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This whole thing is pretty depressing (and would make me pretty angry if I lived in the USA). But I was even a bit shocked in the first paragraph: >He woke up

This whole thing is pretty depressing (and would make me pretty angry if I lived in the USA). But I was even a bit shocked in the first paragraph: >He woke up to a police officer arresting him for violating the city’s ban on lying down in public places. Is that legitimately something that can happen? If so, find it mind boggling that you could be arrested in America for falling asleep on the pavement/sidewalk!?

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Probably. People don't like to see the homeless around their nice little neighborhoods so they come up with all sorts of weird laws to harass them with.
- sdunwoody 5y ago
  I find it really nasty. I visited Los Angeles a couple of years back, one of the first places we went was a McDonalds. Some guy was dozing sat at a table (with a coffee in front of him). A cop came up to him and told him he'd be reprimanded if he caught him napping like that again. In all my life living in the UK I've honestly never witnessed something like that. It may seem minor, but seeing an armed cop come up to someone and reprimand them for dozing off? I have no idea why a waiter couldn't have dealt with that. It's not like the McDonalds was even full or anything. On top of this, the advertising boards saying stuff like "No homeless shelter in our community, keep it safe!" was just completely lacking in compassion. I think a lot of people out there just don't see homeless people as deserving of empathy. At least, that's the impression I get. I also find it profoundly ironic that America is supposedly the "land of the free", but you can get arrested/in trouble for: - Drinking in public (even in parks or at the beach) - Sleeping in public (apparently) - Jaywalking - Eating on public transport I just don't understand all these weird and arbitrary rules they have out there.
  - tqi 5y ago
    The UK is far from immune to this type of behavior. "The Vagrancy Act was passed in the summer of 1824, which means it is now just shy of its 200th birthday. And if it held any relevance then, it certainly doesn’t now. At its core, The Vagrancy Act is a way to punish people “in any deserted or unoccupied building, or in the open air, or under a tent, or in any cart or waggon, not having any visible means of subsistence”. Essentially, it criminalises homelessness. For homeless people, both begging and rough sleeping are things out of their control, and the Act does little to get to the root of why people are homeless in the first place." https://centrepoint.org.uk/about-us/blog/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-vagrancy-act/ https://centrepoint.org.uk/about-us/blog/everything-you-need... Also: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/nov/12/new-home-office-rules-on-removing-foreign-rough-sleepers-from-uk-face-legal-challenge https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/nov/12/new-home-off...
    - sdunwoody 5y ago
      There's obviously room for improvement here too yes. Although I really really doubt anyone here would be arrested for having a doze on the pavement.
      - rootusrootus 5y ago
        > Although I really really doubt anyone here would be arrested for having a doze on the pavement. It seems to be declining, but according to the BBC, as of a few years ago there were more than a thousand people arrested for just that.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    > I just don't understand all these weird and arbitrary rules they have out there. But you live in the nation that invented the ASBO. > - Drinking in public (even in parks or at the beach) - Sleeping in public (apparently) - Jaywalking - Eating on public transport These are local laws, not federal, so not universal across the US. And in all of the places around the US that I have lived, these sorts of laws are rarely enforced (at least not as a primary offense).
    - hemloc_io 5y ago
      Can confirm that the pandemic made laws like drinking in public functionally irrelevant where I live, and other larger cities across the country.
    - lozenge 5y ago
      > And in all of the places around the US that I have lived, these sorts of laws are rarely enforced [on white people] Fixed that for you.
  - vmception 5y ago
