Beside the Point

With a scant seven City Council sessions before year's end and then elections in 2008, everybody's feeling a little needy. Neighborhoods need stroking, property owners assuaging, "quality-of-life" harpies reassuring. The homeless need more than most. But they don't vote.

Despite disagreement on and off the dais, last week Jennifer Kim and Brewster McCracken continued their mission to expand the anti-solicitation ordinances. Ordinances restricting it on all roadways and near schools are now scheduled for public hearings and possible action Oct. 18.

The backlash started early. A confederation of opponents rallied outside City Hall that morning, but it wasn't until after a lengthy executive session (see below) that council took it up. A Kim-commisioned presentation from Police Chief Art Acevedo, meant to affirm her assertion that roadside panhandling is fatally dangerous, provided more questions than answers. Acevedo listed the city's 20 most active soliciting spots, rhetorically asked why so many crashes occur there, then answered his own question: "We have people on the side of the roadway; it is distracting." (So were the L.A. transplant's references to roadside produce vendors. This ain't Cali, dude – well, not yet anyway.)

With a causal link between crashes and panhandlers less than solidly established, Acevedo then cited 30 randomly selected solicitation cases, cross-referenced for prior arrests. The shocking results? Homeless have – gasp! – more run-ins with the law. Of the 30 in the Austin Police Department's pseudo-scientific snapshot, 11 had felony arrests, and 14 had class A or B misdemeanors. A levelheaded reading – whether the findings are statistically sufficient to apply generally, for instance – was ditched for Tales From the Darkside. "It's nighttime outside ... and someone comes and taps on my car window," creaked McCracken. "Who is on the other side of that window about 4 inches from my face? And we see half the people have criminal arrest records." (Once safely home, did he find a hook dangling from the car door?)

Citizens and council members alike shot down the spook stories. Mike Martinez noted that Acevedo's Top 20 list featured the city's busiest intersections. "I don't see how you draw [that] correlation," said Martinez, calling traffic and accidents "a problem in and of themselves." He also picked apart Ace's assertion that more than a third of 2007's 17 pedestrian deaths were people with solicitation priors. "It's almost like you are trying to say they were killed in the act of solicitation. ... Again, we don't have the data to say that."

Rebecca Bernhardt of the state American Civil Liberties Union definitively put the "safety" concerns to rest, describing several of the 17 "solicitor" deaths: "Five of them occurred between 2am and 5am, not a time when people are asking for money. Five of them were jaywalkers. ... One man was killed because he was asleep under a truck at four in the morning – probably homeless and probably not asking for money." (Bernhardt's full remarks, worth reading, are online at austinchronicle.com/chronic.)

Rationally discussing ways to prevent panhandling and homeless deaths would be useful – but a narrow, transparently political wedge-issue cam­paign is not only tasteless but insulting. House the Homeless President Richard Troxell suggested to BTP that if the council is truly interested in preventing such deaths, it could start by reviewing the 93 who died on the street in 2006. But that can't be fixed with public-safety snake-oil.

The proposed changes may have a rough road: Along with Martinez, Lee Leffingwell and Sheryl Cole raised pointed concerns. The city is scrambling for crime solutions, especially for South Cen­tral residents who have seen a spike and are upset. But criminalize further something policing alone can't address? It's hard to believe a fine means much when you're already begging on the side of the street. Or that a night in jail is much of a deterrent when you have no place to sleep.

The panhandle scandal was last week's only public excitement. Privately, council spent several hours in executive session with one item – legal issues related to the Austin Revit­al­iz­a­tion Authority – reportedly heavy and heated. Finally emerging, council extended the embattled agency's contract for 45 days but not before Martinez dropped a public tidbit. "We were given pretty significant information in executive session, so I want to give as strong a directive as I can that we need to come to substantial agreements that clearly line out the objectives to reach our goals in a timely manner." Ooh, snap – but what's the skinny?

Off this week, City Council returns Oct. 11 to a vote on relocating Town Lake Animal Center, certain to get the chambers howling. Now that we've sued on behalf of the cats and dogs – will anybody go to court for the homeless?

E-mail BTP at [email protected].