Poverty as Probable Cause

It's always nice to see flashes of sanity: A judge in the state of Washington rejects a city's attempt to conduct sweeping, suspicionless ID and background checks on residents in a church-run camp for the homeless.

Comments

[kmw]

Isn?t that nice. I?m currently a Washintonian (hopefully not much longer), and a libertarian heaven this is not.

WA just passed a law which states that after a single DUI arrest (not just conviction, but arrest), the accused must install a breath analyzer ignition-interlock device in his or her vehicle.

(story here if you care)
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=duilaws10e&date=20040610

Then of course there?s the monorail taxes, etc etc.

If you?re thinking of moving to the Evergreen State, my advice is? Don?t!

[JSM]

kmv,
Care to tell me where a good libertarian can relocate too? I have lived in a couple states now and I found about the same, if not worse, crap going on. However, that monorail tax is about as bad as it gets! I already learned of one individual who could no longer afford their tabs with the added $47 monorail tax. I think this is the angle the monorail folks are going, she then had to dump her car and is now looking forward to the monorail as one of her few options for transportation. God, to think of my tab fees before I-695 with that added tax!

Anyway, as for the tent city. Quite the delicate issue. I support the anti-ID decision, but can you imagine if someone from that tent city was to molest a kid near one of those schools, how much legislation requiring ID's and background checks would be pushed down our throats??? It won't be enough for the WA legislature to see the actual criminal be brought to justice, they will want more laws that do nothing but make life more difficult for everyone. Must do it for the children, ya know!

[dhex]

dudes, i can't even smoke in a fuckin' bar. fuckin' bloomberg.

[JSM]

dhex,
At this time, you still can in most parts of Washington. But, give it some time and the California-Bloomberg Antismoking virus will over take all of Washington. Maybe, just maybe, we can find a cure in time!

[Mo]

JSM, don't look to NY, MA or CA (states that I've lived in), it doesn't get much worse than that grab bag of states.

dhex, in Brookline, MA you can't smoke on the sidewalks or bars.

[db]

Try New Hampshire, a la the Free State Project.

[JDM]

Just to play devil's advocate here, why isn't the fact that you're a homeless vagrant grounds for suspicion? We aren't talking any intrinsic quality here, like race, we're talking about behavior.

[Jennifer]

JDM-
In most cases, homelessness is not about "behavior" so much as it is about finances, or rather the lack thereof.

[JDM]

Finances are a result of behavior.

I'm not saying most homeless people are going to be criminals, or even many, but if a tent camp of vagrants were put up in my neighborhood, and I had kids, I wouldn't necessarily mind the police checking up on who was in it. The camp had evicted one sex offender within about a week of opening.

[thoreau]

Jennifer-

Wrong. I volunteer at a homeless shelter for parents and children. Sure, I've met some hard-working parents who discipline their kids and just got the bad fortune of being laid off right after paying a bunch of medical bills, so there's no money for rent. Those families are usually there for short stays.

But there's an amazing number of people who have one excuse after another, who don't discipline their kids, who have a history of substance abuse, etc. These are our problem cases.

I will grant you this much: There are plenty of people with more money who are just as irresponsible and just as prone to substance abuse. Those people don't wind up homeless. (*cough, George Bush Jr., cough*)

So I'll grant that money matters, but I've rarely met a chronically homeless person who didn't have other issues as well. At least not in the US. It's probably different in the developing world, but chronically homeless people in the US almost always have problems that go deeper than a lack of money.

[thoreau]

Then again, I also disagree with JDM. Even chronically homeless people are fairly unlikely to steal or engage in violence. Some of them are incredibly mellow (in fact, a little too mellow, hence they have no drive).

Since I don't know the statistics off the top of my head, I suppose it's possible (likely?) that the chronically homeless are more likely than others to engage in theft or violence, but in the US we're supposed to have a higher standard than "Well, he's in the right category" when the police want to hassle somebody.

[JDM]

'in the US we're supposed to have a higher standard than "Well, he's in the right category"'

There are categories, and then there are categories. For example: blacks, muslims, former sex offenders, current sex offenders, serial criminals, the mentally ill, and vagrants. Some of these categories could reasonably be subjected to scrutiny in the name of public safety, and some could not.

