Charles E. is a 58-year-old man. In March 2012, two Detroit police officers stopped him and his brother without rationale, yelling at them to “shut up” when they asked why were they stopped. The officers drove the two brothers from Lafayette Street in downtown Detroit to Buchanan Street in the southwest part of the city, where the police abandoned them on the side of the street in the middle of the night. The neighborhood was notorious for its crime and drug activity. The two brothers had to walk back downtown, despite the fact that Charles has blood clots in his legs.
Andrew Sheehan is a 37-year-old man. Due to struggles with substance abuse, he has been homeless off and on until he completed a drug rehabilitation program in 2013 and started working. In December 2011, Sheenan — while sleeping over a manhole to keep warm — was awakened by a police officer, handcuffed and escorted five miles away where he was abandoned. He was “taken for a ride” three more times in the following year.
These examples and others form the factual background for a complaint the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Michigan filed Thursday with the U.S. Attorneys with the Eastern District of Michigan. According to the complaint,
“[Over] the past 15 months, we have documented numerous cases of Detroit police officers stopping, handcuffing and forcibly removing homeless and other poor individuals in Greektown; disposing of their personal belongings; and taking them ‘for a ride’ to remote parts of Detroit and the surrounding cities, where these individuals are then dropped at the side of the road, often late at night, in hazardous weather, and with no safe way to return downtown.”
Urban beautification & inhumanity
Detroit finds itself in an unique situation: It’s not just broke, but nearly completely destitute and bankrupt. Years of poor corporate management and a refusal to scale back city services as the city population shrank led to a situation where the city had unused services without the capital to pay for them. Detroit has a $327 million budget deficit as of 2013, and long-term liabilities in excess of $14 billion.
On top of this, the remaining population is unprepared to handle the task of making Detroit economically viable. According to a 2011 Detroit Regional Workforce Fund report, “Addressing Detroit’s Basic Skills Crisis,” 47 percent of all adult Detroit residents are functionally illiterate, which means that they do not have the computational, reading, writing and speaking skills needed for most everyday life and work situations. Of this 47 percent, about half have a high school diploma or a General Education Development Certificate of High School Equivalency (GED). Detroit’s social services do not have the capacity or resources needed to significantly remedy this.
In response to this, Gov. Rick Snyder (R-Mich.) appointed Kevyn Orr as emergency financial manager (EFM) for Detroit, despite the fact that the state law that authorized emergency financial management was repealed by public referendum in the 2012 elections. The EFM has near-ultimate control over decision-making for Detroit’s city government, rendering the elected government as empty figureheads.
In light of this crisis, Detroit has seen a push to protect any moneymaking ventures that the city has. Greektown is a historic district located downtown between the Renaissance Center, Comerica Park and Ford Field. The Greektown Casino Hotel, the Athenium Suite Hotel, St. Mary Roman Catholic Church (one of the nation’s most-beloved parishes) and the Second Baptist Church (once a major hub of the Underground Railroad and a primary church in the African-American community) are all located here.
In terms of wealth and tax value, Greektown tops the list of Detroit neighborhoods. As such, the police has felt justified in removing vagrants from Greektown streets, in an effort not to scare off tourists and shoppers.
Civil liberties advocates, however, see this as monstrous. “DPD’s practice of essentially kidnapping homeless people and abandoning them miles away from the neighborhoods they know, with no means for a safe return, is inhumane, callous and illegal,” said Sarah Mehta, staff attorney with the ACLU in Michigan. “The city’s desire to hide painful reminders of our economic struggles cannot justify discriminating against the poor, banishing them from their city and endangering their lives. A person who has lost his home has not lost his right to be treated with dignity.”
Detroit has no municipal vagrancy laws. Section V of the 2003 Consent Decree that Detroit entered with the U.S. Department of Justice prohibits arrests for less than probable cause, with each arrest required to be reviewed within 12 hours. Despite the fact that these arrests of homeless people are not processed (the officers arrest and release the suspect without bringing him to the precinct), they are still arrests in accordance to Section V, according to the ACLU. This assumption is supported by United States v. Canales (1978, 6th Cir.), which states that “[a] clear deprivation of liberty caused by law enforcement officers without formal words is nonetheless an arrest.”
