Current State
Current State
Law enforcement agencies are weaponized to manage a myriad of situations they are not skilled or trained to manage. Law enforcement acts as and are used as tools of oppression toward communities of color (1) and people experiencing homelessness across service settings and living situations, including in encampment removals, homelessness outreach services, in shelter settings, residential settings used by child welfare, schools, and in and around supportive housing programs.
Each type of law enforcement agency in the United States has participated in and perpetuated routine, state-sanctioned human rights violations against people of color, children and youth, historically marginalized communities, and, most egregiously, Black people. Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) and similar organizations frequently seek to privatize public spaces and hire private security forces to engage in harassment of people experiencing homelessness that would be illegal if done by state actors. Police and private security firms, which are veiled extensions of the state-run law enforcement model, are therefore not trusted or suitable players to be involved in service settings.
As unsheltered homelessness has continued to increase around the country, cities are largely responding by criminalizing and over-policing people experiencing homelessness. Armed police oversee and manage the theft and disposal of people’s belongings in encampments and other unsheltered settings and more often disregard the basic unmet needs and human rights of the people they encounter.
Young people and people experiencing homelessness are routinely abused by police in specific and degrading ways. Police are often disrespectful of bodily autonomy and human rights; housing status and age are two factors that exacerbate the likelihood that police are abusive in these ways. Young people are often forced to engage with police when they are responding to behavioral health crises, evicting people from public places and encampments where they are sleeping or staying, and in service settings where law enforcement and hired security are present or the primary points of contact for people who are utilizing public transportation, seeking immigration status and supports, seeking services in shelter, attending school, and engaged in child welfare services.
LGBTQ young people who are experiencing homelessness have a higher risk of being profiled by police, harassed, ticketed, and arrested for behaviors for which other youth are not punished. LGBTQ young people make up 15% of the youth incarcerated in the United States, despite making up only 5-8% of the population of young people in the country, indicating over-policing.
An individual’s proximity to Blackness as perceived through colorism, texturism, and featurism shape how abusively law enforcement may engage with that individual, even a child. Children and young people of color are nearly twice as likely to be arrested than white children; Black children are 2.5 times more likely to be arrested than white children. The manner in which law enforcement and other authority figures engage with children of color from a young age shapes their experiences tremendously: Black children are punished at disproportionate rates in preschools and pathologized rather than nurtured in elementary school and beyond.
White people weaponize the police against people of color and people experiencing homelessness regularly, calling in police when no crimes or violations are happening and when people are simply trying to survive outside.
Criminalization occurs when behaviors of only a specific circumstance or set of circumstances are regulated. For example, camping is regulated differently as a leisure activity than it is as a means of survival for people experiencing homelessness. (2)
Police are used to disrupt the lives of people experiencing homelessness through encampment removals and over-policing near shelters and supportive housing programs. This is done at the request of people with attitudes commonly referred to as “NIMBY” or “Not In My Backyard” who are leveraging their influence as voters and members of the acknowledged electorate. Elected officials and police alike blatantly prioritize neighbors’ property and sense of safety over the ability for people experiencing homelessness to survive at all.
Standards of practice for police and accountability mechanisms have failed to create or ensure safety. Police often escalate or incite violence, particularly in cases where people are experiencing mental health crises or in situations surrounding intimate partner violence. Law enforcement agencies have remarkably weak disciplinary practices and policies for officers who violate the rights of community members, rarely removing officers from their roles following singular incidents or patterns of abuse. Law enforcement officers are very often protected by strong union contracts that are bolstered through reciprocal relationships with politicians.
(1) The current model of law enforcement and policing in America grew out of 18th century “Night Watches” and “Slave Patrols” led by white men using “vigilante tactics to enforce laws related to slavery” to brutalize and kidnap Black and Indigenous people who were fleeing slave owners. Police departments grew as politically driven, decentralized and locally-controlled entities with limited supervision.
(2) These are often referred to as “survival crimes,” but it is important to note that crime or criminalization are the legal responses to behaviors that a public system (e.g. federal, state, or local law enforcement) has defined as criminal. These behaviors, and the necessity for these behaviors, are not recognized as a direct symptom of structural systemic issues and social failures, but rather as a case indicative of individual, personal shortcomings warranting punishment and retribution carried out by legal systems and law enforcement. The criminalization of sex work, drug trafficking, sleeping outside, and other survival crimes are targeted, systemic punishment of basic human behaviors that could be addressed without arrest, displacement, or disruption by the police.