Except the reason for such laws is not cruelty, but to maintain public spaces (like parks) for the enjoyment of the public.
A Charlotte, North Carolina, city council member's outrageous suggestion last week that people who share food with the homeless should face criminal charges has touched a nerve in the community.
"People [are] still bringing food and money and resources directly to the folks that are out there right now," said Charlotte City Council Member Tariq Bokhari, in remarks reported by local station WBVT. "They're only making themselves feel good, they're hurting the ultimate folks, perhaps we explore making that a misdemeanor."
Bokhari says he wants residents instead to donate to charities that provide services, rather than directly to homeless people. But some of the people who work with such charities appear dumbfounded.
"In what world when we as a society are at a place where we would criminalize the act of humanity, care, and consideration and compassion for others in any way, shape, or form—there's a huge problem," responded Kenya Joseph, of the nonprofit Hearts for the Invisible Charlotte Coalition.
Except no one has been arrested for what the Council Member said, because a suggestion is not a criminal law. For that, you need California:
In August 2018, police handcuffed Don Lemly, age 72, at Doheny State Beach as he tried to share food with homeless people gathered there. According to Lemly and his wife, the arrest involved excessive force. They allege park ranger Nicholas Milward "knocked a soda away from Don Lemly that he told jurors he feared could be used as a weapon, grabbed him and walked him over to a curb, cursed at him to sit down, handcuffed him and cited him for failing to comply with a police officer's orders." When Lemly cited an earlier ACLU settlement that protects the rights of people like him to share food with the homeless, Milward allegedly called the ACLU "a freaking joke."
Yup; seems pretty clear who's on the side of the angels here:
"We believe that people, no matter what their circumstances, deserve to have decent food," Lemly, who volunteers with an interfaith coalition, told jurors. "If people who are in comfortable circumstances like I am don't stand up for what's right and call out somebody who's a bully in law enforcement, then our society is in big trouble."
Yup; jurors. Mr. Lemly was tried by a jury of his peers, and convicted. Godless rat bastards, right? But why did they rule against him? For that, you have to go to the newspaper account:
Milward [the park ranger who stopped Mr. Lemly's acts; he was in a state park] acknowledged in testimony that he’d made the comment about not serving when the Lemlys arrived, but he said he didn’t decide to stop the meals until later, after he’d dealt with an unruly man who was there for the food. Milward said he was concerned the man would return and cause more trouble.
“I felt it was best to take away what was attracting him,” which was the food, said Milward, a state park ranger for 13 years and a lifeguard for seven. “I didn’t want him to come back and start another confrontation.”
When the Lemlys told Milward they had a right to feed the homeless people there because of a settlement with the American Civil Liberties Union, Milward replied, “The ACLU’s a freaking joke.”
He then knocked a soda away from Don Lemly that he told jurors he feared could be used as a weapon, grabbed him and walked him over to a curb, cursed at him to sit down, handcuffed him and cited him for failing to comply with a police officer’s orders.
A bystander captured the encounter on his cellphone, and photographs show bruises and bloody cuts on Lemly’s wrists from the handcuffs. Jurors saw everything several times during trial, then deliberated about three hours before siding with Milward.
The verdict ends a legal crusade that Don Lemly described in testimony as a righteous cause. The 72-year-old retiree told jurors: “If people who are in comfortable circumstances like I am don’t stand up for what’s right and call out somebody who’s a bully in law enforcement, then our society is in big trouble.
“I’m fortunate enough that I have the time and availability to be able to pursue this.”
The jury’s decision also follows key defense testimony from Milward and other law enforcement officers about ongoing problems with the meals and the people they bring to the beach. A sheriff’s investigator who spent a month watching those who arrived for the meals compiled a report for the city of Dana Point that concluded 70% of the roughly 600 people served had criminal records.
“The majority of the people that attend … are criminals. Drugs. Domestic violence. Stabbings. Fights,” Milward testified. “I knew a lot of them by name and date of birth.”
He added: “I feel that it didn’t do the state beach well to have that event daily.”
I assume Ranger Milward knows their names and dates of birth from their arrest records.
So, are the jurors Godless rat bastards? Or are they persuaded that feeding people brings people to the park they pay the rangers to keep away from them so they can safely enjoy the park? And is this attitude selfish and wrong? Or is Mr. Lemly's attitude selfish and wrong?
I submit the answer is not an easy one.
Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out almost 100 years ago now that what is moral for me, an individual, is not something I can impose on you; either as an individual, or as a society. I can behave morally, like Dr. King, by opposing unjust laws and accepting the punishment of the law in order to point out the unjustness of the law. I think that's what Mr. Lemly is trying to do; I'm just not sure he hasn't gotten hold of the wrong end of the stick.
Or maybe he hasn't; but his motives need to be examined just as surely as the "bullies" he calls out (Mr. Milward?). The jury didn't think the law was wrong, nor its enforcement. Does that indict the jury? Or does it point up the fact laws are written to provide order in society? Disorder is what the ranger saw, and he saw it as his job to restore order, for the sake of all the people in the park who were not Mr. Lemly, or of his moral persuasion. Are these things right, or wrong? More pointedly, are they cut and dried? Are they black and white?
Just because people have criminal records doesn't make them bad people; but it doesn't mean they are good people who are misunderstood, either. We can't really draw a simple, us v. them, conclusion from these facts. Because the problem is not who comes to the park to hand out food, and who comes to receive it. The problem is the problem of homelessness and hunger is not solved by these actions. I remember a few years ago when business owners complained about homeless people gathering near their shops. That was the impetus for ordinances banning handing out food on the sidewalk. Yes, it seems cruel; but we're foisting the problems of homelessness on business owners, aren't we? We're not solving it; we're barely putting a band-aid on it. And the actions of feeding people with handouts like this just prolongs the problem and makes somebody lose the pleasure of the state park, or even their business, because drawing homeless people to those places drives other people away.
And who has the morally superior authority to make that decision for society? Do we ignore creating one problem because our moral superiority says we must solve this problem? Who declared us morally superior to anyone, and made us arbiters of who pays for problems society resolutely refuses to address? The homeless clearly do; do we alleviate that problem by creating another one? Or do we just create two problems out of one?
My sympathies are with the homeless; with the people I see standing under thunderously loud overpasses near me, in heat and cold, begging for a few dollars. Helping them harms no one, so far as I can tell. But would it harm a business if such people gathered in its parking lot, looking for handouts? Probably. Do we alleviate their homelessness by driving that business, well, out of business?
If you remember "Dennis More" from Monty Python days, you remember it involved several skits in the half-hour show where Dennis rides back and forth playing an ersatz Robin Hood, robbing from the poor to give to the rich. He succeeds wildly; the poor are flooded with his largesse (lupins; a flower), the rich are cold and lupine-less. When he realizes his system of simply taking from one group to give to the other hasn't really solved anything, he realizes: "This redistribution of wealth is trickier than I thought!" Trust me, in context and as delivered by John Cleese, the line is hilarious. But if we're handing food to people in defiance of local laws, we are just making ourselves feel better about ourselves. We're not solving the problem of homelessness; we're just assuaging our guilt that it is a problem in our society.
That's not really a morally superior position. And complaining about the laws that punish such "charity" is not really getting at the problem, either.
This business of seeing God and doing something solely for the sake of the God we see; hungry, naked, in prison; is trickier than we thought.
