What Happens When Cities Make Homelessness a Crime: Hiding The Homeless

my whole goal is to reduce real homelessness not deal with the symptoms I want to have less people are homeless than the year before you'll stop in homelessness because were being ticketed and moved out of the out of course everybody wants to move the homeless but they gotta be somewhere don't play the economic crisis may be over but three and a half million Americans we homeless this year a number that's remained constant for more than a decade despite programs designed to get homeless people back on their feet it seems like it's getting harder I've seen a lot of people to lose their houses older people in the housing crunch that have never dealt with homelessness they don't know how to build cities are responding to growing public frustration with a new tactic legislation designed to hide the homeless rather than help them controversial new laws have been passed by dozens of local governments that make it virtually illegal to be homeless Boise Idaho is one city facing scrutiny for the effect these laws have had on homeless people Boise Idaho is one of a growing number of cities across the country passing laws designed to get homeless people off the streets by criminalizing basic human behaviors like sitting down too long sleeping or even sharing food in public a group of homeless people in Boise have sued the city government claiming that the laws constitute cruel and unusual punishment Janet Bell became homeless ten years ago she lost her arm and nearly lost her life to an infection she developed while living on the streets she was on a railroad bridge when police wrote her a ticket for sleeping outside yes gathered I knew had had a camp down by the river and I'd been down talking to him we both came up and and we got busted how many tickets did you get I got to LA just for camping outside from being outside yeah she and five other homeless people sued the city in federal court and the stakes are high the case has reached a federal appellate court and the outcome could repeal laws targeting homeless people in cities nationwide as the number of cities with such laws continues to grow her case could redefine the rights of homeless people across America what do you think the real purpose of that law is the law to harass the homeless and hope hopes is the homeless will go somewhere else of course everybody wants to move the homeless but they gotta be somewhere don't they supporters of laws like Boise's anti camping ordinance say that they help get homeless people off the streets critics say that it just creates a whack-a-mole dynamic whereby homeless are either forced to move somewhere else or end up in jail the majority of cities have too few shelter beds a shortage that's been made worse since federal funding was scaled back in 2012 in Boise there are only about 300 for a homeless count that can exceed 2000 Richard Morgan became homeless six years ago when the auto shop where he worked went under he couched her for a year but ran out of options and moved to a shelter well you know I get I tried that when I first came literally out on the street homeless and I could only stand it for about two months and that's if I drank that was part of my self medication for the bipolar crowd anxiety well they don't like a drink and I didn't like drinking that much and it was easier to move then he moved to the streets a police harassment eventually forced him to the woods one of the tricks is getting in and out of here without leaving footprints is what it's got about a half a foot of snow on the ground haha it sounds extreme but we soon found he wasn't alone taking a little stroll through the woods yeah how's it go man good we've only been walking a couple minutes but all through the woods back here you see evidence that people stay out here to avoid the citations the police give for public camping how many people staying back well we're in our area there is one two three five five kids and the number will soon grow citing the city's anti camping law police just announced they're going to ticket the hundred and fifty people living behind this homeless shelter the shelters don't have the capacity or special programs these people need but they're being ticketed anyway where they expect everybody go it doesn't seem like anybody has a solution other than just to clear out the alley at this point but you don't stop being homeless just because you are being ticketed and moved out of the alley in practice the laws mean homeless people break the law by simply being homeless I got a warning ticket they know I'm on a voucher I'm waiting for uh from HUD I'm waiting for the apartments to be built for us to move into and I'm still getting ticketed but just throw me in jail I got jealous my housing homeless advocates like Lydia Blackwell say the laws are hurting the people they're supposed to help where do you think that they're brought when they are released from jail they're brought back to the street right back to where they started from the only thing that's changed is they have another barrier to housing do you see a discrepancy between what the government says the laws are designed to do and the effect they have in reality yeah if the intention is in any way to try to solve the problem of homelessness it does quite the opposite despite those criticisms laws criminalizing behavior associated with homeless people are an increasingly popular tactic a major force behind their rising popularity is homelessness consultant Robert Marvin I bend over 708 places as of last week 708 counties sued him in eight counties cities programs that I define it as a program he's tough approach to cleaning up the streets has made