    The "land of the free, home of the brave" quote came from a lawyer moonlighting as a poet watching actual brave people fighting in a war. It was catchy enough to become the national anthem 120 years later (after being used in the military for 30 years or so prior), but don't confuse that opportunistic indoctrination with reality. It has nothing to do with anything, nothing to do with any legal reality, nothing to do with the constitution, the structure of the government, the declaration of independence from the UK, life in practice within the US, or any comparison to any other developed nation at the time it was written (1812) or now (2021). American exceptionalism relies on completely ignoring countries with Human Development Index or rights that are at parity or better, and relies on hyperbolic comparisons to the worst countries in the world. Hope that helps you understand your experiences here! Without context, the cognitive dissonance (confusion from competing ideas and observations) can be very confusing!
    - selimthegrim 5y ago
      Also a slaveholder, which came through in the anthem as well
JohnClark1337 5y ago
Depends on the state or even the county or city
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
It's not really that shocking. In Austin Texas a little over two years ago the city council removed the ban on lying and camping in public places. The result was an explosion of tent encampments all over the city, so much so that just a couple months ago city voters reversed the decision in a referendum. There are certainly valid points on all sides of the debate, and "lying in public" laws can definitely be abused to harass individuals, but there are also some valid rationale for why they exist in the first place.
- sdunwoody 5y ago
  So I think the problem there is that the root causes of homelessness need addressing. Moving all these people to a different city/town/location is not "solving" the issue.
- Gravityloss 5y ago
  Encampment is quite different from falling asleep... And even then it should be enough to tell the person to move on, not to arrest them.
  - ProAm 5y ago
    Move on to where?
    - gowld 5y ago
      To a different jurisdiction where it's someone else's problem.
    - pas 5y ago
      Home, friends, family, shelter. I mean if someone gets drunk and falls asleep they are not necessarily homeless.
      - wombatmobile 5y ago
        Where can people who have no home, friends, family or income shelter?
jandrese 5y ago
Yes, in most places it is effectively a crime to be homeless. It is one of the many reasons it is so hard to break out of the trap of homelessness.
Clubber 5y ago
Behind the veneer of what Hollywood wants you to believe, the US is an extremely cruel place.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  The US is not a Hollywood movie, sure, but neither is it anything like how foreigners on HN portray it. And for a supposedly 'extremely cruel' place, the US has by far the highest rate of charity in the world.
  - Clubber 5y ago
    So here's some of the ways it's cruel. I assume you don't live here, or you are pretty well off: 1. Largest incarcerated population on earth. 2. No public health system until Medicare (60s). 3. Very difficult to discharge debt, for citizens, easy for business. 4. Impossible to discharge student loan debt. 5. Allowing of predatory loan practices to incur this debt. 6. Many public schools are absolutely horrible. 7. Mostly no recourse for violent and corrupt police. 8. Most if not all of the federal policies go to help the donor class at the expense of the citizenry. On the occasion where policies help the citizenry, it's a coincidence. 9. Systemic racism in many aspects of the government, particularly the justice system. 10. Very little social safety net for the poor. In fact, many poor are incarcerated. 11. Very strict justice system where just about anything is a felony. 12. No voting rights for felons. 13. Vicious drug war. 14. Patriot act. 15. Skyrocketing healthcare costs. 16. Skyrocketing educational costs. 17. MANY charities have a 90+% administration fee (meaning only 10% goes to the actual group in need). This is perfectly legal. 18. Many regressive taxes (gasoline, cigarettes, alcohol, groceries). 19. Many instances where regulation isn't even done, or done so poorly, companies can do whatever they want (see nutrition labels for an example). 20. Not much done in anti-trust laws. 21. An insane amount of tax dollars goes to the war machine and soldiers get a minuscule amount. They are treated pretty horribly afterwards. 22. Government fully supports offshoring of jobs to slave-like conditions in China and elsewhere. 