The new outlaws: cities make homelessness a crime.

Thomas O'Halloran played by the rules, and lost. The son of a San Francisco cop, he was born and raised in the Bay Area, attended parochial schools, and went to Stanford University. For nearly twenty-five years, he worked for Pacific Bell. In the latter part of his life, when his wife needed triple-bypass surgery, he spent their life savings--around $65,000--on her health care. After she died in 1991, O'Halloran became homeless.

One day last August, he was sitting on a bench reading a book, with all of his worldly possessions beside him in a shopping cart, when several police officers rode up to him on their motorcycles. The police issued O'Halloran a $76 citation for camping in a public park. O'Halloran could not afford to use any of his $250-a-month phone-company pension to pay the fine. The penalty automatically increased to $180, and the police issued a warrant for his arrest.

Since August 1993, 4,300 citations like the one O'Halloran received have been issued under San Francisco's Matrix program. Mayor Frank Jordan has vowed that Matrix will clean up the streets through strict enforcement of laws against blocking the sidewalk, trespassing, and sleeping in public.

Around the country, similar harassment campaigns against the homeless are under way. The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty has documented crackdowns against the homeless in more than thirty cities since the late 1980s. In some cities, including Seattle, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C., new laws have been passed against begging, loitering, or sleeping in public. In other places, including Santa Monica, New York, and San Francisco, existing "public nuisance" laws, which have been ignored for decades, are suddenly being rigorously enforced.

Such efforts do nothing to address the complicated national crisis that homelessness has become. But politicians have found that cracking down on the destitute and "cleaning up" central shopping districts by moving the homeless to outlying neighborhoods wins votes.

Derrick Thomas learned the hard way that cutting across parking lots is illegal in Atlanta. In May 1993, Thomas was staying in transitional housing near the Omni Stadium. In the evening he went out to make a call at a phone booth near a parking lot. While walking across the lot, Thomas was stopped by a man who was parking his car and wanted change. The parking-lot attendant witnessed the interaction and misinterpreted it. The attendant came "running and screaming, |Don't pay him! Don't pay him!'" Thomas remembers. Thomas and the customer both attempted to explain but the attendant flagged down a motorcycle cop.

When the customer assured the police officer that Thomas had not been impersonating a parking lot attendant, Thomas was arrested under a different statute. "I was arrested for being an unauthorized person in a parking lot and taken to jail," he says. Thomas spent the weekend in jail because he had no money for bail. On Monday afternoon, the prosecutor informed Thomas that he could plead guilty and receive a five-day sentence which would include time served. If he pled not guilty, the prosecutor would ask the judge to delay the trial a week while the state prepared its case. Since Thomas can add, he chose the former. His story would have gone untold were it not for the efforts of the Atlanta Coalition for the Homeless, which has been documenting that city's "criminalization of poverty."

While the parking-lot section of Atlanta's 1991 antiloitering ordinance is bizarre, it is not unique; Jacksonville, Florida, has passed a similar statute. Not to be outdone, Seattle outlawed sitting on the sidewalk between the hours of 7 A.M. and 9 P.M. in certain designated commercial zones.

"This is not aimed at the homeless, it is aimed at the lawless," says Seattle City Attorney Mark Sidran. By "the lawless" Sidran and other city officials mean people who, lacking anywhere else to go, sit down on the sidewalk or cross a parking lot or wander the city streets aimlessly. Jim Jackson, an Atlanta businessman, confidently declares that his city's new laws will "not punish anyone but the criminal." San Francisco's Mayor Frank Jordan assures us that "homelessness is not a crime. It is not a crime to be out there looking like an unmade bed. But if criminal behavior begins ... then we will step in and enforce the law."

At least in Miami, this ever-expanding definition of criminal behavior ran into a wall. The city was arresting homeless people under a law which made it illegal to "stand, loiter, or walk upon any street or sidewalk in the city so as to obstruct free passage over." In 1992, U.S. District Judge C. Clyde Atkins ordered the city to create safe zones where homeless people could remain without fear of arrest for "innocent acts." In other cities, the homeless have not been so lucky.

In the fall of 1989, William Young, a homeless man, suddenly found himself evicted from New York City's subway stations and threatened with arrest. His crime? Asking people for money.

