The Durham Police have endured considerable criticism in recent months for a series of high-profile shootings and revelations about the department’s controversial stop-and-search practices, which statistics show amount to a pattern and practice of racial profiling against black motorists. Now the department’s treatment of the city’s most vulnerable citizens—its homeless population—is also drawing fire, in light of officers’ decision to arrest and cite more than a dozen homeless persons for allegedly running afoul of the city’s recently-adopted anti-panhandling ordinance.
The constitutionally suspect ordinance, adopted by the city council in December 2012, has empowered police to arrest and fine homeless citizens who fail to navigate the labyrinthine series of regulations about where one can stand with a sign asking for help. Some DPD officers have aggressively made use of their new authority, using it to clear downtown streets of the homeless at the behest of downtown business owners. The arrested population, many of them disabled, some confined to wheelchairs, and almost all lacking financial means, have sat in jail for days, and in some cases, even weeks, as a result of little more than their own poverty. The city council, which once looked poised to repeal the ordinance in light of advocacy from local religious leaders and attorney Scott Holmes, has shamefully sat by and allowed these arrests to continue unabated.
The mean-spiritedness of these charges cannot be overstated. Rather than taking steps to get them off the streets, police have on multiple occasions cited children as young as 15 for begging-related offenses. They have cited and arrested wheelchair bound homeless people for obstructing traffic. They have left people in jail for weeks on end because of their inability to pay the smallest of fines. And they have reacted aggressively and angrily towards citizens who have tried to document these abuses. Last month, officers threatened SCSJ attorney Ian A. Mance with an illegal arrest when he stopped to film them after observing an officer getting physically aggressive with a man he approached for having an open container. It was not until Mance produced his bar license that the officers dropped their threat of arrest.
On December 18, Mance appeared in Community Life Court before Judge Marcia Morey on behalf of 14 individuals charged under the ordinance in recent months. The defendants faced a total of 46 charges, the vast majority of them related to violation of the panhandling ordinance. Although none of these individuals should have been charged in the first place, the outcome was as good as could be hoped for. Judge Morey, a longtime voice of reason in the local debate over these issues, ultimately accepted motions to dismiss 44 of the charges against 13 defendants, after SCSJ presented evidence that each individual had made progress in securing services related to housing, substance abuse, and/or mental health issues since their last encounter with the police. We are indebted to the work of attorney Holmes, Open Table Ministry, and Housing for New Hope for their assistance in this regard, as this outcome could not have been achieved without them. The dismissals were also made possible by the cooperation we received from the Durham District Attorney’s office, which agreed that aggressively prosecuting and fining people down on their luck and doing no harm to the community was not in anyone’s interest.
The happy outcome, however, does not absolve the Durham City Council and the Durham Police of their moral responsibility for creating this situation in the first place. Since the dismissals, some have argued that the ordinance is working as planned by channeling people in need towards available services. We reject this analysis. Using city police and city resources to punish poor people for asking for help is not only a violation of their First Amendment rights; it is an assault on their dignity as human beings. In many cases, the city’s purported intervention only interrupted the progress that people were making on their own initiative. Because of the callousness of some individual officers and of city government in general, some of our clients were forced to spend time away from terminally ill loved ones, to miss out on otherwise available job prospects, and to experience other significant interruptions to their daily lives.
Like drug addiction, poverty is not a problem we can arrest our way out of, and it is an inappropriate use of city resources to deploy police officers to arrest people for doing nothing more than asking for help. City leaders will no doubt respond with allusions to pedestrian and traffic safety. What else can they say? Durham residents should not be fooled; these arguments are typically little more than smokescreens—ones commonly rolled out by those unwilling to own up to the real reasons they chose to vote for regressive and mean-spirited policies. In the end, as is almost always the case, this is about business interests and keeping Durham’s poor out of sight and out of mind. As a city, we are better than that.