23. Loophole system where the well off pay very little taxes while the majority of the tax burden goes to the middle class (by income). 24. Massive income inequality and therefore political power and influence. 25. The amount of state funding for prosecution dwarfs the amount of funding for defense in most states. These are just off the top of my head. I could probably do 20 more pretty easily. Regarding charity, that's the citizenry. By and far the citizenry are decent people, it's the state that's cruel. Also we aren't "by far the most charitable country on earth," we're slightly about Myanmar, but we are still the top. In really poor states like West Virginia, the citizens are extremely charitable to each other. I would guess because they all need it desperately. Perhaps being so charitable is actually a symptom of the widespread cruelty of the state's policies. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/most-charitable-countries https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/most-char...
munificent 5y ago
> If so, find it mind boggling that you could be arrested in America for falling asleep on the pavement/sidewalk!? Yes, but it's a little more complex/subtle than that may make it seem. Some things to consider: * Arrested doesn't mean convicted. A cop may take someone in ("arrest" them) to get them off the streets and give them a night in jail to sober up. Then they get let out without pressing charges. In some cases, this may end up being a net benefit for the person, in others it obviously isn't. Your country probably does the same thing. I assume "drunk tanks" are pretty universal. * Police officers have a lot of discretion on which laws they enforce. There is a downside to this in that it lets them use that discretion in biased ways, but—ignoring that for the moment—it does mean that many times cops are more lenient and compassionate than the law implies that they should be. You rarely hear about those stories on the news but talk to a cop or do a ride-along and you'll see that they spend most of their time not arresting people and instead giving them warnings. * Honolulu has a famously bad homeless problem, while also being heavily dependent on tourism for its economy. There are a lot of "beach bums" that move to Hawaii without any plan to provide for themselves and if Honolulu doesn't do anything about them at all, they can end up harming the place's overall economy, which would then make it harder for the city to afford the services these people need. Doing nothing is not as innocuous as it might seem. * In general, a society must do some enforcement of public spaces. Otherwise, they cease to be public spaces. I live in Seattle which also has a lot of homeless people. Some of them build encampments in public parks. This means that, de facto, those are no longer public parks. They're private property because the public no longer has access to them—the squatters in the encampment will run them off. The name for a place where you can choose to be and no one can kick you out is "private property". If you don't want all of your public spaces to turn into private spaces, then you do have to prevent people from unilaterally privatizing them to some degree. Of course, it's not black and white and there are good discussions to have about where you draw the line. Obviously people need to be able to spend some time in a public space. Is napping OK? Sleeping overnight? In a tent? In a shelter made from pallets and tarps? Many of the laws that draw the line harshly are driven by the observation that when you give a little, some people (not all) will try to take more and more. So it's not so entirely that lawmakers are heartless sadists who don't even want to have to see a homeless person, so much as a fear that if you let someone take a nap, they'll sleep overnight. Let them sleep overnight and they'll build a structure. Let them build a structure and they'll start fires. And at that point, it becomes really hard to keep that place available to the public. It is a hard problem and anyone who thinks it is black and white is choosing to not see all of the complexity.
closeparen 5y ago
It's really easy to imagine: think of a neighborhood of politically engaged homeowners, whose sidewalks are covered in sleeping homeless people around the clock. The residents of that neighborhood don't have the power to end capitalism or the money to secure homes for all who need them (bare minimum $500k each). But they do have the power to get an ordinance passed.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

