Downward Spiral: Homelessness and Its Criminalization

A city council recently developed a policy that homeless residents "are no longer welcome in the City." City memoranda describe a plan "continually [to] remov[e] [homeless people] from the places that they are frequenting in the City.". In one phase of what a court later described as the city's "war on the homeless," police conducted a "harassment sweep" in which homeless people "were handcuffed, transported to an athletic field for booking, chained to benches, marked with numbers, and held for as long as six hours before being released to another location, some for such crimes as dropping a match, a leaf, or a piece of paper or jaywalking."