“Though Mr. Stinnett was simply waiting for his train, he was caught up in RTD and Allied’s systematic campaign to target the homeless and communities of color for increased scrutiny and harassment,”
"Leading with housing status for homeless people is a common trope in the news reporting business and one in urgent need of re-examining. In many cases, it is used as a rhetorical device to depict people experiencing homelessness as a threat to public safety, a common right-wing canard used to justify virulently anti-homeless policies and harsh policing of people perceived to be poor."
(If this sounds like an episode of Citations Needed, it is written by Adam Johnson)
This short [12:54] Vice doc from the end of 2015 is a look at the criminalization of homelessness, and the second half is an expose of Robert Marbut's grift of selling his anti-homeless consulting services to municipalities and business improvement districts.
On how BIDs push for the criminalization of homelessness using Denver's urban camping ban and Downtown Denver Partnership as its primary example.
For a book-length treatment of this and similar issues, I recommend Randall Amster's _Lost In Space: The Criminalization, Globalization, and Urban Ecology of Homelessness_ (2008) which examines the role BIDs play in criminalizing homelessness using the struggles over the sit-lie ordinances in Tempe, AZ, as a case study.
"It is those same government-funded charities that push the narrative that “kindness kills” as they tout for your donations. Do not believe them. Apathy and austerity kill. Your kindness saves lives."
An investigation into the practices of private security at Denver's Union Station and 16th Street Mall after four guards beat a homeless man in the bathroom and then tried to cover it up.
“I took one of the homeless guys I know aside in the town centre when I saw him and asked what was going on in St James’s Park and he said ‘We’ve taken it over, it’s ours now, we’ve got it for the people’,” he added.
- 20% of renter households in Richmond were threatened with eviction in 2016
- Of those actually evicted, the median amount owed was $686
- Judgments issued in majority white neighborhoods were far less common
- Mr. Desmond’s eviction calculations are probably conservative: They include only households that touched the legal process, not those in which people moved with an informal warning