Probably. People don't like to see the homeless around their nice little neighborhoods so they come up with all sorts of weird laws to harass them with.

sdunwoody 5y ago
I find it really nasty. I visited Los Angeles a couple of years back, one of the first places we went was a McDonalds. Some guy was dozing sat at a table (with a coffee in front of him). A cop came up to him and told him he'd be reprimanded if he caught him napping like that again. In all my life living in the UK I've honestly never witnessed something like that. It may seem minor, but seeing an armed cop come up to someone and reprimand them for dozing off? I have no idea why a waiter couldn't have dealt with that. It's not like the McDonalds was even full or anything. On top of this, the advertising boards saying stuff like "No homeless shelter in our community, keep it safe!" was just completely lacking in compassion. I think a lot of people out there just don't see homeless people as deserving of empathy. At least, that's the impression I get. I also find it profoundly ironic that America is supposedly the "land of the free", but you can get arrested/in trouble for: - Drinking in public (even in parks or at the beach) - Sleeping in public (apparently) - Jaywalking - Eating on public transport I just don't understand all these weird and arbitrary rules they have out there.
- tqi 5y ago
  The UK is far from immune to this type of behavior. "The Vagrancy Act was passed in the summer of 1824, which means it is now just shy of its 200th birthday. And if it held any relevance then, it certainly doesn’t now. At its core, The Vagrancy Act is a way to punish people “in any deserted or unoccupied building, or in the open air, or under a tent, or in any cart or waggon, not having any visible means of subsistence”. Essentially, it criminalises homelessness. For homeless people, both begging and rough sleeping are things out of their control, and the Act does little to get to the root of why people are homeless in the first place." https://centrepoint.org.uk/about-us/blog/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-vagrancy-act/ https://centrepoint.org.uk/about-us/blog/everything-you-need... Also: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/nov/12/new-home-office-rules-on-removing-foreign-rough-sleepers-from-uk-face-legal-challenge https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/nov/12/new-home-off...
  - sdunwoody 5y ago
    There's obviously room for improvement here too yes. Although I really really doubt anyone here would be arrested for having a doze on the pavement.
    - rootusrootus 5y ago
      > Although I really really doubt anyone here would be arrested for having a doze on the pavement. It seems to be declining, but according to the BBC, as of a few years ago there were more than a thousand people arrested for just that.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  > I just don't understand all these weird and arbitrary rules they have out there. But you live in the nation that invented the ASBO. > - Drinking in public (even in parks or at the beach) - Sleeping in public (apparently) - Jaywalking - Eating on public transport These are local laws, not federal, so not universal across the US. And in all of the places around the US that I have lived, these sorts of laws are rarely enforced (at least not as a primary offense).
  - hemloc_io 5y ago
    Can confirm that the pandemic made laws like drinking in public functionally irrelevant where I live, and other larger cities across the country.
  - lozenge 5y ago
    > And in all of the places around the US that I have lived, these sorts of laws are rarely enforced [on white people] Fixed that for you.
- vmception 5y ago
  The "land of the free, home of the brave" quote came from a lawyer moonlighting as a poet watching actual brave people fighting in a war. It was catchy enough to become the national anthem 120 years later (after being used in the military for 30 years or so prior), but don't confuse that opportunistic indoctrination with reality. It has nothing to do with anything, nothing to do with any legal reality, nothing to do with the constitution, the structure of the government, the declaration of independence from the UK, life in practice within the US, or any comparison to any other developed nation at the time it was written (1812) or now (2021). American exceptionalism relies on completely ignoring countries with Human Development Index or rights that are at parity or better, and relies on hyperbolic comparisons to the worst countries in the world. Hope that helps you understand your experiences here! Without context, the cognitive dissonance (confusion from competing ideas and observations) can be very confusing!
  - selimthegrim 5y ago
    Also a slaveholder, which came through in the anthem as well

JohnClark1337 5y ago

Depends on the state or even the county or city

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

It's not really that shocking. In Austin Texas a little over two years ago the city council removed the ban on lying and camping in public places. The result was an explosion of tent encampments all over the city, so much so that just a couple months ago city voters reversed the decision in a referendum. There are certainly valid points on all sides of the debate, and "lying in public" laws can definitely be abused to harass individuals, but there are also some valid rationale for why they exist in the first place.

sdunwoody 5y ago
So I think the problem there is that the root causes of homelessness need addressing. Moving all these people to a different city/town/location is not "solving" the issue.
Gravityloss 5y ago
Encampment is quite different from falling asleep... And even then it should be enough to tell the person to move on, not to arrest them.
- ProAm 5y ago
  Move on to where?
  - gowld 5y ago
    To a different jurisdiction where it's someone else's problem.
  - pas 5y ago
    Home, friends, family, shelter. I mean if someone gets drunk and falls asleep they are not necessarily homeless.
    - wombatmobile 5y ago
      Where can people who have no home, friends, family or income shelter?

jandrese 5y ago

Yes, in most places it is effectively a crime to be homeless. It is one of the many reasons it is so hard to break out of the trap of homelessness.

Clubber 5y ago

Behind the veneer of what Hollywood wants you to believe, the US is an extremely cruel place.

