<
https://newrepublic.com/article/178678/supreme-court-criminalize-homeless-case>
"Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, advocates and policy analysts have
warned of a homelessness “tsunami.” It’s the worst-case scenario where the
combination of lost income, backlogs of owed rent, and a lack of local
government foresight contribute to a surge of people losing housing and ending
up on the street. Well, it has arrived—and it’s poised to get much worse as the
Supreme Court is set to decide whether to make homelessness a de facto crime.
This past month, many cities and counties conducted their annual point-in-time
homelessness counts. The results of January’s counts won’t be known for several
more months, but they’re likely to be dire. The end-of-2023 results found that
approximately 653,000 people were experiencing homelessness. That’s up more
than 70,000 over 2022, or a 12 percent increase. In the 12 months since that
data was collected, those numbers have likely gone up.
But the raw numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. As more people end up
experiencing homelessness, they’re also facing increasingly punitive and
reactionary responses from local governments and their neighbors. Such policies
could become legally codified in short order, with the high court having agreed
to hear arguments in
Grants Pass v. Johnson.
Originally brought in 2018, the case challenged the city of Grants Pass,
Oregon, over an ordinance banning camping. Both a federal judge and, later, a
panel from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck the law down, saying that
Grants Pass did not have enough available shelter to offer homeless people. As
such, the law was deemed to be a violation of the Eighth Amendment.
The ruling backed up the Ninth Circuit’s earlier ruling on the
Martin v. City
of Boise case, which said that punishing or arresting people for camping in
public when there are no available shelter beds to take them to instead
constituted a violation of the “cruel and unusual punishment” clause in the
Eighth Amendment. That applied to localities in the Ninth Circuit’s area of
concern and has led to greater legal scrutiny even as cities and counties push
for more punitive and restrictive anti-camping laws. In fact, Grants Pass
pushed to get the Supreme Court to hear the case, and several nominally liberal
cities and states on the West Coast are backing its argument. If the Supreme
Court overturns the previous
Grants Pass and
Boise rulings, it would open
the door for cities, states, and counties to essentially criminalize being
unhoused on a massive scale."
Via Violet Blue’s
Cybersecurity Roundup: April 23, 2024
https://www.patreon.com/posts/cybersecurity-23-102883882
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