him a sought out consultant to cities nationwide we followed him to Northern California where he pitched his services to an affluent community you got to have a culture of transformation and you do that by being in programs where his advice is often the same stop handing out free food and open a 24 hour shelter where the homeless are kept out of sight feeding people has never got a single person out of homelessness I've challenged every feeding organization America please bring me somebody who you've fed and because you fed them are no longer homeless it has never happened this is that may sound harsh but he cites improvements that are hard to argue with the system we could get an 80% reduction if we just started working smart Clearwater st. Pete all have had that sort of 80 to 90 percent level cut his results in st. Petersburg in Clearwater have been his calling card on the national stage but we learned those claims simply weren't true neither st. Petersburg nor Clearwater even undertake a homeless count in the first place but they pointed us to data for Pinellas County where both are located the homeless count there actually increased by almost one thousand people since Marv its hiring inside this former jail that marbet just opened as a homeless shelter his numbers got even more convoluted earlier we talking about metrics and how you measure the success of these programs or these shelters one is how many people are graduating from the street in other words one year from now after going out through the program of no longer come back that that to me is the most important how do you know they just they just haven't gone elsewhere you can check across all these data systems and see who's who commit that that's very that's doable right that's not a hypothetical that can be done today these are like vastly different data sets I mean can you really ill a data set that tells you that these people are truly off the street and not just on a street in the next county over somewhere else well homeless the information sent as a required federal required so if you use the backdoor approach and say are they hitting the system somewhere else that data is already there that data's been around about a decade and is getting better and better when we asked him about his own success rate he said he didn't measure it the ultimate test and I don't measure this but the ultimate test would ability of a prior homeless person to have free-market housing that seems almost insurmountable for someone to come off the street and I have to imagine that numbers extremely low and it is and I think that's why people don't measure that that lack of data hasn't stopped him from building shelters across the country this is Piniella Safe Harbor the county's newest homeless refuge we looked into a shelter marbet built in your st. Petersburg Florida in 2011 the amenities at Pinellas safe harbor are Spartan to be sure they sleep on these mats it's a bare-bones existence reduce down to life's minimum requirements they report before the United Nations Committee Against Torture investigated the shelter near st. Petersburg and found it subjected homeless people to cruel inhuman and degrading treatment the report was led by Erik tars senior attorney with the National Law Center on homelessness and poverty in st. Petersburg what he was pushing was for people to be put in solitary pretrial detention if they don't choose to go to the shelter and so to keep them there in solitary until they decide well I guess the shelter is a better option pretrial solitary confinement for what are misdemeanors yes exactly but Marvin's business has continued to expand got the full life full system of everything going on here Keith sets a Rogaine in and they used condom we shadowed marbet while he took stock of the homeless situation in Grass Valley California his focus wasn't what we'd expected he's sending a symbol here you know he's that's a trying to protect you know he's this is out trying to say don't mess with my stuff it's in the homeless world very similar to you know what dream catchers in the Native American or the First Nation community a lot of time you can fight you can tap into water and electricity in these encampments I've been in Kampen instead have satellite TV and you know cable nothing he said it anything to do with solving the problem of homeless and nothing we saw suggested his programs have helped a significant number of homeless people turn their lives around but his thinking shaped the way tens of thousands of homeless people are treated the law is pushing people into Marvin shelters will face serious challenges Janet Bell wins her lawsuit against the city what do you think the impact will be if you win the lawsuit I've had to do what I can you know just to uh to help fight this thing if it changes things at all where there's less harassment and possibly more help with housing then it will be a great impact of via tremendous impact her case is in federal court and it could be years before it's resolved until then laws targeting the homeless are on the books you

Channel: VICE News

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Keywords: criminalization of homelessness, Homelessness a Crime, Hiding The Homeless, homeless crime, homelessness, Boise homeless, homeless, incarceration, criminal justice, social justice, boise, sacramento, crime, housing, housing crisis, VICE News, news, VICE, documentary, interview, interviews, journalism, world news, culture, wild, lifestyle, world, underground, videos, vice.com, vice videos, crime patrol 2018, homeless america, boise idaho, economic crisis

Id: nYFeY2pS0ks

Length: 12min 54sec (774 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 23 2015