Protect the right to rest

SACRAMENTO, CA — “Every day one of the largest concentrations of police power anywhere in the world descends on a small part of downtown Los Angeles. Police officers assigned to the Skid Row section of the city routinely wreak havoc in the lives of approximately fifteen thousand low-income and no-income people who inhabit this fifty-block area that covers less than one square mile of territory. In an area where thousands of people are homeless, where nearly three quarters of the residents suffer from physical or mental disabilities, police officers issue citation after citation for jay-walking, sitting on sidewalks, sleeping in public, holding an open container of liquid, or for outstanding warrants and drug possession.” – George Lipsitz, “Learning From Los Angeles: Producing Anarchy In The Name Of Order,” Freedom Now (LA CAN 2011)
On April 7, in a lavishly decorated mahogany chamber in California’s capitol, the Right To Rest Act, SB 608, was heard. The bill would protect the rights of homeless people to move freely, rest, eat, and perform religious observations in public space as well as the right to occupy a legally parked vehicle.
Senator Liu, who introduced the bill, didn’t see enough votes to move the bill out of committee. SB608 will be considered as “two year bill,” and be considered in the next legislative session. Meanwhile, in both Colorado and Oregon, similar bills have been introduced.
Fifty-eight California cities have enacted hundreds of new laws that single out homeless people; 70,000 Californians were picked up for vagrancy in 2013. Since 2000, statewide arrests increased by 77 percent. More than four out of five homeless people report being harassed, cited, or arrested for sleeping in public, or simply sitting or lying down. From January to March of this year, almost 700 people were cited for sleeping or camping in San Francisco.
Anti-Okie laws, Sundown towns. According to the Western Regional Advocacy Project, the vagrancy laws of the last century—especially during the Great Depression of the thirties—jailed unemployed and migrant working people as they struggled to find work; people of color have always borne the brunt of this attack.
Baltimore Oriole’s Manager John Angelos recently observed that tens of millions of good, hardworking Americans have been plunged into economic devastation, as the political elite has attacked every American’s legal protection “in order to control an unfairly impoverished population living under an ever-declining standard of living and suffering at the butt-end of an ever-more militarized and aggressive surveillance state.”
Angelos explained that jobs are being shipped overseas—but since 2001, America shed 42% of its jobs (5.8 million). By 2010, only one American in 10 worked in manufacturing. According to one writer, globalization is “just a small ripple on the surface of the ocean—the big trend is automation and productivity.”
Like canaries in the mine, the homeless population is under attack first as jobs disappear and poverty is punished as a crime.