Poverty

Anti-Homeless Ordinances

Sarah is homeless. Like many homeless women she is vulnerable and alone. She is 53 years old and has a number of disabling physical and mental health conditions that make employment impossible.

In 2017 she was arrested in Sedona, Arizona because she was camping on Forest Service land within City boundaries in violation of a Sedona City anti-sleeping ordinance and a corresponding Forest closure. She was charged in Federal court for camping in a closed area and in City Court for violating Sedona City Ordinance 9.10.010.

C. It shall be unlawful for any person to sleep in or upon any public building, alley, sidewalk, public way, or any federal, state, county or municipal designated trail head, or any property owned, operated or managed by any local, state or federal agency or department or any Indian tribe, or any other public place or facility within the corporate limits of the city.

As part of her sentence she was literally banished even from entry into three National Forest Districts, all surrounding Sedona.

"You shall be banned from the Coconino, Prescott, and Kaibab National Forests except for the travel through said area(s) on federal, state or local roadways." Hon. Bernardo Velasco, United States Magistrate

Other than being homeless and camped within the City limits on Forest Service lands, Sarah had committed no crime.

In 2018, the 9th Circuit Federal Court of Appeals announced in a case called Martin v. City of Boise that convicting homeless people for sleeping on public lands violates the United States Constitutional prohibition against "cruel and unusual punishment" unless there are beds available within the City for the homeless individual.

Sedona has no shelters, beds or sheltering programs for homeless people. It is a very wealthy City, but no funds are provided to assist people in need. Instead, persons arrested for violating the anti-camping ordinance are taken by police to a town that is 30 miles away and dropped off. That town has very limited shelter opportunities too but at least it does not have an anti-camping ordinance.

Despite the 9th Circuit decision that anti-camping ordinances like Sedona's are unconstitutional, and despite requests by homeless advocates that the City repeal the Ordinance the Council has refused to do so. Sarah and others like her, are at constant risk of arrest and incarceration because they are homeless. In fact in January of 2021 she was rousted from another campsite, this time on City owned land, and her tent was confiscated by police, in clear violation of the 8th Amendment of the United States Constitution.

Southwest Center for Equal Justice is taking up Sarah's case and pursuing legal action against the City to immediately halt the citation, conviction and incarceration of homeless persons in Sedona. This is only one of many cases that we are pursuing on behalf of indigent, oppressed and powerless individuals being steamrolled by laws, law enforcement, prosecutors and the courts throughout Arizona.

The Social Pressure for the Gentrification of Communities is Engineered through Broken Windows or Quality of Life Policing

The middle class runs the criminal justice system. Legislators, council members, county supervisors advance the social norms of their own classism. Laws are passed and enforced to push out the "undesireables"; people who are poor and who live their lives in a manner offensive to the sensibilities of middle class, particularly the white middle class.

Broken Windows

In March 1982, George Kelling and James Wilson published an article called "Broken Windows: The police and neighborhood safety" in the Atlantic magazine. The article expressed the disproven opinion of the authors that serious crime rates can be reduced by focusing police enforcement on misdemeanor, public order offenses in low income neighborhoods that appear to be in disrepair.

That modest opinion piece became the foundation of the entire policing philosophy for the past 30 plus years, and that policing philosophy is at the heart of the current problems in the criminal justice system, including mass incarceration, racially biased enforcement, and particularly the criminalization of poverty.

Because the "Broken Windows" philosophy of policing has lost its lustre because of the association in New York City between that philosophy and the over the top "stop and frisk" policies of the NYC police department that resulted in the wholesale criminalization of black and brown communities, police departments across the nation have rebranded the "Broken Windows" theory as "Quality of Life" policing.

But the theory remains the same. Get rid of people whose mere existence offends the middle class.

Quality of Life Policing

Quality of life policing is the modern, and politically correct term, for anti-vagrancy laws. Anti-vagrancy laws have existed in one form or another for decades.

CRIMINALIZATION OF POVERTY