What do they Mean by Safe Streets?

Let's curb the aggressive behavior of our government.

Homeless political battle heating up
CBC WebPosted Nov 1 2004 09:21 AM PST

See Also: Petition Opposes Safe Streets ; Homeless under seige in Victoria; And What do they mean By Safe Streets?

VANCOUVER - Vancouver city council and the provincial government are squaring off over a new city report showing the number of homeless people has more than doubled since the Liberals were elected in 2001.

The city's Homeless Action Plan shows that – depending on the season – there are as many as 1,200 people living on Vancouver's streets.

The draft report by staff says when the Liberals swept to power, there were 500 homeless people in Vancouver at most.

LINK: Homeless Action Plan (pdf)

The report blames a lack of provincial funds for housing, mental health services and addiction counselling. It also says the province's new welfare rules have pushed people onto the streets.

Among its major recommendations – that the city buy a '"Single Room Occupancy" building each year to address part of the city's homelessness problem.

LINK: Report to Vancouver city council

The study goes before council on Tuesday. But it's already stirring debate.

Vancouver councillor Jim Green is blaming the provincial Liberals for increasing the number of street people.

"They're creating homelessness and they're doing it knowledgably, and I guess with some level of pride and joy," says COPE councillor.

But Liberal MLA Lorne Mayencourt questions the report's accuracy. "I've been looking at the numbers for the Downtown Eastside and the numbers simply don't bear it out.

"As a matter of fact, we've seen a dramatic increase in a number of people in that neighbourhood and in the downtown core who have been able to get increased benefits."

Mayencourt says the homelessness problem is a priority for the Liberals.

He points out that 200 new provincially sponsored shelter beds are opening on Monday in Vancouver as part of the government's wet weather strategy for homeless people.

CBC

Safe Streets Act passes
Critics say legislation punishes the poor
by Victoria Barber

Safe Streets Act passes

In a meeting spearheaded by the UVic NDP club, members from an eclectic range of local groups convened in opposition to the Safe Streets Act, a piece of legislation banning “aggressive panhandling” that was passed into provincial law Oct. 26.

Members of the Community Solidarity Coalition, UVic Child and Youth Care, the Vancouver Island Compassion Society, and International Socialists agreed that a unified front was necessary to oppose what they called “the scapegoating of the poor.”

Those attending the meeting agreed that the act punishes individuals who are affected most by the B.C. government’s cuts to welfare and the social safety net—including social housing programs—and that these cuts have directly contributed to the presence of panhandlers and homeless people in downtown Victoria.

“We’ve got the government tossing people onto the street, then telling them not to stand there,” said Philippe Lucas of the Vancouver Island Compassion Society.

Charlayne Thornton-Joe, who represents downtown on the Victoria City Council and sits on the Downtown Advisory Committee, said in an email that she does not support the bill. “I do not think it is the answer to the concerns that we have on the streets—I feel we should be dealing with root causes,” she said.

The Safe Streets Act will punish panhandlers who solicit in a way that would make a “reasonable person” fear for his or her safety and makes it a criminal offence to ask for spare change near instant tellers, phone booths, bus stops, taxi stands and public toilets.

The act would also prohibit squeegee kids from approaching vehicles at intersections.

The Safe Streets Act was introduced as a private member’s bill by Vancouver-Burrard MLA Lorne Mayencourt in May of 2004.

Bruce Carter, CEO of the Greater Victoria Chamber of Commerce, wrote on the Chamber of Commerce website that “many Victorians feel unsafe to walk our streets both at nighttime and during the day.” Carter said that the act is not a solution in itself, and that more social assistance and funding for extra policing is necessary for “peace and harmony on our city streets.”

Carter added that the $2 million that the City of Victoria expects to receive from traffic fine revenues will go a long way towards financing the police budget.

Those convened on Friday agreed that directing resources at police will not solve the problems of homeless people downtown and that the bill is an attempt to divert attention from the B.C. government’s social policies onto the poor.

Steve Perks, assistant director of the Law Centre, called the bill an attempt to make escalating poverty “invisible.”

“We have cutbacks in services and a lack of resources to deal with poverty, and this act says that it is the poor people who are the problem,” he said. Perks added that the aggressive behavior targeted by the act is already covered in the Criminal Code.

Bill Burrill, president of the Together Against Poverty Society, agreed.
“You can control this kind of behaviour with the Criminal Code. Its provisions for assault, extortion and criminal behaviour are so broadly written, it covers every possible kind of inappropriate behaviour,” he said.

Critics have also questioned the enforceability of the bill, which would either fine the panhandler or serve him or her with a court summons.

Bruce Wallace, research coordinator of the Vancouver Island Public Interest Group, said that failure of a panhandler to pay his or her fine may create a pretext to be taken into police custody, regardless of the panhandler’s activities.

“The act criminalizes the poor—it says that if you are poor you will always be a criminal, no matter what you do,” said Wallace.

The new law will not be enforced until the government figures out how to punish aggressive panhandlers. According to Attorney General Geoff Plant, this should take until December at the latest.

