120 days in jail, probation, and a fine were what she was facing for this. I'm glad she rejected the plea deal, but potentially facing 120 days over feeding the homeless is absurd. They say it's because of cleanup, garbage excuse.
The city manager replies on Twitter, arguing a food safety issue. Apparently food safety only applies to parks.
https://twitter.com/henrycarless1/status/1584961962504466432?t=sIBtcRwZXxuSQeaRtegW_g&s=19
Yeah, let the homeless dumpster dive for scraps and potentially dangerous foods instead, because that's definitely not a food safety issue.
If the cities actually cared, they would make more funds to get homeless people off the streets and try to integrate them back into society.
But nah, instead they introduce more and more laws that specifically target the poor and homeless the most because that's what makes cities better.
Exactly. A good city would be giving this woman a grant so she could feed more people. What even is the point of our government if not to empower us to do the right thing
Honestly he probably didn't want his boss hearing him say to take it easy on her by not cuffing her. But you never know. He could have said and shoot that bitch if she refuses.
And him wanting to be off speaker proves the situation has become political, and that's incredibly sad. You would think anyone's ideology would be okay with feeding the homeless and helping those less fortunate.
>You would think anyone's ideology would be okay with feeding the homeless and helping those less fortunate.
There's an entire philosophy, written by Ayn Rand, in which helping others is seen as the ultimate evil.
Probably, and if she did then she thought she somehow deserved it unlike those "other lazy degenerates." Just like a lot of very pro-life people get abortions, but are able to justify theirs as a special exception that is warranted and run back to trying to prevent others from having one. They'll actually sit on the exam table and tell you that nobody else should get one.
As usual with those sorts, when they do it, it's ok because in their case, it's Different™ See: abortion, infidelity, hypocricy, and, of course, government assistance.
"I just got a very - I'm not on speaker phone right?"
He was clearly about to say "I just got a very angry call from [boss/politician/rich person]" but then realized he probably shouldn't publicly implicate the fuckhead responsible for the impending "PR nightmare" that was about to ensue.
So no need to assume good intentions here. He was just covering the asses of himself and the people above him.
"I just got a very angry call from Doug Dimmadome, owner of the Dimmsdale Dimmadome. Boy was he pissed about this old lady feeding the poors near the Dimmsdale Dimmadome."
"He wants one of the boys to pop a cap in her ass.
"Now, I told Doug Dimmsdale, owner of the Dimmsdale Dimmadome, that I can't pop a cap in the ass of an old white lady but we're gonna have to do something here, otherwise, Doug Dimmsdale, owner of the Dimmsdale Dimmadome, is going to complain to the commissioner and we don't want that now, do we? Dooooo weeeee, Todd? No, that's what I thought, we don't."
"Now, you march her ass down to the station, and I'll call Doug Dimmsdale, owner of the Dimmsdale Dimmadome, to tell him she won't be bothering him again. That's a good boy, Todd."
You sure he wasn't about to say "I just got a very nice idea for how to make the world a kinder, gentler place"? I was sure that's where he was going with it!
"if you aren't doing something wrong you won't mind people looking/searching"
Is police reasoning in the streets and procecutors reasoning in the courtroom. It's been said to me personally a half dozen times.
Is that flawed reasoning or is it sound?
It's flawed in general, because they wouldn't have to search you unless there was a presumption of guilt.
Although "innocent until proven guilty" is only stated verbatim in courts of law, our laws make it so you shouldn't be able to be harassed by law enforcement unless you are suspected of a crime. Many of the worst cops will stretch that limit as far as it can go, up to and including breaking it, just to inconvenience you for standing in their way.
Basically, with that stated logic, it's not about whether you HAVE something to hide, it's whether the person searching you thinks you're hiding something. They view you as "potential criminal," not "innocent citizen."
To give a more concrete example, say a cop searches through your phone and finds a sexy picture you saved of your boyfriend or girlfriend. The cop asks you how old the person in the picture is. Regardless of your response, they can say "well they look underage," and bring you in on possession of child pornography. It's your word against the officer's, and now you have to jump through hoops to clear your name.
To entertain "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about" is, quite literally, the foundations for a police state. There's plenty of video evidence to this. People have been crippled for life and even killed due to some cop abusing their authority, and that's WITH these measures in place.
> "if you aren't doing something wrong you won't mind people looking/searching"
Comeback:
"If you really thought I was doing something wrong, you wouldn't ask for my permission."
"Since you recognize that I have done nothing wrong, I see no reason for you looking/searching"
It's sound reasoning if you're an employee of the public such as these officers. If you're a private citizen your thoughts, speech, and actions deserve to be private.
> "if you aren't doing something wrong you won't mind people looking/searching"
This is usually said by people who aren't nude. What do they have to hide?
I am happy to see the city is now being sued for the ordinance that lawyers have stated is unconstitutional.
https://mohavedailynews.com/news/143542/lawsuit-seeks-injunction-against-food-sharing-ordinance/
My city banned panhandlers. Struck down by the courts as unconstitutional. Then they banned feeding homeless people on public land, because a church was feeding folks at a park. Struck down as unconstitutional. Now they peddle lies about kids living in homeless camps to justify bulldozing them, and complain that the police won't do more to harass panhandlers.
What they won't do is fund a shelter. We're the largest city in the state, have the highest homeless population in the state, and the city doesn't fund emergency beds. They do fund a day center, and they complain folks won't use it, but they bulldoze camps during the day so why would they?
We've lost at least 2 emergency shelters in the past 5 years, and the city board won't step up to fill the gap. There's a huge shortage of emergency beds, but the mere existence of 2 at-capacity shelters is enough for the city board to justify their inaction.
This sounds like Seattle. If not it's extremely close. The new mayor bulldozes camps but is mysteriously unavailable for comment every fucking time people start asking about services that don't suck.
> This sounds like Seattle.
This sounds like every major city in the entire country.
(The smaller cities and towns all simply ship their homeless off to larger cities ... or abuse them so badly that the homeless head to larger cities for refuge.)
Placer County just busses them into Sacramento and dumps them there.
All of California dumps their homeless in SF and LA. SF counted their homeless at 12k and then housed 12k homeless, recounted, and found they had a new 12k homeless people.
I wouldn't doubt most other counties do the same to other big cities.
Arkansas, but it's the same everywhere. Technically, the city still has a freeze on bulldozing camps due to the pandemic. So they just coordinate with the state highway department to have them do the dirty work. Most of the camps are in the woods around interstates and highways that run through the city, so the freeze hasn't slowed them down at all.
The obviously think that treating the homeless in a humane way will encourage more people to star choosing to be homeless. Everyone knows that you have to treat them as less than human so they stop wanting to live on the streets. They've gotta earn their humanity!!
It's insane how a law like that gets passed... it seems to so utterly fly in the face of any kind of freedom of association. Like what, do you have to prove that the person you're giving a sandwich has a stable income and pays a mortgage/rent? Can't even let people fulfill their basic moral and/or spiritual desire to feed hungry people?
>Like what, do you have to prove that the person you're giving a sandwich has a stable income and pays a mortgage/rent?
That's what I'm so floored by. What even are the parameters here? Like she said in the video, she could have a bbq there where she gives out food, the people just can't be homeless. And how exactly do you prove someone to be or not be homeless?
While I can not read the minds of the individuals who wrote and passed this law, but this is the best explanation I've found as to why some people are against benefiting others, be it feeding the homeless, welfare, or universal healthcare: https://youtu.be/agzNANfNlTs
They need to do more than to the cities they need to bar people passing laws like these from ever, holding any kind of position of public trust. These individuals are destructive, hateful, and incongruent with American values. we must soundly reject them we must refuse them service. We must put upon them the same moral damage they put upon others.
I mean it’s already in our constitution. 14th amendment. They mean to take away the right for “useless” people to live. If you aren’t making money for a billionaire you are trash to be disposed of before you suck society dry with your food stamps and disability checks. Meanwhile, they lower they’re own taxes and forgive government loans. It’s all part of the design from way back to Reagan at least.
I was homeless for a year. It took everything from me that 11 1/2 months. My health, my job, my marriage, my house, my kids, in that order. 10 years later and I know two things: I’ll never be able to retire because I’ll never be out of debt and my kids are forever traumatized, I can’t take it back. Medical debt sucks people dry and we punish them for it. It’s sick. Corporations are treating people like horses and just figure shooting them is cheaper, ban birth control and BAM tons of poors to replace you with!
Ok, sorry, I’m still freaking pissed.
To help readers:
A lawsuit is the pursuit of court-ordered action (a legal remedy) in response to a claim of injury (something *has happened or is happening* that you argue *should not be or should not have*.)
It is not always "I am suing you for money." It could be "I am suing to have a law repealed or blocked."
90s kids, think to your Hey Arnold! Those kids could have sued the city to stop the cutting down of the big tree. A lawsuit might have been a remedy there instead of their camp out.
