Jail, perhaps, if your municipality gets serious about “no panhandling” laws, and attacks the supply as well as the demand.
Would it be a dickish move to pass out Jack Chick tracts to panhandlers?..You want help - here you go, read this. It might change your life. Jesus saves. Have a nice day.
Yep, worse than giving trick-or-treaters fruit or other healthy snacks when they’re expecting candy. 
No panhandlers where I live. But the coyotes and owls are definitely getting worse.
To someone upthread who said many homeless people are on the street because they won’t keep the rules of the shelters, some of them CAN’T keep the rules. There are drug addicts and alcoholics who aint keepin’ them rules, no matter how hard they try. Mentally ill patients who be like, “what rules?” and women who are being stalked out and beaten by boyfriends who WISH they could make curfew. There are just so many factors that weigh in by the time a person gets to the point where they are fucked up enough to be homeless and out there begging. It’s just not human nature to live at the bottom on purpose, just because you are lazy or selfish or whatever. Most people want to do well enough in life to have a warm home, good food, and safety from the elements. Even I, every morning, fights the demon of “get up”. I literally press my face in the pillow and ask myself do I want to push myself another day through the grind, tear my body from the bed at an ungodly hour to eek out a living. Of course I do it. So far, I’ve done it. But I can imagine the things that could jump in a situation to make me break. I can see how maybe an illness in my fam might push me to drink or some coping shit, and next thing I know, I don’t have the oomph to keep my damn self off the street. I try to consider that shit.
I don’t knock others who don’t give, but I try to give. I really try hard to give to women on the street. I carry bags of goods for homeless women. Pads, flip flops, soap, lotion, toothpaste and brush, metro card, snack and I try to throw in a buck. If they are aggressive, angry, tired, slick, conning, lying, addicted. Whatever their malfunction is, it is their demon to fight. I’m just trying to help out. The idea that I’m enabling them is just crazy to me. So is someone who gives them a job enabling them, since they are addicted and will spend the pay on drugs? Are my friends enabling my fat ass when they make me dessert? I’m not their goddamn spouse tying off their arm. I’m a stranger giving a buck, and if they get some wine, so be it. No one blinks an eye when Sharon in marketing takes a Valium to cope with her shit, so I’m not gonna play at that.
I know that everyone has the right to deal with these things as they see fit, but BOY OH BOY let me tell you, the city is hard, concrete unforgiving, winters cold, competition scarce, resources limited and I just want to make any gesture I can to say, "If people suffer, let me try to find some way to give a comfort, and when I suffer, thank goodness for the ones who comfort me on the most grass root level. The dirty, grimy, rock bottom level. We all play our positions in humanity, but I do have a soft spot for those who try to look out for the people on the bottom and I’m gonna try to be like them. But don’t mind my maudlin rambles too much. This is one of those topics that gets me right in the feels, that’s all.
Let me start off by saying I agree wholeheartedly with everything you’ve said here. The only thing I want to add is that another reason those who’ve become homeless might become belligerent and not follow the rules of homeless shelters has to do with a need to hold on to the only things they have left. A need to maintain a sense of dignity and agency. No, it by no means accounts for most of the homeless population not in shelters. But it does account for some. And it is very understandable, IMHO.
I’ve often considered performing a preemptive strike: See a panhandler, ask him for spare change before he gets a chance to ask you.
mmm
I rarely go into downtown Baltimore anymore, but when I did, there was a sort of dance. The beggar would make eye contact, and ask for money. I’d reply, “No”, to which they’d reply, “Aw, come ON!”.
After enough of those encounters, I apparently had developed body language which made it clear I wasn’t going to cough up, and the beggars would pick up on it. The initial eye contact would now be accompanied by the post-refusal, “Aw, come ON!”
I wish I knew more about the criteria beggars use to target their customers (or are we clients?) I often seem to attract them. I presume it helps to be big and menacing, neither of which I am. But I’m usually in old t-shirts and jeans, so it’s not like I’m dripping wealth either. I’ve sometimes been tempted to offer them money in exchange for information along these lines, but that goes against my intention not to enable them. I could always renege after getting the information, but that would be dickish.
Mr. Mustard’s idea of pre-empting them is intriguing.
Suburbs south of Los Angeles. They are everywhere here. Every shopping center, donut shop, intersection, bank. You can’t go anywhere. They seem to have clamped down on the more aggressive ones as I have not been seeing any of them for a few years now and when they do pop up they don’t last long.
It couldn’t become too popular however because then you’d get a sting operation where an undercover “beggar” would turn around and arrest you for panhandling!
Come to Phoenix in the winter!! We’ve got great weather!! The panhandlers sure do-huge uptick in their numbers in the winter. And leaving when the asphalt gets damn hot in 115 degree weather.
A freeway exit near my house has become a target for organized panhandling. It’s always the same crew of guys, and I’ve seen the “shift-change” where a guy relieves the original panhandler who hands over the cup and sign. The local semi-homeless guy is part of the crew.
Very weird.
I don’t want to appear to be a total callous person, I have compassion, I support local charities, and I prefer to give that way.
However, I will fully admit, that my first reaction to some of these situations I witness is, “Wow, is it really necessary for these people to be out here doing this, like this?”
For instance, I saw an entire family, Dad, Mom, 3 kids and a dog, sitting on a sidewalk curb in the hot sun at a crowded Truck Stop with their sign saying they are homeless and asking for money. They all appeared able-bodied. They weren’t being outwardly aggressive, but plopping yourself down right where everyone has to walk past you and your kids and dog? That’s sorta passive-aggressive. I mean, yeah, it causes a whole jumble of emotion in me, everything from embarrassment for them to guilt for my own decent life, to low-level anger & frustration at them and our messed up system.
I am feeling all of that, while in my own head I am thinking “Aren’t there agencies and other places such as churches they can go that will help them? Especially when there are children involved? They don’t have to be out here begging like this.”
Maybe I am rationalizing, but it seems so cruel to put children and pets through that, and it does make me pissed at the adults doing it. If an adult wants to panhandle that is their choice, but seeing kids and pets involved makes me want to call the authorities.
So if they think dragging their children and pets into it is going to loosen my wallet, it just has the reverse effect on me, cuz I get mad at the adult.
Actually I’ve noticed fewer in my city, certainly not “in your face” like they were a number of years ago.
I’ve also noticed fewer in downtown Toronto - just people sitting with a cup instead of aggressively asking you for money. In 1989 I was 15 and went to “the big city” for a day and couldn’t believe how many times I was asked for money. By grown-ass adults too. That’s what pisses me off, when a grown adult asks a child for money.
Last week in Las Vegas, I saw several people holding signs with variations of “Why Lie, I need beer money”. So this tactic is already being used.
Hopefully an Aussie will chime in. When I was in Sydney recently I was amazed at how elaborate some of the homeless/panhandlers’ home bases were. I saw set-ups that looked like little studio apartments erected on a busy urban sidewalk. I’m talking a mattress, a little bedside table, a stack of clothes, other personal items.
One even had a spare change bucket, left unattended. Don’t know where the ‘homeowner’ was, maybe out for the day.
mmm