jailed.

Gonzalez, on the other hand, campaigned for a proposition to increase the minimum wage, and Ammiano publicly announced that the most important priority in ending homelessness was securing more permanent housing and making addiction treatment services more readily available. However, Newsom, as the winner, correctly predicted that harnessing anti-homeless sentiment and continuing with his ineffective Care Not Cash policies and anti-panhandling measures would win voters over. Newsom won, and so did Proposition M. Of course, this would be at the expense of the hundreds of homeless people who have been burdened by Newsom and his policies.

In the 1999 mayoral election, then incumbent Mayor Willie Brown, former Mayor Frank Jordan, and Clint Reilly ran against each other for the 2000-2004 term. Mayor Brown, in a punitive action not dissimilar to Newsom’s Golden Gate Park ordinance, ordered police to confiscate all shopping carts. At the time, Brown justified it by saying, “The homeless aren’t the only ones to have a right to public space,” (however his decree indicated that he actually meant the homeless were the only ones that had no right to public space) and George Smith, then director of the Office on Homelessness declared the confiscation was aimed at, “getting people off the streets and getting them services,” (again, failing to mention how confiscating a homeless person’s shopping cart constituted a service) reported the San Francisco Chronicle. This was really a political maneuver that gave police free reign to harass homeless people, conveniently right before election season, right when the political pay-off for punitive measures was prime. Soon after the cart confiscation, however, Brown realized that it might seem cold-hearted, and three weeks before the election, completely denied that he ever ordered the police to seize homeless shopping carts.

As the past two elections have demonstrated, mayoral candidates have attempted to strike the perfect balance between appearing tough on homelessness, but not mean-spirited and unsympathetic. This has been a political dilemma since the early 1980s when homelessness began to appear, to the great confusion of then Mayor Feinstein. Her successor Mayor Art Agnos emphasized his dedication to homeless rights, allowing people with nowhere to go to sleep in the Civic Center. Camp Agnos, a community of houseless individuals arose, greatly to the frustration of the populace, and he soon lost in re-election, proving that homeless-friendly policies do not appeal to the mainstream public.

Agnos’s successor Frank Jordan, went the opposite direction, employing the heavy-handed Matrix approach. Matrix sent teams of police and social workers to speak to every homeless person on the streets. The Matrix program was unpopular with voters because it appeared too confrontational and not service-directed. Ever since then, mayoral candidates have been trying to strike the perfect balance between Agnos and Jordan with regard to homeless policy. What they don’t seem to realize is that all of their political maneuvering has real world consequences, and that none of their voter-friendly policies seems to address the root cause of homelessness—a lack of affordable housing.

Mayor Newsom’s Golden Gate Park ordinance is clearly another soulless and cynical political tactic aimed at winning votes for his re-election. What voters should realize when they walk into the voting booth is that none of these empty policies will actually solve homelessness. San Francisco needs—and needs to adhere to—a comprehensive housing first plan that addresses the problem at its root: affordable housing. Let’s fight poverty, not the poor!

A recent series in the San Francisco Chronicle accusing homeless people of virtually destroying the sanctity of Golden Gate Park has caused quite a brouhaha in San Francisco, the past month and a half. Perhaps the most amazing aspect of the recent hysteria was that nothing actually happened. Or, more precisely, nothing happened until after the news had already been invented. No child stepped on one of the supposedly ubiquitous syringes, no cooking fire got out of hand, no sleeping body tripped a morning jogger.

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On June 3, three homeless people who witnessed a disturbance in Medford, Oregon, that led to a death and an arrest on manslaughter charges were themselves jailed—because a prosecutor argued, and a judge agreed, that as homeless people, the witnesses might prove too difficult to locate at the time of the trial. That trial is scheduled to start September 25. No charges have been brought against the witnesses.

As of press time, two of the three witnesses have been released, but are required to check in with the probation department daily, which puts them in a similar category to what happens when someone is charged with a crime and the judge wants to make sure that the person is around for the trail date. The Medford Three are not the first homeless people to be jailed for the crime of stepping forward to tell police what they witnessed.

“It should alarm everyone in this country, regardless of how you see the issue of homelessness, that our courts are locking people up simply based on the fact that they witnessed (not committed) a crime. Guantánamo Bay comes to Medford, Oregon,” says Paul Boden, Executive Director of Western Regional Advocacy Project, a San Francisco-based coalition of West Coast homeless advocacy organizations.

“An alarming trend has emerged in this country, one that criminalizes those that merely witness a crime; a trend that has led to the jailing of witnesses for indefinite periods of time. This trend has the chilling effect of silencing those who would otherwise be used as tools in the pursuit of justice,” says Pete White, founder and Co-Director of the Los Angeles Community Action Network.

This incident comes on the heels of another case, in Scranton, Pennsylvania. On July 6, Randy Barr, a 41-year-old homeless man, saw a man slashed to death during an argument, called police, and waited for them to arrive at the scene in order to make a statement. He was jailed for four weeks before being put on a house arrest program earlier this month, fitted with a monitoring device, and required to check in with house arrest officials once a week. He is banned from using alcohol or drugs and must also submit to random drug tests and pay $10 a day for the program.

Initially, Barr was thrown in Lackawanna County Prison where, he said, no one told him about anything that was happening with the case.

As advocates for homeless people, we are outraged at this egregious violation of their civil rights. Instead of giving the individuals in these cases a hotel room or other place to stay, they have been thrown into jail and treated as any other inmate for the crime of coming forward as good citizens, while not having a roof over their head. “Just because an individual is without a home, shouldn’t mean you are stripped of your rights as a citizen of the United States,” says Israel Bayer, Director of Street Roots newspaper in Portland, Oregon.

It has often been said that the most precious thing we have in America is our freedom and that Government must be able to show good cause before our freedom can be infringed upon. In an effort to preserve our individual freedom, protections were created that government must be able to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that we have committed a crime before it can lock us up in jail. Apparently, those days are over.

“If you’ve got money, you’ve got rights. Since when do you have to buy due process and human rights in this country?” asks Rachael Myers, Advocacy Director with Real Change newspaper in Seattle, Washington.

You can follow other West Coast and national homelessness news at WRAP’s blog at http://wraphome.blogspot.com. Learn more about WRAP’s work and get involved or donate at http://www.wraphome.org.