A recent report by Sheffield Hallam University in England indicates that attempts to drive away the homeless from certain places through the use of the 'Public Space Protection Orders' fails to have any impact on decreasing anti-social activity and unfairly criminalizes the homeless who are mainly doing innocuous activities such as eating, resting or begging on the streets.
However, the homeless frequently return to the spots from where they have been evicted like a boomerang!
"Why don't the police do any action? The homeless keep on gathering in my backyard but nothing is done. I am afraid they might rob my house," stated an American who lives in California. The concerned and anxious American was not harmed in anyway by the homeless. A year has passed. No homeless person has robbed him. However, the fact that the presence of the homeless in some spots can inspire such dread demonstrates the magnitude of fear which people hold about the homeless. But many fears of what might happen never materialize. As the saying goes 'Fear has big eyes.'
Some people believe that homelessness is mainly a legal problem, that it arises from the absence of 'the iron fist.' If you round up and arrest all the homeless, put them into buses to be taken to certain detention centers or work houses, the problem will be resolved at a stroke.
Those crude attempts to use force have not been without historical precedent. Peter the Great rounded up all beggars—and Napoleon Bonaparte in 1808 passed a decree to ban street beggars. Both attempts failed to resolve the problems of homelessness!
A recent study explodes the myth that cracking down on the homeless by using the notorious Public Space Protection Order stops so-called anti social problems. The study was undertaken by criminologists at the Sheffield Hallam University in England and encompassed ten cities in England. The researchers also interviewed some of the homeless. They found that 'Dispersal and displacement tactics did not stop or deter the behavior of people experiencing homelessness.' Instead, such an approach mainly criminalized homeless people.
The homeless have often been singled out by the police using 'Public Space Protection Orders.' The police can detain and fine people 100 pounds if they deem a person is involved in anti-social activity such as drinking alcohol, pitching tents, or sleeping on benches. Those orders have been enforced since 2014. The law is used to target a person sleeping at night in 'the wrong place.'
However, a person sleeping hardly constitutes a threat to public order. Common sense suggests that a person sleeping is not doing any harm unless you think that he might be dreaming about how to commit his next crime—a notion which is just absurd.
The researchers found that a person could be stopped by the police for eating on a particular spot on the streets. In Moscow, people do this all the time and the police usually just pass them by.
However, the police tend to drive away beggars who are at the entrance of the metro. But you will notice that when the police depart, the homeless return to the same spot. The cat and mouse scenarios where the police bully and bait the homeless were superbly captured by Charlie Chaplin. With the ingenuity of an acute artist he could superbly show the funny as well as tragic side of farce.
In Moscow, the mayor in the 1990's used draconian methods of deporting the homeless from the city—in huge buses way beyond 101 kilometers from the city boundaries. It never worked.
The homeless always made their way back to the city. And one of the reasons why some aid groups were reluctant to purchase a homeless person in Moscow a ticket back to his own village or town again was because he would come back again. Neither using a hard or soft dispersal approach worked.
Unfortunately, it seems that the number of homeless people evicted by landlords is remorselessly shooting up. The housing act of 1988 permits landlords to evict a tenant without providing any reason. When an eviction ban was lifted in October 2021, the number of people being subjected to those evictions shot up by almost 9000.
Despite a promise to introduce a new anti-eviction law in 2019, the government has failed to introduce such a bill which would prevent vulnerable tenants from being evicted. On the contrary, instead of protecting the poor and the homeless, the Tory government has just introduced a new budget giving huge tax relief to the rich while cutting welfare benefits and pensions by refusing to index them to inflation.
It is important to grasp the fact that those draconian laws are not only used against the homeless but against anyone 'whose face does not fit' {i.e., Chinese, Vietnamese and African students are stopped more often than other nationalities. Anyone who happens to have an unkempt or shabby appearance might attract the unwanted attention of the police also.'}
We are not just talking about so-called 'anti-social' behavior but children being told they can't play football in a courtyard because it disturbs the peace and quiet of some old people sitting on park benches… or someone who simply sits down to casually read a book. Unless we become less complacent we might wake up to find ourselves in a police state.
Indeed, some people in Britain already claim we live in an authoritarian police state where spots are jealously guarded and watched.
You feel trespassing is never forgiven!