Martlett

Safe Streets Act will take work and acceptance
November, 12 - 6:47 AM http//www.cknw.com

VANCOUVER/CKNW(AM980)--Vancouver Police are now sitting down to consider the government's Safe Streets Act and trying to come-up with recommendations for policies and procedures before fines and other sanctions are written into the Act's regulations.

The Director of Crime Prevention Services for the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association says there are still many unanswered questions about the Act.

Dave Jones says however, he's involved in trying to educate the public with a website, "So people can find out what this Act means, how it is likely to be applied, what will happen when they call police, when they should call police, what the prohibition signs for tresspass look like."

Mayor Larry Campbell hasn't changed his position on the Act, "We've got this stupid Safe Streets Act, ya know, police are going to go down there and arrest you for being poor, 9-1-1!"

The Act won't take effect until the government can figure out how to punish aggressive panhandlers.

There's a history to the Safe Streets Act
The social psychology of consumption and the success of various theories within it over the decades forms the nucleus of the new Safe Streets Act.
by Reed Eurchuk

There's a history to the Safe Streets Act

The Safe Streets Act has turned into a battleground for opposing groups. And rarely do these groups even agree on the subject of the Safe Street Act. For one group, the Act attempts to manage a symptom of growing poverty. For another, it's about controlling crime. Another viewpoint altogether has it as an ill-founded attempt at dealing with homelessness.

In reality, it's about all these things. Despite mainstream media avoidance of the subjects, poverty and homelessness set the context for the Safe Streets Act. However, it is worth listening to what the main creators of the Act have to say about it in order go deeper into its significance.

The Safe Streets Act's legislative sponsor, Liberal MLA Lorne Mayencourt, claimed, with some confusion, "This law is not about people, but about behaviour."

More to the point, Kathi Thompson, ex-President of the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association, while speaking for the Safe Streets Coalition, told Province reporter John Bermingham, "Our members are extremely concerned with this increased disorder," which, she said, "is leading to a growing level of public and visitor insecurity."

So, the Act is not primarily about traditional crime where someone breaks a law in a physical sense. In any case, crime rates have been dropping for a decade, so it does not seem the police need much help with traditional crime. As Thompson accurately states, with the Safe Streets Act we are entering the arena of feelings and perceptions, fears and anxieties.

What is Disorder?

Thompson chose the word in the quotation above—disorder—carefully. The word is a key, a code that opens up to an important debate among criminologists and urbanists over the last 20 years.

The key text here is Broken Windows , an article written in 1982 by James Q Wilson and George Kelling. Wilson and Kelling claim that fear of traditional crime, while very real itself, tends to lead us “to overlook . . . another source of fear—the fear of being bothered by disorderly people. Not violent people nor, necessarily, criminals, but disreputable, or obstreperous, or unpredictable people: panhandlers, drunks, addicts . . . prostitutes, loiterers, the mentally ill."

These “distateful, worrisome encounters," which are not primarily criminal encounters, comprise much of the fear rife among urban dwellers, according to Wilson and Kelling. But “disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence," they also argue. "Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken" wrote Kelling and Wilson, using a suitably architectural metaphor to make their point.

The date of Wilson and Kelling's article is important for two reasons. First, 1982 was the peak of the Reagan era recession, and poverty was rising quickly throughout the US. But also, the early 80s was the beginning of a turn-around for real estate development in many US cities. Boston, New York and San Francisco, among others, found it possible to draw huge developments and new consumers back to the city centres.

The Architecture of Order

From 1970 to 1990, urbanists discussed how to re-magnetize downtowns, and draw back those who had fled to the suburbs. The quintessential piece of modern architecture, wedding consumerism with a new form of order, is the shopping mall.

In the book, Downtown Inc, Bernard Frieden and Lynne Segalyn chronicle the decline of the American city centre that began with the exodus of middle class Americans to the suburbs from the 1950s through the 1970s. With the suburbs came the malls, which used "a selective retailing strategy [that] led to a standardized group of tenants [to]present . . . an idealized version of downtown."

This retailing strategy excluded bargain stores, second hand stores, and liquor stores, as well as Five and Dimes, and focused on "the most productive stores from downtown" such as, brand-name clothing, jewelry, shoes, specialty foods, etc. The mall offered a casual shopping experience for affluent suburbanites.

Frieden and Sagalyn list the careful “stagecraft” that created a sanitized theatre of consumption. Soft, upbeat, calming “muzak” soothed the ears. The mall kept out the smells of cars, industry, and sewers. The weather was always 72 degrees. Some malls deodorized the air. They were cleaned daily, “all behind the scenes with the sights, sounds, and smells kept away from shoppers."

Meanwhile, a platoon of private security guards kept out the preachers, winos, panhandlers and druggies. Political demonstrations or organizing were forbidden in this privatized public space.

