EDITORIAL: Feeding the homeless should not be a crime

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On Monday, 90-year-old Arnold Abbott and two ministers in Fort Lauderdale, Florida were arrested for feeding the homeless. For each citation, violators of the law can receive 60 days in jail and a $500 fine. After a Wednesday night protest in which Abbott continued to feed the homeless, he now has two citations. Yesterday in an Associated Press article, Abbott was quoted saying, “One of the police officers said, ‘Drop that plate right now,’ as if I were carrying a weapon.”

Abbott isn’t alone on the list of people charged for feeding the homeless, and Fort Lauderdale isn’t the only city to impose such an ordinance. In March, Rick Wood, a Birmingham, Alabama pastor was ordered by police to stop handing out hot dogs and bottled water to the homeless.

Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, California, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio,  Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Washington have all fined, removed, relocated or threatened prison time for feeding the homeless in 2013-2014 according to the National Coalition for the Homeless.

This isn’t a new occurrence either. In 2007, Jeremy Rosen, policy director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty filed a lawsuit against the city of Dallas and won after contesting a city ordinance that restricted the locations that people could hand out or share food. The American Civil Liberties Union sued the cities of Las Vegas and Orlando, Florida in 2006, and last week, Albuquerque, New Mexico settled a suit over a 2010 case where people were arrested and criminally cited for feeding the homeless.

According to an April Fox News article titled “Cities, homeless advocates wage battle over laws against feeding the hungry,” city officials claim that these policies are to protect the homeless from tainted or otherwise unsafe food. While this may be well intentioned, the same goals could be achieved by requiring do-gooders to obtain a permit that is granted only after a food safety course is completed.

However, we are doubtful that this is the reason the cities have created such laws and ordinances. We find it more likely that policy makers wished to hide the homelessness in their cities. In fact, Sunday’s Sun Sentinel article about Abbott’s citation states the ordinance that bans feeding the homeless “one of several recent efforts by officials to crack down on the city's burgeoning downtown homeless population.”

We have to ask: When did being homeless become a crime, and when did homeless people start needing to be “cracked down” on? The causes of homelessness are what need to be cracked down on, not the people themselves.

While cities have valid reasons for desiring a lower homeless population, such as reduced incidents of homeless related hate crimes, the method should not be by starving them out or removing them from city parks or limits. Pushing homeless people out of an area doesn’t solve the problem of homelessness. It makes the situation more hopeless. Instead, there should be aid programs targeted at the homeless populations that are unable to go to shelters for whatever reason. Programs should focus on helping the homeless once again become self-sufficient.

We are ashamed that so many states, including our own, have passed laws prohibiting feeding the homeless. Helping another human being should never be a crime.