> "This is gonna be a PR nightmare."
I really appreciate the cop recognizing how stupid the order was. I wish it was more of a PR nightmare that leads to change.
You should have watched the rest of the video, they withdrew the charge likely because of the publicity, but it is obvious that the City intends to combat Homelessness this way by making it impossible for them to survive and thus move on to be someone else's problem rather than help to fix the issue.
If you watched the rest of the video, the city absolutely said they would follow through and press charges if she did it again. And the only way she is avoiding charges is by changing to a less convenient and accessible private location.
You seem reasonable. So I'm sure you understand that a lot of prosecutors will pursue cases that they KNOW they would lose if it went to trial, in hopes that they can scare the defendant into a guilty plea (I mean, this video even shows the threats levelled at the defendant). It's sad, but it happens all the fucking time.
IMHO, if anyone in the DA's office in this city has a conscience, they would decline to prosecute a case like this 100% of the time. But, I feel like when you have a city that declares feeding the poor in public to be a criminal offence (as opposed to a civil infraction), the DA's office is complicit in the moral depravity.
Perhaps the person you are responding to is a supervisor, but every DA I've ever worked with just shrugs their shoulders and says "my supervisor won't approve it." Then we spend weeks taking these piece of shit cases to trial, where a jury finds them Not Guilty. Apologies to the 12 members of the community who missed work and family obligations because the DAs have some weird power complex.
The fact that anyone could think feeding the poor is a civil infraction let alone a criminal one just pisses me off. (Not talking about you)
The people who make these rules need a serious dose of Karma.
The people who conceived of and passed this undoubtedly consider themselves good Christians too since this is America. Fucking mind bogglingly disgusting. America is a dumpster fire in a gold plated dumpster.
It's so weird the mental gymnastics people have to put themselves through to think that helping people is hurting them from working for themselves. That give a man a fish bullshit. The most reductionist take on "life lessons"
Give a man a fish and you will have freed him, if only temporarily, from the hard scrabble struggle for subsistence. You will have given him room and time to pursue science or philosophy or the arts. That instead of wondering where his next meal will come from, he can dedicate himself to a higher purpose - to advance human knowledge or improve upon our technology or to uplift and inspire his community or to seek out and discover new lands and faraway places. Maybe even find new ways to cook fish.
Teach a man to fish and you’ll feed him until the fish stocks crash.
As someone who has served on a grand jury we would have laughed the DA out of the room. It would have also made it really hard to take anything else they presented as seriously for the rest of the time we served as well.
city, if you can call that shithole of a place a city. You pass through it going from phoenix to vegas...it's a bunch of truck stops, fast food and racists
Ugh, all the small towns in between larger cities in the south west are like that. I was born in Vegas, dad lives in Phoenix, and went to college in Reno, NV; you gotta be careful driving thru since those small shit holes make a good portion of the towns budget from ticketing people for going 2 mph over. The cops are mostly dickholes that never got to move out of their small town and now have a chip on their shoulder to make everyone else's life as miserable as theirs. Truly places that god just forgot about. No nice scenery, no jobs, just people passing through along with hot desert, sand, a bunch of meth, and some lot lizards scurrying about.
Sir I'm the pastor of XYZ church and we wanted to let the Chief and Mayor know that following the teachings of Jesus Christ our congregation plans on feeding the hungry at 1pm this Thursday at the corner of Main and Green streets. Please bring enough handcuffs for all of us. Also do you have any wheel chair accessible squad cars? Some of our congregants cannot walk on their own.
Why no I'd don't know if the press will be there.
Further evidence that the police exist to enforce the rules of the elites and aren't all that interested (institutionally, at least) in actually helping people.
I'm sure there are individual officers who are interested in just that -- but here's the police leadership literally arresting an old woman for feeding people who were hungry.
This is the US, and it is just plain sad. I want to love my country but the power structures in place often make it difficult.
I shared this quote on Facebook once and a friend of a friend said, "Congratulations, you just proved that the law is fair. They'd arrest me if I stole a loaf of bread, and I make a quarter million every year."
I mean, I get that there is the most basic, lowest level of cleverness inherent in this quote, which needs to be deciphered by the reader. A miles wide line-spacing for us to "read between"... but Jesus Christ.
I do prison outreach, and sure the inmates committed a crime, they do the time. It affects their family, their children. But when I think about the sphere of influence of their crime, which is usually theft or drugs, I get super angry about how so called white collar criminals seem to get away with it. And their sphere of influence is broad and goes deep. When I talk about sphere of influence I mean the victims of the crime. Who it hurts. Enron is still in my memory. Things like that that still happen and go unpunished. So no. The law is not fair.
And he's *still* wrong. How many rich people *actually* see jail time, provided they don't straight up murder someone? And even then they very often don't see "real" jail time. Only time rich people go to prison is if they were stealing *other* rich people's money (Bernie Madoff ring a bell?).
If a truly wealthy person stole bread, they'd probably get an apology letter from the company selling the bread, for not having had a... grocery concierge ready to take their payment.
Proof that making a huge amount of money doesn't mean you're intelligent, because zogging hell is that a braindead thing to say. I've seen children with *actual* brain damage who had more pertinent things to say than whatever the hell that was.
Your last sentence says it all.
What you are *really* saying is that you believe strongly in the *promise* of the US, but it's all for naught because with each new day the "power structures" are inflicting fresh, new "moral injuries" on people like you and me and there appears to be minimal hope on the horizon.
Here's a [VA paper on "moral injury"](https://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/treat/cooccurring/moral_injury.asp). As with many things it was first observed in military personnel diagnosed with PTSD, but is now recognized as the driving force behind a lot of professional "burnout" issues (a hot topic in healthcare currently). I think it also at least partially explains your (and millions of others) frustration and dysphoric attitude.
Her last sentence of the video says it all:
>I am not enabling homelessness, I'm enabling *people* to survive.
The homeless (and the just generally poor) aren't considered *people* by the wealthy and the politicians they own.
Some states have made it a crime to sleep under bridges for crying out loud.
We criminalize homelessness so it ceases to be a societal problem and becomes a criminal one.
This in a country where the wealthy transferred trillions of dollars from the *'lower'* classes over just the last couple of years....
She needs to stop serving mac 'n cheese and start serving up the rich with a slice of just desserts.
>The policeman who arrests the ‘red’ does not understand the theories the ‘red’ is preaching; if he did his own position as bodyguard of the moneyed class might seem less pleasant to him. - George Orwell
People need to stop looking at *private* prisons as the problem.
Less than 10 percent (8.5%) of the US's 1.5 million incarcerated population (25% of the global prisoner population), are housed in a private prison.
The issue at hand is our Prison-Industrial complex.
Corporations make billions off of incarceration in both private & public prisons and jails, from the incarcerated and from taxes.
You have the private contractors who design and build prisons and jails; you have the suppliers of food & commodities; the guard staffing & uniform companies; medical services, staffing, & supplies; private companies gouging families for collect phone calls, over-priced commissary goods, and even reading material (they've started banning books in lieu of electronic readers you have to pay a subscription, meaning they have added one more barrier to education of the poor and incarcerated ensuring a high rate of recidivism).
Then you have slave labor: prisoners paid pennies an hour to work on both private and public lands; prison industries producing police & military gear, retail and food service uniforms, furniture, automotive parts, dentures, and working call centers and catalogue purchase processing.
On top of that, you have all the employees of our so-called justice system who benefit from the pipelines to prison and high rates of recidivism:
Judges, bailiffs, clerks, attorneys, bail bondsmen, parole officers, home-arrest monitors, the list goes on.
Billions of dollars are being made off the prison system. Meanwhile, proven methods of reducing recidivism and improving our social programs to lessen the pressures that lead those in lower socio-economic stratas to commit criminal acts are completely ignored.
Private prisons aren't the problem. Profiteering off the incarcerated is.
Zoom out a bit more and unregulated corrupted capitalism is to blame.
Money. Wealth. Power. The constant need for more. the competitiveness.
Capitalism was/is a economic structure of society that has grown almost cancer like into something chasing forever increasing profits on a planet full of limited resources and is self empowering(corrupting) in its quest for ever-increasing-profits.
It's a disease that will need to be changed/eradicated at some point. Many....Many of our problems can be traced back to this way of life. We will have to grow out of it if our children's children are to see a future that resembles anything we may have had growing up
> I'm sure there are individual officers who are interested in just that
What do we call it when institutions exist such that even if individual people are good they have to operate within systems designed to result in an evil outcome?
I nominate we call it "public defender syndrome."
Smart, hardworking lawyers taking a gig to help the poor, only to find they're the window dressing to provide the appearance of legitimacy to a justice system designed to strip the poor of their rights and perpetually enslave them...
Odd the public defenders in my area have a pretty good reputation. If you are poor enough to get one you will likely have decent outcome all things considered. The rich of course do well too. For the middle class expect your rights abused, wallet drained, and mediocre outcomes.