An interesting timeline from the Seattle PI:

May 17: Tent City 4 is established on St. Brendan Catholic Church property, and the city of Bothell goes to court with a lawsuit of its own, saying the camp needs city permits

May 20: A 22-year-old Tent City 4 resident is arrested on a domestic-violence warrant from Auburn.

May 21: A Tent City 4 resident is kicked out of the camp after organizers discover that he is registered as a sex offender.

May 27: A 26-year-old man is arrested outside the camp on a Snohomish County disorderly conduct warrant, and a 22-year-old man asks police to check and see if there are any warrants outstanding on him. Police do, and find that he is wanted in Colorado on a criminal trespass charge.

May 28: At a parking lot of a downtown auto parts store, police intervene in fight between two Tent City 4 residents. No arrests are made.

June 4: A man and a woman barred from Tent City 4 set up camp in woods nearby and are asked by police to leave.

Sunday: Police break up an argument between a man, 42, and a woman, 37. Neither is arrested, but the same day camp organizers alert police to a woman, 32, with a drug pipe in her tent, and officers arrest her.

So far, not so good, especially if it's literally in your back yard.

[Gadfly]

If they have "issues" (read health issue) then deal with the issue. Locking them up is a road straight to public assistance for a long time.

We are getting closer and closer to the formerly de-bunked idea that if you can't make it in a market economy, something is wrong with you, usually in a moral sense but often in a criminal sense. The result is a reduction in the welfare roles and a huge, disproportianate increase in the prison population.

Pay me now or pay me later, but you will surely pay.

[Jennifer]

Thoreau-
You may remember from a previous post/discussion that I agree with you to an extent: surely, there are a lot of poor people who are poor because they have made a lot of incredibly stupid choices in their life; a person who's poor because she feels she has an inalienable right to never do a thing she doesn't feel like doing at the moment; a guy who can't hold a job because he keeps starting fist-fights with people. To hell with them.

But at the same time, it's true that jobs are hard to come by these days, and it's even harder to find a job that will actually pay enough to live on. I don't have the exact statistics here but there are homeless people who have full-time jobs; they just aren't paid enough to get an apartment.

I know, I've heard all the libertarian arguments about why minimum wage is bad and people as a whole would actually be better off if employers could pay a buck an hour to those desperate enough to work for such a pittance, but I don't buy it.

I'd have no problem if the cops in the story decided to patrol the tent city area more frequently than the quiet suburban neighborhoods, but I'm glad the ID-check thing got tossed.

[Richard Kimball]

Thank God for that judge, at least

[abc]

"jobs are hard to come by these days, and it's even harder to find a job that will actually pay enough to live on"

What country are you living in?

[joe]

JDM's argument seems to be based on probabilities - homeless people have a greater probability of committing crimes than other people. Which is to say, if you have a population of 100 homeless people, there will be a larger number of them that commit crimes than if you have a populatin of 100 software engineers.

Similarly, gun owners have a greater probability of shooting people than those of us without guns. If you have 100 gun owners, and 100 non-gun owners, there will be more people who are likely to commit a gun crime among the first group than the second. And, I'd like to point out, gun ownership is a behavior.

You can't have the police treating people differently because of the group they belong to, even if members of that group are more likely to commit a crime.

[gun nut]

"If you have 100 gun owners, and 100 non-gun owners, there will be more people who are likely to commit a gun crime among the first group than the second."

Especially if owning a gun is illegal.

[joe]

...which brings us full circle to the crime of "vagrancy."

Neat.

[JDM]

I'm sure the city of Bothell knows my name, since I live here. If they ran me through an FBI database when they found out I was moving in, I don't care. Right to privacy arguments don't generally sway me at all, when it means giving your name one time. Constant intrusion into the camp by the city to search and inspect tents and hassle people would be a different matter.

Also, handgun owners are subjected to background checks nowadays. As are people who apply for concealed carry permits.

Lastly, this entire thing is a political stunt, designed to throw homeless people into the face of suburbanites. The people in the camp are likely to be hand picked by the organization who set it up not to cause problems. In a more representative camp, things would likely be worse, and it would be an even better idea to know who was in the camp.