PLATFORM : Making Homelessness a Criminal State
Most homeless people I know haven’t the energy to commit a crime. Their prime offense, it seems, is just being there.
Their sheltered neighbors are convinced that homelessness itself is a crime, or ought to be. Responsive city councils in Fullerton, Orange and Santa Ana have invented ordinances that outlaw a segment of population. Under anti-camping statutes, personal belongings may not be left on public property. Under these rules, a homeless person becomes a criminal when she or he gets up in the morning.
The new Santa Ana ordinance outlaws 350 people who have used Civic Center as their bedroom for the last five years. The Civic Center homeless, however, have nowhere to go and are not going to disappear. If they drag themselves into the more expensive neighborhoods the City Council is going to learn what pressure really is.
There is no sanctuary northward. Orange has its own anti-camping law, and was already hostile to the homeless. Garden Grove stands ready to invent its own crime that the homeless can’t avoid committing, and other mid-county cities seem to have adopted a wait-and-see attitude.
Leave it to Huntington Beach to lead the way toward a fresh, enlightened attitude. It has passed an ordinance making legal possession of a pot-bellied pig named Lilly, a humanitarian move that makes it the 17th city in the county to legalize pot-bellied pigs. This would make room in Huntington Beach for 186,000 pigs of the pygmy strain, the notion apparently being that they are cute when they are babies. Of course, so are homeless people.