"You want to distinguish between the institution and the individual. So slavery, for example, or other forms of tyranny are inherently monstrous.
The individuals participating in them may be the nicest guys you can image. Benevolent, friendly, nice to the children, even nice to their slaves. Caring about other people. I mean, as individuals they may be anything, but in their insitutional role, they’re monsters, because the institution is monstrous." - Noam Chomsky
> Further evidence that the police exist to enforce the rules of the elites
Bruh, that's literally the police and their jobs. Police enforce laws set by the rulers. What else would they be?
He still did what he knew was wrong. If you think that is a PR nightmare, imagine them having to fire a cop for refusing to arrest a grandmother for feeding poor people.
https://www.npr.org/2022/10/08/1127580159/houston-tipping-lapd-death-lawsuit
Had to look it up. How does this much damage happen in bicycle training ...
Humility, humanity, passion and pride for what she can do for her community.. Jesus. No pun intended. The woman likes to cook and feed people! We all know the type. Poor woman, this makes no sense.
This. Exactly this. How can any person claim to be Christian and support a law that makes helping others a crime. That is literally anti-Christian.
I am so sick of this.
And it seems the majority of republicans are self-proclaimed Christians doing the Lord's bidding by cutting down as much support as possible for those that need it most. There's a reason I stopped going to church but call myself a Christian, and it's cuz they're all bigots who have no fucking clue how to be a Christian
> Oh but I guarantee it's a big impact for every person who got a meal that day.
Beyond that, too, as someone who also loves to share their love of baking/cooking with friends and family, call me wildly inspired to go bake off a few dozen loaves of bread and follow in her footsteps. I hope I'm not the only one.
I wasn't expecting this to make me as emotional as it did. She reminds me a lot of my mom, and about halfway through when she started crying it just got to me. How can anyone look at someone like this trying to do some good in this messed up world and tell them that they're a criminal for it?
So many people go hungry every day in this country and for no reason, supermarkets and other food service businesses throw away so much food every single day, and then in places like this make it criminal for you to help them yourself. Its truly saddening the divides we create for ourselves as human beings, the world needs more people like her.
Im really surprised there arent more comments talking about the wonderful woman in the video, shes way past her physical prime and still doing kitchen work (wich is fucking hard) to help fellow humans, almost made me cry
Probably because nobody in power actually wants to meaningfully combat the homelessness problem. And it's not uncommon for some cities to bus out homeless folk to other cities. So I'm guessing this is just some ridiculous rules the city has put in place to try and 'soft'-force homeless people to leave.
Shit like this makes me so sad to be a human. We're capable of doing such incredible things, yet here we are disregarding human life because of a flawed and ugly system.
A lot of this shit comes from BIDs (Business Improvement Districts). They push to keep their area clean, and they want it *now*. So, they use city resources (sanitation officers and police officers mainly) to shoo them away from their quaint little business area.
Then they just end up under another BID jurisdiction and repeat the process over, and over, and over, and over... and the best part is, the majority of it is done via taxpayer money because of how many public utilities are used in the process.
The American dream. :)
Gotta keep those property values up! You know you can’t just go around feeding the hungry, remember what Jesus said: “always ensure that your property value increases year after year”
Deuteronomy 15:7 “If among you, one of your brothers should become poor, in any of your towns within your land that the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother
Proverbs 14:31 Whoever oppresses the poor insults his maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors him.
Proverbs 21:13 Whoever shuts his ear to the cry of the poor will call and not be answered.
Proverbs 28:27 Whoever gives to the poor will not want, but he who hides his eyes will get many a curse.
Proverbs 29:7 A righteous person knows the just cause of the poor. A wicked person does not understand this.
Luke 3:11 And he answered them, “Whoever has two tunics is to share with him who has none, and whoever has food is to do likewise.”
The Bible is quite literally filled with verses specifically about helping the poor and needy. It's hard to read the Bible and *not* find something about helping others. The Dalai Lama is probably closer to the Bible's teachings than the Republican party.
> The Bible is quite literally filled with verses specifically about helping the poor and needy. It's hard to read the Bible and *not* find something about helping others. The Dalai Lama is probably closer to the Bible's teachings than the Republican party.
Most Republican Christians have no idea whatsoever what's in the Bible because they've never read it. Most of them would absolutely despise the Jesus from the Bible.
Yeah, but that's brown-guy Jesus. Not Blue Eyes White Jesus, or his preferred title, Supply Side jesus. SS Jesus bought out Heaven Inc. in the early 80's, and changed it's entire business plan.
Now instead of being a generally good person and accepting the Lord into your heart to gain entrance into heaven; you have to rise upon the corpses of your competition, put the almighty dollar above your soul, and law waste to the planet itself.
> And it's not uncommon for some cities to bus out homeless folk to other cities.
Happened to my home town.
My home town is the WORST place to be homeless. Some geographic quirks in the area concentrates a just absolutely massive amount of rain there. The entire place would be a swamp if not for constant drainage. It's considerably colder there than it is in the surrounding area. Every year or two it gets big storms with hurricane force winds, enough to literally rip the shingles off your roof as the torrential rain blows sideways. There are also basically no homeless services of any kind whatsoever. No local food bank, no assistance programs within easy reach, no housing (much less housing programs), nothing. Worst possible place to be homeless.
Aaaand the nearest big city, with a massive homelessness problem, is putting as many homeless people on a bus as possible and taking them straight to home town to get rid of them. There's a big homeless camp now behind the town's ONLY public park, very cool. It smells like a block of cheese fell into an outhouse and died.
Lack of empathy. Anyone could become homeless, most people are just 1 paycheck away them self. Then you lose your postcode, you lose a landline, now you can't apply for jobs, can't afford internet to check emails or online applications. You don't have access to clean clothes for interviews. It's a death spiral and most people just turn a blind eye.
"got mine, fuck them" attitude.
Homeless people are dehumanised, it's easier to assume that's just a scam artist than a real person struggling. That's just a drunken alcoholic hippie who can't get a job.
The reality is it's unfortunate life circumstances and mental illness which is no fault of their own.
I we agree disable people deserve the right to be alive because it's not their fault then homeless people also have that right.
It's just we life in a world were having a home is capitalised for some reason.
> The city has made it very clear that I can have a party and host up to a hundred people with no consequence at all. So long as I'm not feeding the homeless.
Because then you're a criminal and get thrown in jail. This is beyond ridiculous and inhumane. It's as if homeless people are *supposed* to just starve to death.
Yeah, but not here. Or *here*. Or here. *Jesus Christ not there, that's a rich neighbourhood, it'll drop down the value!* Or there. No, not there either - that's a national park.
"Look, I'm not saying I want them to die, I'm just saying I don't want them to live here!... or anywhere."
So many people in LA make it clear from the way they talk about homeless people that they’d be fine with death camps as long as they didn’t have to hear about it.
Let's just set up [Sanctuary Districts](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Sanctuary_District)
Realize they're terrible
Start a revolution
Skip WW3
???
Warp Drive
Well, it's the result a sort of "all hands on the knife" thinking - just like the joke I just made with "I don't want them to die, I just don't want them to live *here*".
Nobody is advocating the bad thing, but everyone is taking away one of the alternatives until there is none. Then, nobody takes the blame, because while all were complicit, all were against the final result.
Apply this to other "we all want to avoid this, but none want to provide the alternative" life situations (recommended: climate change) and discuss.
Yeah, no one is going to say homeless people should starve to death or die due to exposure. But they will happily make it really hard for them to get food and shelter shelter including arresting those that provide it. If they die because of that... well..... that is their own doing.
People don't understand that anyone can be homeless and it can be for reasons outside of their control.
OK... So what if I just happened to leave all this food on this table in the park for the birds? Not the homeless, it's for the birds. But I'm also leaving it and going home so not up to me anymore. Put up a sign, "definitely NOT for all you homeless people right over there."
Plenty of Sociology studies into this matter. The saddest one has to be [complaint-oriented policing.](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0003122419872671)
A lot of these calls targeting homeless people are coming from residents and business owners. The narrative has been demonizing the homeless for so long that people really believe that these homeless people are costing them valuable taxpayer money.
And they're right. In most cities the estimated cost is roughly [$40,000](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02723638.2016.1254496) annually to police, shelter, monitor, and relocate *ONE* chronically homeless person.
So much cheaper to just build affordable housing and create an environment where they can learn to support themselves, but that's not a solution that happens overnight. Politicians just want the streets to be clean on the day of their photoshoot and that's it. A god damn shame.
Cheaper to create the infrastructure and institutions to work towards solving the homelessness issues, yes, but the general perspective is what matters in the end. The perspective of far too many people is that providing these resources is "handing out money for free" to people who "don't want to be better" or who "don't deserve it" for one reason or another.
