feeling fat and lazy

I'm feeling fat and lazy today because I didn't run. I had alarm clock issues and not enough time. Anyways, while talking with Kelly she told me to check out her blog and specifically look at a post from Friday with all the comments and one from today with even more research.

At issue is a City Ordinance passed in Las Vegas that makes it a misdemeanor to hand out food to homeless people in city parks. It's Las Vegas' way of combatting large groups of people who are homeless gathering in public parks. The homeless population of Las Vegas has doubled in the past decade. I'm assuming these people had been in Las Vegas and had homes at some point. It's not like all the homeless people in a bunch of cities got together and said, "Hey, let's all go be homeless in Las Vegas. That looks like a nice place."

So there's a limited pool of resources to address this issue. Some people including the Mayor of Las Vegas think the best way to use those resources is the employ police to arrest people for being in the parks before dawn or passing out food in the parks at all. This keeps the homeless out of parks so families who live in the neighborhood can use them with their children. In this scenario some homeless and some charity workers wind up in jail, others receive a summons. (A summons means the person has to appear in court at a certain date and time or a warrant for their arrest will be issued. They still have to go to court, they just don't spend the night in jail.) This scenario puts the responsibility for fixing this problem on the police and the criminal justice system (because that's worked well in the past) and burdens those institutions. This scenario also provides some relief to the families living around the park.

The other way to use limited resources to address the homeless population is to divert money into outreach programs that provide food and shelter and social service programs that can provide addiction and mental health treatment and employment services. This use of resources places the burden on social service institutions to provide services and public and private institutions to fund those services. (Because charities, social service organizations and government social programs sometimes have more luck affecting change with few resources.) This scenario provides relief to the families living around the park, and relief to the people who are receiving free food in the park.

It's very sad that people think it's ok to choose option one and punish people for being homeless. This is a community where everyone has to live together and look out for each other. The better option is the option that helps everyone, not just the ones with phones to call the police and money to donate to political campaigns.