Trial Opens in Case Testing Rights of Homeless
Is it a crime to be homeless?
That’s the question before a federal court here in a trial that began Monday. Attorneys for thousands of homeless people have sued the city of Miami, asserting that when faced with no alternative, people have a constitutional right to live in public parks and on city streets.
The class-action suit, brought in 1988 by the American Civil Liberties Union, is one of the first to challenge a city’s power to enforce local laws that effectively ban public “sleeping, eating, sitting--all the things that you and I do in our homes and don’t think twice about because it’s not criminal,” said Benjamin Waxman, an ACLU attorney.
U.S. District Judge C. Clyde Atkins, in hearing the non-jury trial, is being asked by the plaintiffs to bar the city from enforcing laws against public living. The ACLU also wants shelter for the homeless and the awarding of unspecified compensatory damages, which would be shared among some 5,000 members of the class.
In an opening statement, ACLU attorney Valerie Jonas charged that for years Miami police violated the constitutional rights of the homeless by arresting them for sleeping in public, or even, when found lying on a flattened cardboard box, for littering. Between the years 1986 and 1990, Jonas said, routing the homeless from parks and streets became a “preoccupation” of city officials who engaged in “a long-term, multi-front campaign of pest control” that led to more than 3,500 arrests.
While homelessness is considered a serious problem in almost every American city, Jonas, during a noontime recess, said that Miami was “unique in the brutality demonstrated in trying to render the homeless invisible.”
Beginning with a systematic sweep of the streets before the 1988 Orange Bowl game, the homeless “were arrested because they were not consistent with the image we had of ourselves,” said Jonas.
Miami’s homeless population is estimated to be about 6,000. Two downtown shelters--run by religious organizations--offer beds for about 200.
Leon Firtel, Miami assistant city attorney, told the judge: “The city enforced the laws based on conduct, not homelessness.” He suggested the remedy to the problem of homelessness would not be found in federal court, but with lawmakers. And he said police no longer enforce the ordinance that bans sleeping in public.
Indeed, Bicentennial Park, less than 10 blocks from the federal courthouse, has in recent months become a permanent encampment for the homeless. There, on 33 acres of prime downtown real estate that front Biscayne Bay, up to 200 people live under sheets of plastic, under the overhang of closed refreshment stands or under the sub-tropical sun and stars.