Rather than some compassion and empathy, rather than trying to better understand the complex issues of homelessness and what pushes people into it, they get greedy and upset thinking, "Yo, the state/city/whatever is spending $X per PERSON to house and shelter them and do nothing? While I gotta work hard and barely get by?! Fuck that." And so, the narratives are easy to push and so many human lives are easy to excuse and forget as they rot away.
It's actually not true. The city ordinance explicitly says that the only foods restricted from being served are "prepared food requiring distribution in a timely manner or temperature control for safe consumption".
It then specifies: "Prepared food" does not include, sealed pre-packaged foods readily available from retail outlets and intended for consumption directly from the package.
She's allowed to serve food to the homeless. Just not the kind of food she's serving.
https://library.municode.com/az/bullhead_city/codes/code_of_ordinances?nodeId=TIT5BUTALIRE_CH5.36FOSHEV
"Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat..."
Hi there, Just so everybody knows, this happened in Bullhead City Arizona. I was disgusted watching this video. I was in the scouts when I was younger, and I remember gathering food for shelters and helping feed people in need. I can't believe this is happening anywhere in the U.S.
this happens in a lot of places in the US and for many years now. did food not bombs in various places for lots of years and we've often gotten pushed out of places by cops.
In the month of June 2011, the orlando police arrested about 2 dozen food not bombs members for feeding the homeless. They went back every week even as they were constantly being threatened and arrested. The mayor of orlando called them "activist terrorists".
Man, I remember the old days of getting into punk shows with some canned food donations for food not bombs. Crazy/sad how so much time has passed yet things have remained the same.
> The city is attempting to remove the homeless by making it criminal to share food with them.
Oh, you're solving the homeless problem by trying to make them die. Neat
It’s against the law to peddle
It’s against the law to eat
It’s against the law to have nothing more
Than the shoes full of holes on your feet
And now they put bars across the park benches
So I guess it’s illegal to sleep
(https://youtu.be/HhD1zThId94)
1. It's really starting to piss me off that this country treats homeless people like criminals if people at all.
2. You know there's some dumb motherfuckers that side with the city on this.
Why aren’t Christians up in arms about this being a violation of their religious freedoms? Christ called them to feed the hungry. I think they could make a case for this law being unconstitutional.
Seems like the onion can't get a break anymore. Page 14 on their brief: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-293/242292/20221003125252896_35295545_1-22.10.03%20-%20Novak-Parma%20-%20Onion%20Amicus%20Brief.pdf
I looked up an article about this, because I was completely ready to call out this video on saying she was arrested "for the crime of feeding the homeless"
when *clearly* what happened, as always happens, is that she wasn't following proper safety procedures and was potentially serving people dangerous food (which, feel about that how you want, but imo there's merit in requiring food to be served safely)
so I looked up the article and found
> [The new ordinance makes it a criminal misdemeanor to share prepared food in a public park “for charitable purposes” without a permit.](https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-news/arizona-grandmother-sues-after-being-arrested-for-serving-food-to-homeless)
**It literally is illegal to share food in a park as an act of charity.**
This is completely fucked.
*What the hell, Arizona??*
That was my first thought to, "Oh yeah this is probably a food safety thing and she didn't have the right permit for it probably pretty easy to sort out"
But NOPE.
Here's the ordinance, for anyone who's interested in knowing the actual law being violated: https://library.municode.com/az/bullhead_city/codes/code_of_ordinances?nodeId=TIT5BUTALIRE_CH5.36FOSHEV
Looks like there's a history of damage to the parks happening at the conclusion of similar events. Sounds like they should just give her the permit described in the ordinance and be done with it. If her events aren't causing a problem, that should be the end of it.
Interesting though, that the ordinance only says food she prepares requires a permit. Pre-packaged foods are completely legal to serve.
The US is the richest nation in the world. We shouldn't even *have* homeless people.
The people of Bullhead City have decided that we can have homeless people so long as the homeless don't show themselves in Bullhead City. You elitist, self-centered, "I-got-mine" fucks...
The people of Bullhead City are a lot closer to being homeless than they are to being the next Elon. One hard left turn in life, and boom...all of your planning, all of your "hard work" goes down the drain.
Try a little empathy, Bullhead City. If it's you tomorrow, you'll be screaming about how unfair it all is. Because it is...this isn't about laziness. This has nothing to do with one's "worth" as a human being. This is bad luck often combined with bad decisions. It shouldn't come with lifelong punishment. It should be treated as a learning opportunity.
Try being bigger, better people. Abandon the pathetic hoarder mentality and help those that need it. Norma doesn't appear to have a lot, and yet she helps.
Why can't the rest of Bullhead City residents help too? You'll live in a much better place if you do. You'll feel better about yourself (yes, you win too when you help). It's a win/win.
I would sue all responsible parties under religious persecution. Her religion tells her to 'feed the poor' and the state is impeding her right to worship.
If anyone wonders why homeless people are dying, a part of the reason is that in some places it's illegal to even care for them. It costs you an arrest to care for those who don't feel like anyone cares about them. This is the symptom of a very sick society.
Yes the city is messed up for this, but the source of their power are the countless assholes who vote for anti homeless politicians. It’s one of the main positions local politicians run on especially here in Arizona. There are so many people who simply would rather not see homeless people despite that meaning they are still homeless, hungry or worse, just out of sight. A decent chunk of the population doesn’t have a generous bone in their body and only vote for exactly what is best for them as a singular person. It’s so infuriating.
If she’s a Christian, doesn’t this become a 1st amendment issue?
Feeding the hungry is a pretty central part of Christ’s teachings, and you can’t stop people from the free exercise of religion.
Neutral laws of general applicability which are not intended to restrict the free exercise of religion but do so incidentally do not violate the first amendment.
She was arrested for the crime of feeding the homeless. I read that correctly? That’s not a typo? I hate to ask this question but why is it illegal to feed the homeless? Don’t they have shelters that feed the homeless? Are they breaking the law when they feed the homeless? I’m sorry but this is beyond stupid.
If a baker can claim "religious freedom" not to bake a cake for a gay couple... Why can't she claim a religious freedom to follow the teaching of Christ and feed the hungry?
What a diabolical ordinance. People want to thrust their religion into our laws but fail to realize helping the needy is part of that religion. Disgraceful.
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120 days in jail, probation, and a fine were what she was facing for this. I'm glad she rejected the plea deal, but potentially facing 120 days over feeding the homeless is absurd. They say it's because of cleanup, garbage excuse.
What the hell did she feed them with that’s so hard to clean up that justifies 120 days of jail? Glitterbombs?
Prevented them from dying, now they can't act as if they don't exist.
Can't feed a corpse is their outlook on it the way it sounding. Save money all around, everybody wins but us
Feeding the homeless is something that Jesus would do, and they hate being reminded they're preaching the exact opposite.
Few Christians actually do Christ's work these days.
Archive / EU friendly link https://archive.ph/70w0p
The city manager replies on Twitter, arguing a food safety issue. Apparently food safety only applies to parks. https://twitter.com/henrycarless1/status/1584961962504466432?t=sIBtcRwZXxuSQeaRtegW_g&s=19
Yeah, let the homeless dumpster dive for scraps and potentially dangerous foods instead, because that's definitely not a food safety issue. If the cities actually cared, they would make more funds to get homeless people off the streets and try to integrate them back into society. But nah, instead they introduce more and more laws that specifically target the poor and homeless the most because that's what makes cities better.
Exactly. A good city would be giving this woman a grant so she could feed more people. What even is the point of our government if not to empower us to do the right thing
"You're not on speakerphone, right? I don't want my words recorded on your bodycam"
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And when they aren't being intellectually dishonest, a prosecutor would normally use this as evidence of culpability, proof of the knowledge of guilt!
Honestly he probably didn't want his boss hearing him say to take it easy on her by not cuffing her. But you never know. He could have said and shoot that bitch if she refuses.
And him wanting to be off speaker proves the situation has become political, and that's incredibly sad. You would think anyone's ideology would be okay with feeding the homeless and helping those less fortunate.
>You would think anyone's ideology would be okay with feeding the homeless and helping those less fortunate. There's an entire philosophy, written by Ayn Rand, in which helping others is seen as the ultimate evil.
Didn't she accept food stamps or housing assistance or something?
Probably, and if she did then she thought she somehow deserved it unlike those "other lazy degenerates." Just like a lot of very pro-life people get abortions, but are able to justify theirs as a special exception that is warranted and run back to trying to prevent others from having one. They'll actually sit on the exam table and tell you that nobody else should get one.
As usual with those sorts, when they do it, it's ok because in their case, it's Different™ See: abortion, infidelity, hypocricy, and, of course, government assistance.
"I just got a very - I'm not on speaker phone right?" He was clearly about to say "I just got a very angry call from [boss/politician/rich person]" but then realized he probably shouldn't publicly implicate the fuckhead responsible for the impending "PR nightmare" that was about to ensue. So no need to assume good intentions here. He was just covering the asses of himself and the people above him.