"I spend the money I receive soliciting on the basic necessities of life, that is, on food, shelter, clothing, transportation, and medicine," Young explains. Medicine is vitally important because Young is afflicted with a bleeding ulcer and high blood pressure. Young avoids public shelters because they are "dangerous places, where violence often occurs and the few belongings I have might be stolen." Instead, he chooses to try to earn enough money to rent a room for a night by begging subway fare and then riding to the loading docks in the Bronx: "If I am lucky I can make twenty dollars unloading trucks for the day."

Young ran afoul of Operation Enforcement in November 1989. In response to a drop in ridership, the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) targeted homeless people for eviction from subway and train stations. MTA's 3,800 transit cops began strictly enforcing rules that forbid littering, creating unsanitary conditions, blocking free movement, lying down on subway seats, and begging.

With the help of the Legal Action Center for the Homeless, Young took his fight for First Amendment protection of his right to ask people for money all the way to the U.S. Court of Appeals. The court ruled against him. "Begging in the subway often amounts to nothing less than assault, creating in the passengers the apprehension of imminent danger," Judge Frank X. Altimari wrote for the majority.

While beggars may seem annoying or even frightening to some people, how else are the homeless supposed to get money? Some do manage to hold steady jobs. Others, like Young, find casual work or day labor. The little extra money they can raise through alms may be what it takes to keep them alive. While no beggar should be permitted to threaten or physically harm people, New York has plenty of laws against extortion and assault on its books. Begging in and of itself should not be regarded as criminal behavior. Altimari's 1990 ruling, however, was among those that created the precedent for cities across the country to pass laws that restrict begging. Fortunately, another New York ruling (Loper v. Brown) overturned blanket prohibitions on begging on all streets and public ways in the entire state.

The lesson that city attorneys across the country have learned is that if begging is banned from a particular part of the city (i.e., the subway or near automatic teller machines) or defined somewhat narrowly (i.e., aggressive panhandling), the courts will generally uphold restrictions. Aggressive panhandling has been defined in Seattle as including the use of "profane or abusive language toward the person solicited," while in the District of Columbia it includes "continuously asking, begging, or soliciting alms after the person [being solicited] has made a negative response." Laws against begging have been passed in at least eleven other cities.

San Francisco's "Operation ASAP" (Aggressive Soliciting Abatement Program) illustrates the lengths to which police departments will go to protect monied citizens from beggars. Under Operation ASAP, the police department employed a host of expensive, state-of-the-art equipment, including bulletproof vests and video cameras, and spent 450 work-hours and $11,000 for an undercover sting operation aimed at netting aggressive beggars. The resulting fifteen arrests were seen as a disappointment by all involved. Sergeant William Henderson, ASAP's director, explained the reasons for the meager results to his commander: "The overwhelming number of panhandlers ... ask for money, then when refused say 'thank you, have a nice day!' or |God bless you.'"

In 1992, Bobby Beamer, a fifty-nine-year-old man, was living under the Whitehurst Freeway in Washington, D.C. Beamer and about twenty-five other homeless people had constructed a shantytown not far from the Kennedy Center and the Watergate Hotel.

On the morning of June 5, Washington police raided the shantytown. "The police who came down to the camp told me and the other homeless people who live in the camp to eat all of the food we had in five minutes." Beamer recalls. The police "took a mattress which we shared, and many of my clothes. They took the mattress, clothes, and food up the hill to the streets and put all of it in a truck." Beamer never saw his possessions again. Other homeless people from Beamer's shantytown and elsewhere in the city offer similar accounts of police seizing property, including flash-lights, coats, blankets, "an interview suit," resumes, and umbrellas. One officer, Beamer says, "took my glasses and stomped on them. They were shattered and they are now useless. I paid a lot of money for those glasses.... I need a new pair very badly."

Attorney Michael Adlin wrote to Police Chief Addison Davis in behalf of the homeless. Adlin believes the police were not even acting "under the color of law" in these cases. Chief Davis replied, "It is our obligation to enforce the law and undertake actions which are necessary under appropriate circumstances. Understandably, then, what appears to be an unjustifiable seizure to some, is an appropriate disposal of property to others."

Such raids are not unique to Washington. In 1991, Atlanta police evicted sixty homeless people from one of the city's five "hutvilles," following a fire that damaged the viaduct which served as the hutville's roof. In Oakland, seven homeless people won a suit after the state police confiscated their property without warning during a raid in March 1992. Chicago's police spruce up Grant Park by clearing out homeless camps before city-sponsored concerts and events. In New York City, the Dinkins Administration bulldozed homeless shantytowns in Columbus Circle, Riverside Park, and vacant lots throughout the city. The best-known razing of a homeless encampment was Manhattan's 1991 action at Tompkins Square Park. Deputy Mayor Bill Lynch articulated the argument which is on the lips of city officials across the nation. "This [homeless camp] is not what the park is created for," he said. "It impedes the use of the park for all the community."