The rebirth of some American downtown cores have been closely tied to adapting the lessons of the mall to the city. Frieden and Saglyn painstakingly go through the list: Faneuil Hall in Boston, Horton Plaza in San Diego, the Philadelphia Gallery, and literally dozens more. The authors comment on an early urban mall, Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco.

The Square “represented the next architectural progression by putting a mall into old buildings and using downtown itself as a theme for the mall product. . . . They were processing downtown in a framework that was already working in the suburbs."

Michael Sorkin calls this the “Disneyfication” of downtown—an image of downtown as a movie set, with exposed brick, saw tooth skylines, and a faux finish on a newly sanitized city where well paid young professionals can live their lifestyle—that is, consume, freely, without the fear of the “unpredictable,” “disreputable,” “obstreperous” people Wilson and Kelling referred to.

Sorkin comments: "The theme park presents it's happy regulated vision of pleasure . . . as a substitute for the democratic public realm, and it does so appealingly by stripping troubled urbanity of its sting, of the presence of the poor, or crime, or dirt, of work."

The Safe Streets Act continues a tradition that attempts to expunge the signs of poverty from the fantasy landscape of happy consumption.

I'm one of the few squeegee people here in Victoria, I've been washing car windows on and off for the past ten years. I've experienced every form of aggression, hospitality and corruption through out my years moving around Canada. I was in toronto when mayor Mel Lastmen banned the act of washing windows on street corners. At the time, I knew 30 to 50 people that made all their money through washing car windows. After the cops started to arrest people for this act, many of these people (mostly kids) started to do other things for money like prostitution, drug dealing and stealing. Some of the squeegee folk came to the mind set that "If I'm going to go to jail, then I'm going to go for something more worth while and less risky" This is what no one seems to understand, you can get rid of the squeegee people but you can't get rid of the people.

I was put in jail for washing a window for thirty days and that's the same amount of time I would get if I was caught shop lifting. When I got out of jail my wife and I had to leave Toronto because I was a target for the police and received several beatings just for being a former squeegee punk. I've had no formal education and so when I was put on the street I couldn't handle a real job so I started to squeegee and never really stopped . I never wash a window unless someone asks, unless a driver says "Sorry I don't have any money" Or when I see a car window with bird crap all over it, I wash it. And people seem to be genuinely grateful. I never use dirty water, I always use fresh water,
soap and I clean my squeegee all the time. I know I'm breaking the current bylaws here in Victoria that says "I'm conducting business on a highway" I try to stay out of the cops radar because
police treat us squeegee people worse then drug dealers. From this year alone I've acquired around 1500$ in fines and I've had the police take over 500$ from my pocket, they say "it's
proceeds of crime" but I never get a receipt, I assume they keep my hard earned money for themselves.

I use my squeegee as a way to make extra money for my wife and I to eat and pay bills. I'm an ex-Heroin addict, ex-drug dealer and ex-thief. I need a cain when I walk because of a bad knee that was permanently injured when I was ran down by a police car. I have very few options right now because my wife is in collage and she is studying all the time. I'm making the money we need to survive. This is the best I've ever lived, I always have food, heat, clean clothes, my own computer, T.V. and a clean apartment. I go to food banks but they can hardly help. Food banks are not as good as most people would think. The food that most food banks give us are expired or it's
not very nutritious. And it only lasts three days and one can only go to each food bank one time per month.

I know many of you will think "why wont this guy just get a real job? First off I'm on welfare and that pays for my rent, some food and my staggering medical bills. It's such a hard cycle because when I wanted to get off Heroin, after being a junkie since I was fourteen. I tried many times to go cold turkey, which never lasted longer then a few days. I found the only way to stay clean was to get on the Methadone program and this was when I got stuck in this rut. Welfare pays for the clinic fee's which is 60$ a month and the pharmacy bills which can be any where from 10 to 30 dollars a day for the drink of Methadone that I need every day. So, if I was to get a job all my money would go into paying for my Methadone and clinic fee's.

Some thing I was never told when I got on Methadone was that Methadone is way more addictive then Heroin. It takes 2 or 3 weeks to physically get off Heroin and it takes 2 or 3 months
to get off Methadone. I had a friend that quit Methadone cold turkey and he could'nt sleep more then an hour a day for the first three weeks and felt like he had the worst flu you could imagine for 3 months after that. Methadone was created by the Nazi's because the British stopped all Morphine from going into German hands, no wonder the stuff is so evil. It eats away at the human bodies calcium like a Cancer, I had pretty good teeth until I started Methadone and now at the age of 23 I've lost all my teeth and I need to wear dentures.

It's very hard for someone who has lived this life style for over ten years to just let it go. I've grown accustom to the ways of the street and I am trying to
change but it'll take time and support. Which I am seeking through counseling, support groups and from my wife. I realize that the way my life is now is because of my own choices and I can't blame any one but myself. Sure I had a hard childhood but so did my brother and he's doing pretty good.

I do have dreams of being a writer and being clean from all drugs but I'm just not ready at this point in my life to make those changes. Next time you see a squeegee person remember it's only soap and water and not all of us are bad people.