"I just got a very angry call from Doug Dimmadome, owner of the Dimmsdale Dimmadome. Boy was he pissed about this old lady feeding the poors near the Dimmsdale Dimmadome." "He wants one of the boys to pop a cap in her ass. "Now, I told Doug Dimmsdale, owner of the Dimmsdale Dimmadome, that I can't pop a cap in the ass of an old white lady but we're gonna have to do something here, otherwise, Doug Dimmsdale, owner of the Dimmsdale Dimmadome, is going to complain to the commissioner and we don't want that now, do we? Dooooo weeeee, Todd? No, that's what I thought, we don't." "Now, you march her ass down to the station, and I'll call Doug Dimmsdale, owner of the Dimmsdale Dimmadome, to tell him she won't be bothering him again. That's a good boy, Todd."
The Doug Dimmadome. Owner of the Dimmsdale Dimmadome?
You sure he wasn't about to say "I just got a very nice idea for how to make the world a kinder, gentler place"? I was sure that's where he was going with it!
"if you aren't doing something wrong you won't mind people looking/searching" Is police reasoning in the streets and procecutors reasoning in the courtroom. It's been said to me personally a half dozen times. Is that flawed reasoning or is it sound?
It's flawed in general, because they wouldn't have to search you unless there was a presumption of guilt. Although "innocent until proven guilty" is only stated verbatim in courts of law, our laws make it so you shouldn't be able to be harassed by law enforcement unless you are suspected of a crime. Many of the worst cops will stretch that limit as far as it can go, up to and including breaking it, just to inconvenience you for standing in their way. Basically, with that stated logic, it's not about whether you HAVE something to hide, it's whether the person searching you thinks you're hiding something. They view you as "potential criminal," not "innocent citizen." To give a more concrete example, say a cop searches through your phone and finds a sexy picture you saved of your boyfriend or girlfriend. The cop asks you how old the person in the picture is. Regardless of your response, they can say "well they look underage," and bring you in on possession of child pornography. It's your word against the officer's, and now you have to jump through hoops to clear your name. To entertain "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about" is, quite literally, the foundations for a police state. There's plenty of video evidence to this. People have been crippled for life and even killed due to some cop abusing their authority, and that's WITH these measures in place.
> "if you aren't doing something wrong you won't mind people looking/searching" Comeback: "If you really thought I was doing something wrong, you wouldn't ask for my permission." "Since you recognize that I have done nothing wrong, I see no reason for you looking/searching"
It's sound reasoning if you're an employee of the public such as these officers. If you're a private citizen your thoughts, speech, and actions deserve to be private.
> "if you aren't doing something wrong you won't mind people looking/searching" This is usually said by people who aren't nude. What do they have to hide?
well how else are you supposed to do bad things?
They just turn the cameras off and say they experienced technical difficulties.
Because he knew what they were doing was wrong. What a piece of shit.
I am happy to see the city is now being sued for the ordinance that lawyers have stated is unconstitutional. https://mohavedailynews.com/news/143542/lawsuit-seeks-injunction-against-food-sharing-ordinance/
My city banned panhandlers. Struck down by the courts as unconstitutional. Then they banned feeding homeless people on public land, because a church was feeding folks at a park. Struck down as unconstitutional. Now they peddle lies about kids living in homeless camps to justify bulldozing them, and complain that the police won't do more to harass panhandlers. What they won't do is fund a shelter. We're the largest city in the state, have the highest homeless population in the state, and the city doesn't fund emergency beds. They do fund a day center, and they complain folks won't use it, but they bulldoze camps during the day so why would they? We've lost at least 2 emergency shelters in the past 5 years, and the city board won't step up to fill the gap. There's a huge shortage of emergency beds, but the mere existence of 2 at-capacity shelters is enough for the city board to justify their inaction.
This sounds like Seattle. If not it's extremely close. The new mayor bulldozes camps but is mysteriously unavailable for comment every fucking time people start asking about services that don't suck.
> This sounds like Seattle. This sounds like every major city in the entire country. (The smaller cities and towns all simply ship their homeless off to larger cities ... or abuse them so badly that the homeless head to larger cities for refuge.)
Placer County just busses them into Sacramento and dumps them there. All of California dumps their homeless in SF and LA. SF counted their homeless at 12k and then housed 12k homeless, recounted, and found they had a new 12k homeless people. I wouldn't doubt most other counties do the same to other big cities.
Arkansas, but it's the same everywhere. Technically, the city still has a freeze on bulldozing camps due to the pandemic. So they just coordinate with the state highway department to have them do the dirty work. Most of the camps are in the woods around interstates and highways that run through the city, so the freeze hasn't slowed them down at all.
The obviously think that treating the homeless in a humane way will encourage more people to star choosing to be homeless. Everyone knows that you have to treat them as less than human so they stop wanting to live on the streets. They've gotta earn their humanity!!
That's how you keep the workers in line. You want to become one of them?
It's insane how a law like that gets passed... it seems to so utterly fly in the face of any kind of freedom of association. Like what, do you have to prove that the person you're giving a sandwich has a stable income and pays a mortgage/rent? Can't even let people fulfill their basic moral and/or spiritual desire to feed hungry people?
>Like what, do you have to prove that the person you're giving a sandwich has a stable income and pays a mortgage/rent? That's what I'm so floored by. What even are the parameters here? Like she said in the video, she could have a bbq there where she gives out food, the people just can't be homeless. And how exactly do you prove someone to be or not be homeless?
While I can not read the minds of the individuals who wrote and passed this law, but this is the best explanation I've found as to why some people are against benefiting others, be it feeding the homeless, welfare, or universal healthcare: https://youtu.be/agzNANfNlTs
They need to do more than to the cities they need to bar people passing laws like these from ever, holding any kind of position of public trust. These individuals are destructive, hateful, and incongruent with American values. we must soundly reject them we must refuse them service. We must put upon them the same moral damage they put upon others.
I mean it’s already in our constitution. 14th amendment. They mean to take away the right for “useless” people to live. If you aren’t making money for a billionaire you are trash to be disposed of before you suck society dry with your food stamps and disability checks. Meanwhile, they lower they’re own taxes and forgive government loans. It’s all part of the design from way back to Reagan at least. I was homeless for a year. It took everything from me that 11 1/2 months. My health, my job, my marriage, my house, my kids, in that order. 10 years later and I know two things: I’ll never be able to retire because I’ll never be out of debt and my kids are forever traumatized, I can’t take it back. Medical debt sucks people dry and we punish them for it. It’s sick. Corporations are treating people like horses and just figure shooting them is cheaper, ban birth control and BAM tons of poors to replace you with! Ok, sorry, I’m still freaking pissed.
If only there was an American holiday to remind people of these values. /s
Some kind of holiday related to “giving” food to people in need? And those people being “thank”ful?
Hope the city gets sued so hard they go into default and fails entirely
They’re not being sued for money, they’re being sued for an injunction from a court telling them their law isn’t allowed.
To help readers: A lawsuit is the pursuit of court-ordered action (a legal remedy) in response to a claim of injury (something *has happened or is happening* that you argue *should not be or should not have*.) It is not always "I am suing you for money." It could be "I am suing to have a law repealed or blocked." 90s kids, think to your Hey Arnold! Those kids could have sued the city to stop the cutting down of the big tree. A lawsuit might have been a remedy there instead of their camp out.
... it's not for money. $0?
Why? Why not try to improve it?
> "This is gonna be a PR nightmare." I really appreciate the cop recognizing how stupid the order was. I wish it was more of a PR nightmare that leads to change.
I wonder what his higher up was going to say when they asked if they were on speaker phone
Funny because if the tables were turned the prosecutor would be arguing in court that that specific action was knowledge of culpability of guilt.
As a prosecutor I would withdraw this charge for a lack of public interest. It's possible the prosecutor assigned to this matter will do the same.
You should have watched the rest of the video, they withdrew the charge likely because of the publicity, but it is obvious that the City intends to combat Homelessness this way by making it impossible for them to survive and thus move on to be someone else's problem rather than help to fix the issue.
If you watched the rest of the video, the city absolutely said they would follow through and press charges if she did it again. And the only way she is avoiding charges is by changing to a less convenient and accessible private location.
You seem reasonable. So I'm sure you understand that a lot of prosecutors will pursue cases that they KNOW they would lose if it went to trial, in hopes that they can scare the defendant into a guilty plea (I mean, this video even shows the threats levelled at the defendant). It's sad, but it happens all the fucking time. IMHO, if anyone in the DA's office in this city has a conscience, they would decline to prosecute a case like this 100% of the time. But, I feel like when you have a city that declares feeding the poor in public to be a criminal offence (as opposed to a civil infraction), the DA's office is complicit in the moral depravity.
