A homeless man in Indianapolis is suing because police chased him away from Monument Circle:
It's not clear whether the action was part of a recent police crackdown on the homeless Downtown.
"Officer Dittemore told him that it was now the policy of the Indiana War Memorials Commission to remove all homeless persons from the property controlled by the Commission and that the Executive Director of the Indiana War Memorials Commission and the Mayor of Indianapolis wanted to remove the homeless from Monument Circle," the lawsuit says.
The man wasn't arrested, but there was a clear implication that he would be if he returned. He apparently wasn't doing anything overtly illegal -- not aggressively accosting strangers for money or urinating in public -- but merely sitting there, looking homeless. People sitting there not looking homeless -- on public property, which we are all entitled to peacefully occupy -- were presumably not asked to move along. This amounts to a de facto charge of vagrancy, a legal concept that has fallen out of favor for good reason. It is one of those selectively enforced laws that are ignored for most people and used only to target those whom society dislikes but can't find a valid reason to bring into the criminal justice system.
Still. Before "the homeless" became embedded in the national consciousness, this country had a lot of vagrants, those who were "idle, refused to work although capable of doing so, and lived on the charity of others" -- bums, in other words. Those bums are still out there in great number, along with those who wander the streets because they are mentally ill or consumed by drug or alcohol addiction. But we lose track of them because of our collective need to think all the homeless are ordinary families destroyed by an unfeeling capitalist society. Is it too much to hope for that we can sort out the homeless factions -- and thus come up with targeted solutions -- without going back to bad and selectively enforced laws?