Lynch had no advice, however, on where homeless people should live. While estimates of homelessness in New York range from 70,000 to 90,000, the city says it has only 23,973 shelter beds. The shelter gap exists in all other cities that carry out destruction of homeless camps. Washington's 8,200 to 15,000 homeless people are provided only 6,700 shelter beds, Chicago's 12,000 homeless people have 4,590 shelter beds, and Atlanta's 15,000 homeless people have 3,500 shelter beds.

Nationwide, estimates of homelessness range from the Department of Housing and Urban Development's 600,000 to the National Coalition on Homelessness's two to three million. HUD's latest survey of shelter beds found 275,000 nationwide. If sleeping in public places--under freeways, in parks, or on heating grates--is illegal, that means at least 325,000 people are faced with the nightly choice of breaking the law or staying awake.

Since 1970, the United States has been faced with a simultaneous increase in the number of poor people and a decrease in places for them to live. The Federal Government has made it clear that it will not help cities solve the crisis. In the Reagan and Bush Administrations, cities faced deep cuts in Federal funding for low-income housing and services for the poor. The Clinton Administration shows little sign of improving things.

Meanwhile, mayors and city councils are under intense pressure from downtown business groups. Store owners, who are already losing customers to outlying malls, believe the presence of homeless people is hurting business. Business associations across the country have been flexing their political muscle and demanding that mayors do something to clean up the streets.

In the last few years, voters have also signaled their approval of crackdowns against the homeless, electing tough-talking mayors and supporting punitive campaigns. In 1990, Washington, D.C.'s voters turned down an ordinance that would have guaranteed shelter beds for every homeless resident. In 1992, San Franciscans approved Proposition J, an anti-begging ordinance which the Board of Supervisors had rejected as punitive.

In this political climate, it is easier for city officials to placate voters and businesses by locking up the homeless or moving them along, than it is to face the depth of the crisis.

Advocates for the homeless are responding to the crackdowns by organizing protests and filing lawsuits--with mixed success--while carrying on the day-to-day effort to feed, clothe, and shelter the poor.

One successful effort at fighting back was a recent grass-roots organizing campaign in Santa Monica, California. In the early 1980s, Santa Monica became known as one of the most compassionate cities for the homeless in Los Angeles County because of its generous social services, including a feeding program on the City Hall lawn. By the late 1980s the city's homeless population had grown to between 1,500 and 2,000 people. In response, a coalition of business owners, conservative citizens, the police chief, and members of the city council led a backlash against the homeless.

In June 1993, things came to a head when City Councilmember Kelly Olsen proposed enforcing an existing law which would close city parks from midnight to 5 A.M., denying homeless people a place to sleep. By the time of Olsen's proposal, homeless people and their allies had formed an organization, "We, the People," to fight back. Ron Taylor is one of the homeless people who led the fight. Taylor and others went to hear a speech by Olsen in which the councilman claimed there were plenty of other places to sleep besides the park. Taylor remembers. "Somebody called out, |Well, can you name some?' Olsen said, |Why not City Hall?' So that's where we all moved.... At one time there were about 100 people.... We just put our bedrolls everywhere and had the front steps of City Hall for our storage area. They didn't want to give us a bathroom, so City Hall began to smell pretty bad."

The City Hall sleep-in began to rally public opinion to the cause of the homeless. Among other things, the sleep-in showed the true face of homeless people. "We had a woman who was pregnant in her eighth month. We had a ninety-four-year-old woman who was out there and two other ladies in their late seventies. We had veterans of Desert Storm," Taylor says.

Two-and-a-half months after the sleep-in began, the city council agreed not to enforce the law closing the park between midnight and 5 A.M. In addition, Taylor says, "we managed to get two bathrooms opened twenty-four hours a day. I really and honestly think we gave them a wake-up call." Taylor encourages people to try similar tactics in other cities.

"Somebody has to take a stand," he says. "We should all be ashamed of ourselves for letting this [homelessness crisis] happen. If we don't stand up now, by the year 2000, it's just going to be mind-boggling how many people are going to be on the streets."

George Howland Jr., a Seattle-based writer, is co-author of "Two Left Brains," a collection of public radio commentaries published by Open Hand Publishers, 1993.