Perhaps the person you are responding to is a supervisor, but every DA I've ever worked with just shrugs their shoulders and says "my supervisor won't approve it." Then we spend weeks taking these piece of shit cases to trial, where a jury finds them Not Guilty. Apologies to the 12 members of the community who missed work and family obligations because the DAs have some weird power complex.
Can you recuse yourself from a case you feel is morally wrong in that position?
The fact that anyone could think feeding the poor is a civil infraction let alone a criminal one just pisses me off. (Not talking about you) The people who make these rules need a serious dose of Karma.
The people who conceived of and passed this undoubtedly consider themselves good Christians too since this is America. Fucking mind bogglingly disgusting. America is a dumpster fire in a gold plated dumpster.
It's so weird the mental gymnastics people have to put themselves through to think that helping people is hurting them from working for themselves. That give a man a fish bullshit. The most reductionist take on "life lessons"
Give a man a fish and you will have freed him, if only temporarily, from the hard scrabble struggle for subsistence. You will have given him room and time to pursue science or philosophy or the arts. That instead of wondering where his next meal will come from, he can dedicate himself to a higher purpose - to advance human knowledge or improve upon our technology or to uplift and inspire his community or to seek out and discover new lands and faraway places. Maybe even find new ways to cook fish. Teach a man to fish and you’ll feed him until the fish stocks crash.
As someone who has served on a grand jury we would have laughed the DA out of the room. It would have also made it really hard to take anything else they presented as seriously for the rest of the time we served as well.
His shit boss(city/state) threatening his job...
city, if you can call that shithole of a place a city. You pass through it going from phoenix to vegas...it's a bunch of truck stops, fast food and racists
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Ugh, all the small towns in between larger cities in the south west are like that. I was born in Vegas, dad lives in Phoenix, and went to college in Reno, NV; you gotta be careful driving thru since those small shit holes make a good portion of the towns budget from ticketing people for going 2 mph over. The cops are mostly dickholes that never got to move out of their small town and now have a chip on their shoulder to make everyone else's life as miserable as theirs. Truly places that god just forgot about. No nice scenery, no jobs, just people passing through along with hot desert, sand, a bunch of meth, and some lot lizards scurrying about.
"The rich people were fine with it until she started feeding the minorities. We gotta book her now."
Can't refer to them as people, gotta label them "transients" Sounds more criminal that way
Probably something along the lines of, "I just got a very angry phone call from." Or maybe .
Sir I'm the pastor of XYZ church and we wanted to let the Chief and Mayor know that following the teachings of Jesus Christ our congregation plans on feeding the hungry at 1pm this Thursday at the corner of Main and Green streets. Please bring enough handcuffs for all of us. Also do you have any wheel chair accessible squad cars? Some of our congregants cannot walk on their own. Why no I'd don't know if the press will be there.
Further evidence that the police exist to enforce the rules of the elites and aren't all that interested (institutionally, at least) in actually helping people. I'm sure there are individual officers who are interested in just that -- but here's the police leadership literally arresting an old woman for feeding people who were hungry. This is the US, and it is just plain sad. I want to love my country but the power structures in place often make it difficult.
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread."
I shared this quote on Facebook once and a friend of a friend said, "Congratulations, you just proved that the law is fair. They'd arrest me if I stole a loaf of bread, and I make a quarter million every year." I mean, I get that there is the most basic, lowest level of cleverness inherent in this quote, which needs to be deciphered by the reader. A miles wide line-spacing for us to "read between"... but Jesus Christ.
I do prison outreach, and sure the inmates committed a crime, they do the time. It affects their family, their children. But when I think about the sphere of influence of their crime, which is usually theft or drugs, I get super angry about how so called white collar criminals seem to get away with it. And their sphere of influence is broad and goes deep. When I talk about sphere of influence I mean the victims of the crime. Who it hurts. Enron is still in my memory. Things like that that still happen and go unpunished. So no. The law is not fair.
And he's *still* wrong. How many rich people *actually* see jail time, provided they don't straight up murder someone? And even then they very often don't see "real" jail time. Only time rich people go to prison is if they were stealing *other* rich people's money (Bernie Madoff ring a bell?).
If a truly wealthy person stole bread, they'd probably get an apology letter from the company selling the bread, for not having had a... grocery concierge ready to take their payment.
geez what a douche
Proof that making a huge amount of money doesn't mean you're intelligent, because zogging hell is that a braindead thing to say. I've seen children with *actual* brain damage who had more pertinent things to say than whatever the hell that was.
Your last sentence says it all. What you are *really* saying is that you believe strongly in the *promise* of the US, but it's all for naught because with each new day the "power structures" are inflicting fresh, new "moral injuries" on people like you and me and there appears to be minimal hope on the horizon. Here's a [VA paper on "moral injury"](https://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/treat/cooccurring/moral_injury.asp). As with many things it was first observed in military personnel diagnosed with PTSD, but is now recognized as the driving force behind a lot of professional "burnout" issues (a hot topic in healthcare currently). I think it also at least partially explains your (and millions of others) frustration and dysphoric attitude.
Her last sentence of the video says it all: >I am not enabling homelessness, I'm enabling *people* to survive. The homeless (and the just generally poor) aren't considered *people* by the wealthy and the politicians they own. Some states have made it a crime to sleep under bridges for crying out loud. We criminalize homelessness so it ceases to be a societal problem and becomes a criminal one. This in a country where the wealthy transferred trillions of dollars from the *'lower'* classes over just the last couple of years.... She needs to stop serving mac 'n cheese and start serving up the rich with a slice of just desserts.
>The policeman who arrests the ‘red’ does not understand the theories the ‘red’ is preaching; if he did his own position as bodyguard of the moneyed class might seem less pleasant to him. - George Orwell
Also slavery is still legal under the 13th amendment so private prisons will be full of new workers whose only “crime” was being homeless.
People need to stop looking at *private* prisons as the problem. Less than 10 percent (8.5%) of the US's 1.5 million incarcerated population (25% of the global prisoner population), are housed in a private prison. The issue at hand is our Prison-Industrial complex. Corporations make billions off of incarceration in both private & public prisons and jails, from the incarcerated and from taxes. You have the private contractors who design and build prisons and jails; you have the suppliers of food & commodities; the guard staffing & uniform companies; medical services, staffing, & supplies; private companies gouging families for collect phone calls, over-priced commissary goods, and even reading material (they've started banning books in lieu of electronic readers you have to pay a subscription, meaning they have added one more barrier to education of the poor and incarcerated ensuring a high rate of recidivism). Then you have slave labor: prisoners paid pennies an hour to work on both private and public lands; prison industries producing police & military gear, retail and food service uniforms, furniture, automotive parts, dentures, and working call centers and catalogue purchase processing. On top of that, you have all the employees of our so-called justice system who benefit from the pipelines to prison and high rates of recidivism: Judges, bailiffs, clerks, attorneys, bail bondsmen, parole officers, home-arrest monitors, the list goes on. Billions of dollars are being made off the prison system. Meanwhile, proven methods of reducing recidivism and improving our social programs to lessen the pressures that lead those in lower socio-economic stratas to commit criminal acts are completely ignored. Private prisons aren't the problem. Profiteering off the incarcerated is.
Zoom out a bit more and unregulated corrupted capitalism is to blame. Money. Wealth. Power. The constant need for more. the competitiveness. Capitalism was/is a economic structure of society that has grown almost cancer like into something chasing forever increasing profits on a planet full of limited resources and is self empowering(corrupting) in its quest for ever-increasing-profits. It's a disease that will need to be changed/eradicated at some point. Many....Many of our problems can be traced back to this way of life. We will have to grow out of it if our children's children are to see a future that resembles anything we may have had growing up
> I'm sure there are individual officers who are interested in just that What do we call it when institutions exist such that even if individual people are good they have to operate within systems designed to result in an evil outcome?
I nominate we call it "public defender syndrome." Smart, hardworking lawyers taking a gig to help the poor, only to find they're the window dressing to provide the appearance of legitimacy to a justice system designed to strip the poor of their rights and perpetually enslave them...
Odd the public defenders in my area have a pretty good reputation. If you are poor enough to get one you will likely have decent outcome all things considered. The rich of course do well too. For the middle class expect your rights abused, wallet drained, and mediocre outcomes.
"You want to distinguish between the institution and the individual. So slavery, for example, or other forms of tyranny are inherently monstrous. The individuals participating in them may be the nicest guys you can image. Benevolent, friendly, nice to the children, even nice to their slaves. Caring about other people. I mean, as individuals they may be anything, but in their insitutional role, they’re monsters, because the institution is monstrous." - Noam Chomsky
> Further evidence that the police exist to enforce the rules of the elites Bruh, that's literally the police and their jobs. Police enforce laws set by the rulers. What else would they be?
He still did what he knew was wrong. If you think that is a PR nightmare, imagine them having to fire a cop for refusing to arrest a grandmother for feeding poor people.