In addition, Section V dictates that any investigatory frisks are only authorized when the police officer has “reasonable suspicion to fear for his or her safety” and the frisk is “narrowly tailored to those specific reasons.” As some of these homeless men were frisked while they were asleep, and as the officers checked whether the men had money to return to Greektown, both the arrests and the searches were unlawful, says the ACLU.
Chester L. Logan, chief of the Detroit Police Department, indicated to Mint Press that he is unfamiliar with the complaint. Chief Logan stated:
“We will look into these allegations. At the present time, the Detroit Police Department has not received a copy of the complaint that has been filed. Therefore it would be inappropriate to provide further comment without reviewing the specific allegations.”
Homelessness in America
Detroit is far from being alone in its attempt to hide its homeless problem.
“Adoption of laws and policies that punish homeless people rather than addressing the problems that cause homelessness is an ineffective approach,” argues Kristen Brown in a 1999 blog entry for the National Housing Institute. “Penalizing people for engaging in innocent behavior — such as sleeping in public, sitting on the sidewalk, or begging — will not reduce the occurrence of these activities or keep homeless people out of public spaces when they have no alternative place to sleep or sit or no other means of subsistence. With insufficient resources for shelter and services for homeless people, imposing punishment for unavoidable activities is not only futile, it is inhumane.”
Between May 1995 and May 1996, the Atlanta Police Department arrested more than 9,000 homeless individuals in its preparations for the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics. Prior to this, trespassing arrests for the homeless only happened in preparation of major events — such as the Billy Graham crusades, the 1994 Super Bowl or the 1995 World Series.
In 2012, Indianapolis police tried to force the homeless out of the downtown area ahead of the Super Bowl. Due to the bad publicity, Indianapolis authorities were forced to soften their approach. “We’re actually going out well in advance of the Super Bowl, just making contact with them, talking to them and trying to convince them to go to a proper facility, shelter or hospital,” Deputy Chief Michael Bates of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department said at the time.
For the 2008 Democratic National Convention, Denver gathered up the downtown homeless — all 4,000 of them — and hid them, offering to pay for them to go and see a movie at a local theater, to visit the Denver Zoo or the Denver Museum of Nature and Science or to participate in a hosted game of bingo. According to officials, this was done to shield the homeless from the “chaos of the convention.”
In 2007, Boston criminalized loitering in the Boston Commons overnight, in response to a series of violent crimes. In 2012, Philadelphia was blocked by a federal district judge from banning the serving of food to the homeless outside. Almost every major city have laws that “close” public parks and spaces overnight, criminalizing those that are found sleeping or camping on the property at night.
In 2006, the Ninth Circuit’s Court of Appeals ruled that “making it a crime to be homeless by charging them with a crime is in violation of the 8th and 14th Amendments.” The judgement read:
“The City could not expressly criminalize the status of homelessness by making it a crime to be homeless without violating the Eighth Amendment, nor can it criminalize acts that are an integral aspect of that status. Because there is substantial and undisputed evidence that the number of homeless persons in Los Angeles far exceeds the number of available shelter beds at all times, including on the nights of their arrest or citation, Los Angeles has encroached upon Appellants’ Eighth Amendment protections by criminalizing the unavoidable act of sitting, lying or sleeping at night while being involuntarily homeless.”
The decision was set aside after the city of Los Angeles agreed to settle with the plaintiffs.
While there have been numerous decisions in regard to forced removal of the homeless, there has yet to be a national precedent set in place about the issue, as different courts have issued contrasting opinions. For the 700,000 homeless Americans currently on the streets, survival and one’s right to secure oneself is an uncertain proposition dependent on the charity of others.
“It is an interesting problem that comes up time and again,” Robert Hess, former commissioner of New York City’s Department of Homeless Services and chief executive of Housing Solutions USA, said to Mint Press about the criminalization of the homeless. “There is one example after another of communities taking some sort of legal action. It doesn’t work. They will find themselves in court with the ACLU. The local community law will be struck down.“
“Communities need to address this as a social service issue and problem of people living on the street and in parks,” Hess continued. “It’s preferable to have a social service intervention strategy as opposed to a legal strategy. Also, we need to remember our neighbors are living in parks not by choice but necessity. We should provide a hand up — shelter and social service support — not criminalization and a jail cell.”