By Charles Springer Homeless in Santa Monica
I hear complaints all the time about how the homeless community wastes taxpayer dollars for police involvement. If the crime is violent, one that does serious damage to a person or property, or the person is just a nuisance, I can see the sense in it. However, to call the police for something as petty as sleeping in public, urinating in public or just because the person is homeless, the taxpayer’s grievance is not really a well-founded one. Some of you, instead of looking at the causes of homelessness and helping alleviate those problems, would rather treat the homeless community as the problem.
Some of you would rather waste the taxpayer dollars on giving a homeless person a urinating in public ticket, for example, and then complain about it, thereby wasting taxpayer dollars and the officer’s time. Some of us within the homeless community would rather work together with the housed community and the governments of the cities in which we live to solve the problems that lead to homelessness than sit and urinate in the alleys.
Some of you fail to realize calling the police for these petty infractions is like crying wolf. When a real problem arises with in the homeless community, one that is a real threat to your community as a whole, if you have repeatedly called for the minor infractions, and the officer is tired of it, the response time may be slower. Moreover, you become the ones who waste taxpayer money, not the homeless person who just sleeps and leaves.
Some of you fail to realize any of this because you are just plain cold-hearted and compassionless, and, like little children, do not know how to play nice, and live and let live. Some of you have nothing better to do with your lives than to make others’ lives miserable, which leads me to believe that your own lives might be miserable and you do not want to be alone in your misery.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on November 9, 2005. Read the original PDF.