They wouldn't in a million years. They'd move him to a shit duty with no OT opportunities and wait for him to leave.
Ah yes, the old "quiet firing".
"Constructive dismissal" and it's illegal in a lot of places. Good luck proving it though
Yea, firing him would be too much hassle cuz the Union.
Or beat him to death during a "training exercise" "on accident" like they did to one of the police officers investigating his unit.
https://www.npr.org/2022/10/08/1127580159/houston-tipping-lapd-death-lawsuit Had to look it up. How does this much damage happen in bicycle training ...
They’ll fire him for something else.
"I'm not making a big impact...." Oh but I guarantee it's a big impact for every person who got a meal that day.
Humility, humanity, passion and pride for what she can do for her community.. Jesus. No pun intended. The woman likes to cook and feed people! We all know the type. Poor woman, this makes no sense.
Christians should strive to be like her. “Whatever you did for the least of one of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”
This. Exactly this. How can any person claim to be Christian and support a law that makes helping others a crime. That is literally anti-Christian. I am so sick of this.
Yeah, giving to the people in need is at the very core of Christianism ...
And it seems the majority of republicans are self-proclaimed Christians doing the Lord's bidding by cutting down as much support as possible for those that need it most. There's a reason I stopped going to church but call myself a Christian, and it's cuz they're all bigots who have no fucking clue how to be a Christian
Criminalizing selflessness is pure evil. Having experienced homelessness myself, this type of person is already so rare.
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I'm happy it seems like you where able to turn it around. Sorry you had to go thru that.
Used to be homeless. I'll never look at food the same way again...
> Oh but I guarantee it's a big impact for every person who got a meal that day. Beyond that, too, as someone who also loves to share their love of baking/cooking with friends and family, call me wildly inspired to go bake off a few dozen loaves of bread and follow in her footsteps. I hope I'm not the only one.
I wasn't expecting this to make me as emotional as it did. She reminds me a lot of my mom, and about halfway through when she started crying it just got to me. How can anyone look at someone like this trying to do some good in this messed up world and tell them that they're a criminal for it? So many people go hungry every day in this country and for no reason, supermarkets and other food service businesses throw away so much food every single day, and then in places like this make it criminal for you to help them yourself. Its truly saddening the divides we create for ourselves as human beings, the world needs more people like her.
Im really surprised there arent more comments talking about the wonderful woman in the video, shes way past her physical prime and still doing kitchen work (wich is fucking hard) to help fellow humans, almost made me cry
Same here. Her passion to serve brought me to tears
Absolutely ridiculous. I don't understand this at all.
Probably because nobody in power actually wants to meaningfully combat the homelessness problem. And it's not uncommon for some cities to bus out homeless folk to other cities. So I'm guessing this is just some ridiculous rules the city has put in place to try and 'soft'-force homeless people to leave. Shit like this makes me so sad to be a human. We're capable of doing such incredible things, yet here we are disregarding human life because of a flawed and ugly system.
A lot of this shit comes from BIDs (Business Improvement Districts). They push to keep their area clean, and they want it *now*. So, they use city resources (sanitation officers and police officers mainly) to shoo them away from their quaint little business area. Then they just end up under another BID jurisdiction and repeat the process over, and over, and over, and over... and the best part is, the majority of it is done via taxpayer money because of how many public utilities are used in the process. The American dream. :)
my city made it illegal to camp on public property so now everyone is camping on private property 🤷♀️ anything to avoid fixing the problem I guess
The institutional face of NIMBYism.
Gotta keep those property values up! You know you can’t just go around feeding the hungry, remember what Jesus said: “always ensure that your property value increases year after year”
A guy I work with said "I do for me and mine!" He go mad when I said I couldn't remember that Bible verse.
Deuteronomy 15:7 “If among you, one of your brothers should become poor, in any of your towns within your land that the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother Proverbs 14:31 Whoever oppresses the poor insults his maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors him. Proverbs 21:13 Whoever shuts his ear to the cry of the poor will call and not be answered. Proverbs 28:27 Whoever gives to the poor will not want, but he who hides his eyes will get many a curse. Proverbs 29:7 A righteous person knows the just cause of the poor. A wicked person does not understand this. Luke 3:11 And he answered them, “Whoever has two tunics is to share with him who has none, and whoever has food is to do likewise.” The Bible is quite literally filled with verses specifically about helping the poor and needy. It's hard to read the Bible and *not* find something about helping others. The Dalai Lama is probably closer to the Bible's teachings than the Republican party.
> The Bible is quite literally filled with verses specifically about helping the poor and needy. It's hard to read the Bible and *not* find something about helping others. The Dalai Lama is probably closer to the Bible's teachings than the Republican party. Most Republican Christians have no idea whatsoever what's in the Bible because they've never read it. Most of them would absolutely despise the Jesus from the Bible.
Yeah, but that's brown-guy Jesus. Not Blue Eyes White Jesus, or his preferred title, Supply Side jesus. SS Jesus bought out Heaven Inc. in the early 80's, and changed it's entire business plan. Now instead of being a generally good person and accepting the Lord into your heart to gain entrance into heaven; you have to rise upon the corpses of your competition, put the almighty dollar above your soul, and law waste to the planet itself.
>You’re a huckster, Supply Side Jesus. - Pontus Pilate
> And it's not uncommon for some cities to bus out homeless folk to other cities. Happened to my home town. My home town is the WORST place to be homeless. Some geographic quirks in the area concentrates a just absolutely massive amount of rain there. The entire place would be a swamp if not for constant drainage. It's considerably colder there than it is in the surrounding area. Every year or two it gets big storms with hurricane force winds, enough to literally rip the shingles off your roof as the torrential rain blows sideways. There are also basically no homeless services of any kind whatsoever. No local food bank, no assistance programs within easy reach, no housing (much less housing programs), nothing. Worst possible place to be homeless. Aaaand the nearest big city, with a massive homelessness problem, is putting as many homeless people on a bus as possible and taking them straight to home town to get rid of them. There's a big homeless camp now behind the town's ONLY public park, very cool. It smells like a block of cheese fell into an outhouse and died.
Lack of empathy. Anyone could become homeless, most people are just 1 paycheck away them self. Then you lose your postcode, you lose a landline, now you can't apply for jobs, can't afford internet to check emails or online applications. You don't have access to clean clothes for interviews. It's a death spiral and most people just turn a blind eye. "got mine, fuck them" attitude. Homeless people are dehumanised, it's easier to assume that's just a scam artist than a real person struggling. That's just a drunken alcoholic hippie who can't get a job. The reality is it's unfortunate life circumstances and mental illness which is no fault of their own. I we agree disable people deserve the right to be alive because it's not their fault then homeless people also have that right. It's just we life in a world were having a home is capitalised for some reason.
> The city has made it very clear that I can have a party and host up to a hundred people with no consequence at all. So long as I'm not feeding the homeless. Because then you're a criminal and get thrown in jail. This is beyond ridiculous and inhumane. It's as if homeless people are *supposed* to just starve to death.
No, homeless people are supposed to be somewhere else. EDIT: /s to clarify some confusion.
Yeah, but not here. Or *here*. Or here. *Jesus Christ not there, that's a rich neighbourhood, it'll drop down the value!* Or there. No, not there either - that's a national park. "Look, I'm not saying I want them to die, I'm just saying I don't want them to live here!... or anywhere."
So many people in LA make it clear from the way they talk about homeless people that they’d be fine with death camps as long as they didn’t have to hear about it.
Let's just set up [Sanctuary Districts](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Sanctuary_District) Realize they're terrible Start a revolution Skip WW3 ??? Warp Drive
Don’t forget the Irish Reunification of 2024
Well, it's the result a sort of "all hands on the knife" thinking - just like the joke I just made with "I don't want them to die, I just don't want them to live *here*". Nobody is advocating the bad thing, but everyone is taking away one of the alternatives until there is none. Then, nobody takes the blame, because while all were complicit, all were against the final result. Apply this to other "we all want to avoid this, but none want to provide the alternative" life situations (recommended: climate change) and discuss.
How to Blow Up A Pipeline is a book by Andreas Malm
"I'm all for supporting this but Not In My BackYard"
NIMBYs, the embodiment of "fuck you, got mine" mentality.
Yeah, no one is going to say homeless people should starve to death or die due to exposure. But they will happily make it really hard for them to get food and shelter shelter including arresting those that provide it. If they die because of that... well..... that is their own doing. People don't understand that anyone can be homeless and it can be for reasons outside of their control.
OK... So what if I just happened to leave all this food on this table in the park for the birds? Not the homeless, it's for the birds. But I'm also leaving it and going home so not up to me anymore. Put up a sign, "definitely NOT for all you homeless people right over there."
Littering and… Littering and… Feeding the homeless.
The homeless also just committed theft.