rootusrootus 5y ago
The US is not a Hollywood movie, sure, but neither is it anything like how foreigners on HN portray it. And for a supposedly 'extremely cruel' place, the US has by far the highest rate of charity in the world.
- Clubber 5y ago
  So here's some of the ways it's cruel. I assume you don't live here, or you are pretty well off: 1. Largest incarcerated population on earth. 2. No public health system until Medicare (60s). 3. Very difficult to discharge debt, for citizens, easy for business. 4. Impossible to discharge student loan debt. 5. Allowing of predatory loan practices to incur this debt. 6. Many public schools are absolutely horrible. 7. Mostly no recourse for violent and corrupt police. 8. Most if not all of the federal policies go to help the donor class at the expense of the citizenry. On the occasion where policies help the citizenry, it's a coincidence. 9. Systemic racism in many aspects of the government, particularly the justice system. 10. Very little social safety net for the poor. In fact, many poor are incarcerated. 11. Very strict justice system where just about anything is a felony. 12. No voting rights for felons. 13. Vicious drug war. 14. Patriot act. 15. Skyrocketing healthcare costs. 16. Skyrocketing educational costs. 17. MANY charities have a 90+% administration fee (meaning only 10% goes to the actual group in need). This is perfectly legal. 18. Many regressive taxes (gasoline, cigarettes, alcohol, groceries). 19. Many instances where regulation isn't even done, or done so poorly, companies can do whatever they want (see nutrition labels for an example). 20. Not much done in anti-trust laws. 21. An insane amount of tax dollars goes to the war machine and soldiers get a minuscule amount. They are treated pretty horribly afterwards. 22. Government fully supports offshoring of jobs to slave-like conditions in China and elsewhere. 23. Loophole system where the well off pay very little taxes while the majority of the tax burden goes to the middle class (by income). 24. Massive income inequality and therefore political power and influence. 25. The amount of state funding for prosecution dwarfs the amount of funding for defense in most states. These are just off the top of my head. I could probably do 20 more pretty easily. Regarding charity, that's the citizenry. By and far the citizenry are decent people, it's the state that's cruel. Also we aren't "by far the most charitable country on earth," we're slightly about Myanmar, but we are still the top. In really poor states like West Virginia, the citizens are extremely charitable to each other. I would guess because they all need it desperately. Perhaps being so charitable is actually a symptom of the widespread cruelty of the state's policies. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/most-charitable-countries https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/most-char...

munificent 5y ago

> If so, find it mind boggling that you could be arrested in America for falling asleep on the pavement/sidewalk!? Yes, but it's a little more complex/subtle than that may make it seem. Some things to consider: * Arrested doesn't mean convicted. A cop may take someone in ("arrest" them) to get them off the streets and give them a night in jail to sober up. Then they get let out without pressing charges. In some cases, this may end up being a net benefit for the person, in others it obviously isn't. Your country probably does the same thing. I assume "drunk tanks" are pretty universal. * Police officers have a lot of discretion on which laws they enforce. There is a downside to this in that it lets them use that discretion in biased ways, but—ignoring that for the moment—it does mean that many times cops are more lenient and compassionate than the law implies that they should be. You rarely hear about those stories on the news but talk to a cop or do a ride-along and you'll see that they spend most of their time not arresting people and instead giving them warnings. * Honolulu has a famously bad homeless problem, while also being heavily dependent on tourism for its economy. There are a lot of "beach bums" that move to Hawaii without any plan to provide for themselves and if Honolulu doesn't do anything about them at all, they can end up harming the place's overall economy, which would then make it harder for the city to afford the services these people need. Doing nothing is not as innocuous as it might seem. * In general, a society must do some enforcement of public spaces. Otherwise, they cease to be public spaces. I live in Seattle which also has a lot of homeless people. Some of them build encampments in public parks. This means that, de facto, those are no longer public parks. They're private property because the public no longer has access to them—the squatters in the encampment will run them off. The name for a place where you can choose to be and no one can kick you out is "private property". If you don't want all of your public spaces to turn into private spaces, then you do have to prevent people from unilaterally privatizing them to some degree. Of course, it's not black and white and there are good discussions to have about where you draw the line. Obviously people need to be able to spend some time in a public space. Is napping OK? Sleeping overnight? In a tent? In a shelter made from pallets and tarps? Many of the laws that draw the line harshly are driven by the observation that when you give a little, some people (not all) will try to take more and more. So it's not so entirely that lawmakers are heartless sadists who don't even want to have to see a homeless person, so much as a fear that if you let someone take a nap, they'll sleep overnight. Let them sleep overnight and they'll build a structure. Let them build a structure and they'll start fires. And at that point, it becomes really hard to keep that place available to the public. It is a hard problem and anyone who thinks it is black and white is choosing to not see all of the complexity.

closeparen 5y ago

It's really easy to imagine: think of a neighborhood of politically engaged homeowners, whose sidewalks are covered in sleeping homeless people around the clock. The residents of that neighborhood don't have the power to end capitalism or the money to secure homes for all who need them (bare minimum $500k each). But they do have the power to get an ordinance passed.