Homelessness in America by Stephen Eide

Author:Stephen Eide
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2022-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

CLIMATE AND CROWDS

Police are not the only means used by cities to keep homelessness-related disorder in check. Even more important are climate and crowds. Cities’ levels of unsheltered homelessness are related to the warmth of local temperatures in January. New York has a high rate of homelessness, but less than 10 percent of its homeless population lives in the streets. New York is temperate three season of the year. However, tent cities don’t mushroom all throughout Manhattan between April and October. New York City government has long discouraged encampments, even under the recent era of progressive leadership. But in some ways that policy is enabled by the climate, which keeps unsheltered homelessness at low rates. Encampments can therefore be dismantled without the discouraging whack-a-mole problem places like Seattle and San Francisco face. Cold winters help keep street disorder in check without authorities having to rely on expensive and forceful public safety methods.

Crowds curb disorder, too, through the imposition of “internalized norms of street etiquette.”31 Dense city neighborhoods provide “eyes on the street,” which, as Jane Jacobs explained, keep people safe through local self-government. Jacobs was active before the modern homelessness crisis but her thinking inspired many people who have been involved in dealing with that crisis such as policing expert George Kelling and Dan Biederman, the influential creator of business improvement districts in New York.

Much disorder can be addressed at the community level, either by cops or local actors, simply through people exercising their judgment based on knowledge of community conditions and standards. Police are less likely to shoot dead a mentally ill man behaving erratically if his neighbors don’t call 911 on him in the first place, because they’ve known him since he was a child and understand that he’s harmless. Officers that do respond to any call placed might themselves know him to be harmless if they have deep familiarity with his neighborhood. Two men are drinking in public. One remains sitting on a stoop and his bottle is covered with a paper bag. The other is up and about, making no attempt to conceal his vodka bottle. These are not the same crime. From the perspective of an informed beat officer, the brown bag user is observing a community norm whereas the other man is not. Unsheltered homeless people are themselves sometimes responsive to community norms, such as by avoiding public spaces in the daytime that they occupy at night.32

Localistic, community-based solutions to disorder require deference to local actors’ discretion about when to enforce the law and when to not. Many civil rights lawyers doubt that cops, in particular, can be trusted to use discretion appropriately. Letting some people but not others bend the rules sounds to them like a recipe for discrimination. Who gets to decide how many panhandlers are too many? Justice requires universal rules. Civil rights lawyers’ abstract philosophies have been devastating for public order, as explained by James Q. Wilson, one of the architects of broken windows policing:

Courts are institutions whose special competence lies in the discernment and application of rights.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.