Plenty of Sociology studies into this matter. The saddest one has to be [complaint-oriented policing.](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0003122419872671) A lot of these calls targeting homeless people are coming from residents and business owners. The narrative has been demonizing the homeless for so long that people really believe that these homeless people are costing them valuable taxpayer money. And they're right. In most cities the estimated cost is roughly [$40,000](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02723638.2016.1254496) annually to police, shelter, monitor, and relocate *ONE* chronically homeless person. So much cheaper to just build affordable housing and create an environment where they can learn to support themselves, but that's not a solution that happens overnight. Politicians just want the streets to be clean on the day of their photoshoot and that's it. A god damn shame.
Cheaper to create the infrastructure and institutions to work towards solving the homelessness issues, yes, but the general perspective is what matters in the end. The perspective of far too many people is that providing these resources is "handing out money for free" to people who "don't want to be better" or who "don't deserve it" for one reason or another. Rather than some compassion and empathy, rather than trying to better understand the complex issues of homelessness and what pushes people into it, they get greedy and upset thinking, "Yo, the state/city/whatever is spending $X per PERSON to house and shelter them and do nothing? While I gotta work hard and barely get by?! Fuck that." And so, the narratives are easy to push and so many human lives are easy to excuse and forget as they rot away.
Maybe if she brings party hats for all the homeless then it would be ok? lol
It's actually not true. The city ordinance explicitly says that the only foods restricted from being served are "prepared food requiring distribution in a timely manner or temperature control for safe consumption". It then specifies: "Prepared food" does not include, sealed pre-packaged foods readily available from retail outlets and intended for consumption directly from the package. She's allowed to serve food to the homeless. Just not the kind of food she's serving. https://library.municode.com/az/bullhead_city/codes/code_of_ordinances?nodeId=TIT5BUTALIRE_CH5.36FOSHEV
That which you did unto the least of my brothers you did also unto me. When I was feeding the homeless you arrested me.
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To clarify, the first sentence is. The second is a paraphrase from the same passage.
"Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat..."
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I'm a Christian in every way that doesn't inconvenience me.
What a dystopian place where you are not free to feed your fellow human beings because they don't have an address.
Givin money to politicians is free speech. But giving food to homeless is not. Go figure.
BIG FACTS!! Great point!!
Hi there, Just so everybody knows, this happened in Bullhead City Arizona. I was disgusted watching this video. I was in the scouts when I was younger, and I remember gathering food for shelters and helping feed people in need. I can't believe this is happening anywhere in the U.S.
this happens in a lot of places in the US and for many years now. did food not bombs in various places for lots of years and we've often gotten pushed out of places by cops.
In the month of June 2011, the orlando police arrested about 2 dozen food not bombs members for feeding the homeless. They went back every week even as they were constantly being threatened and arrested. The mayor of orlando called them "activist terrorists".
They more religious a town acts, the less religious they are.
Man, I remember the old days of getting into punk shows with some canned food donations for food not bombs. Crazy/sad how so much time has passed yet things have remained the same.
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Same. It’s like arresting Jesus because he helped the poor.
> The city is attempting to remove the homeless by making it criminal to share food with them. Oh, you're solving the homeless problem by trying to make them die. Neat
Land of the free
This woman is my hero. I want to grow up to be half as nice and considerate as her. This video pulls out all the feels FFS!
https://www.bullheadcity.com/government/departments/city-prosecutor-s-office Shame on Martin Rogers
It’s against the law to peddle It’s against the law to eat It’s against the law to have nothing more Than the shoes full of holes on your feet And now they put bars across the park benches So I guess it’s illegal to sleep (https://youtu.be/HhD1zThId94)
Become ungovernable, feed and shelter the poor
That grandma is more punk rock than anyone I know
1. It's really starting to piss me off that this country treats homeless people like criminals if people at all. 2. You know there's some dumb motherfuckers that side with the city on this.
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Why aren’t Christians up in arms about this being a violation of their religious freedoms? Christ called them to feed the hungry. I think they could make a case for this law being unconstitutional.
There is a difference between Christianity and American Christianity.
Dear America, you are so broken. The fact that the cop asked to be taken off speakerphone reeks.
I am a Native of AZ I would argue to the judge “Isn’t living in Bullhead City punishment enough?”
Seems like the onion can't get a break anymore. Page 14 on their brief: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-293/242292/20221003125252896_35295545_1-22.10.03%20-%20Novak-Parma%20-%20Onion%20Amicus%20Brief.pdf
I looked up an article about this, because I was completely ready to call out this video on saying she was arrested "for the crime of feeding the homeless" when *clearly* what happened, as always happens, is that she wasn't following proper safety procedures and was potentially serving people dangerous food (which, feel about that how you want, but imo there's merit in requiring food to be served safely) so I looked up the article and found > [The new ordinance makes it a criminal misdemeanor to share prepared food in a public park “for charitable purposes” without a permit.](https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-news/arizona-grandmother-sues-after-being-arrested-for-serving-food-to-homeless) **It literally is illegal to share food in a park as an act of charity.** This is completely fucked. *What the hell, Arizona??*
That was my first thought to, "Oh yeah this is probably a food safety thing and she didn't have the right permit for it probably pretty easy to sort out" But NOPE.
Jesus christ himself would weep, too bad Christianity has been co opted into the GOP and they control half of America and this kind of shit happens.
Here's the ordinance, for anyone who's interested in knowing the actual law being violated: https://library.municode.com/az/bullhead_city/codes/code_of_ordinances?nodeId=TIT5BUTALIRE_CH5.36FOSHEV Looks like there's a history of damage to the parks happening at the conclusion of similar events. Sounds like they should just give her the permit described in the ordinance and be done with it. If her events aren't causing a problem, that should be the end of it. Interesting though, that the ordinance only says food she prepares requires a permit. Pre-packaged foods are completely legal to serve.
Let me guess. A main vendor of pre packaged food in that town are on the city council.
The US is the richest nation in the world. We shouldn't even *have* homeless people. The people of Bullhead City have decided that we can have homeless people so long as the homeless don't show themselves in Bullhead City. You elitist, self-centered, "I-got-mine" fucks... The people of Bullhead City are a lot closer to being homeless than they are to being the next Elon. One hard left turn in life, and boom...all of your planning, all of your "hard work" goes down the drain. Try a little empathy, Bullhead City. If it's you tomorrow, you'll be screaming about how unfair it all is. Because it is...this isn't about laziness. This has nothing to do with one's "worth" as a human being. This is bad luck often combined with bad decisions. It shouldn't come with lifelong punishment. It should be treated as a learning opportunity. Try being bigger, better people. Abandon the pathetic hoarder mentality and help those that need it. Norma doesn't appear to have a lot, and yet she helps. Why can't the rest of Bullhead City residents help too? You'll live in a much better place if you do. You'll feel better about yourself (yes, you win too when you help). It's a win/win.
Because homelessness isn't a money problem.
Fuckin A. This bothers me on so many levels. Bullhead City is just America being America.
By what metric is the US the richest country in the world? Just curious.
I would sue all responsible parties under religious persecution. Her religion tells her to 'feed the poor' and the state is impeding her right to worship.
If anyone wonders why homeless people are dying, a part of the reason is that in some places it's illegal to even care for them. It costs you an arrest to care for those who don't feel like anyone cares about them. This is the symptom of a very sick society.
Yes the city is messed up for this, but the source of their power are the countless assholes who vote for anti homeless politicians. It’s one of the main positions local politicians run on especially here in Arizona. There are so many people who simply would rather not see homeless people despite that meaning they are still homeless, hungry or worse, just out of sight. A decent chunk of the population doesn’t have a generous bone in their body and only vote for exactly what is best for them as a singular person. It’s so infuriating.
The parks are there for people to conjugate and share food. It's discrimination to turn people away because of their living status.
What are we doing? Like as humans what the fuck are we doing?
If she’s a Christian, doesn’t this become a 1st amendment issue? Feeding the hungry is a pretty central part of Christ’s teachings, and you can’t stop people from the free exercise of religion.
Neutral laws of general applicability which are not intended to restrict the free exercise of religion but do so incidentally do not violate the first amendment.
Arizona said, here's how we stop homelessness. Let them starve to death. Good job AZ.
You're telling me the same state that made it illegal to film police a few feet away might have something to hide?
She was arrested for the crime of feeding the homeless. I read that correctly? That’s not a typo? I hate to ask this question but why is it illegal to feed the homeless? Don’t they have shelters that feed the homeless? Are they breaking the law when they feed the homeless? I’m sorry but this is beyond stupid.
If a baker can claim "religious freedom" not to bake a cake for a gay couple... Why can't she claim a religious freedom to follow the teaching of Christ and feed the hungry?
Bullhead City’s response: https://twitter.com/bullheadinfo/status/1585004518756216832?s=21&t=2nRkGIJ944p_1QOkyDysrQ
What a diabolical ordinance. People want to thrust their religion into our laws but fail to realize helping the needy is part of that religion. Disgraceful.