Are there any places that do this? Arrest those with bad hygiene or smells?
Like, the person walking in a store in winter time that smells like dirty armpits, the store owner says they are creating a disturbance with the odor and police force them to leave or arrest them? Any countries do this? Random question but i’m curious.
Most places of business can exclude people they don’t wish to serve provided they don’t do so because the person is a member of a protected class. I doubt bad body order qualifies under ADA, though I suppose it could be a condition associated with something that was covered.
In your very specific example, I could have that person arrested. I could ask them to leave and if they refuse all I need to do is have the police come down and tell them that they’re trespassing. The police (at least in my area) will escort them off the property and tell them they’re not welcome back. If they put up any kind of a fight about it, they’ll get arrested for whatever the officer sees fit. If they come back, they’ll be arrested, no questions asked, for trespassing.
This is why it always boggles my mind when I tell someone they need to leave or I’ll have to call the police (happens a few times a year) and they’ll say ‘fine, call them’. There’s an almost zero chance that they’ll come out ahead. Best case scenario for them is that the police will calm them down and make sure they leave. If you did nothing wrong at all, say you’re just an obnoxious sales drone from Quill, cut your losses and take off, don’t keep going on and on while I dial. If you’ve done something wrong, like you’re drunk and getting rowdy in my store or you have warrants our, just leave, don’t keep going on and on while I’m dialing. You won’t win. It’s a small city, the cops will be here in less than 2 minutes and they’ll walk in and say ‘hi Joey, what’s going on?’.
My store is not ‘public property’, you don’t have ‘freedom of speech’ while you’re here. I can have you removed because you smell awful. I can have you removed because you’re holding your cell phone 8 inches from your face and the whole store can hear both sides of the conversation. I can have you removed because I think you have a stupid face.
Yes, some of these are just silly examples, but some have happened and the police have been called over them.
TL;DR, in general, a store owner/manager can ask someone to leave for just about any reason they want so long as it doesn’t have to do with a protected class. Once you’ve asked them to leave, the police will assist you in keeping them away.
I got in line at the bank last week, behind a woman who must have bathed in some kind of floral perfume. I mean, it was so strong my eyes were watering. I thought I was gonna have to leave and come back. There outta be a law…
In some cities, homeless people like to hang out in the public libraries. It get them in out of the rain and cold (at least while the libraries are open), and there’s comfortable furniture there. It easily gets out of hand, and libraries ask them to leave. There have been stories around (I’m thinking of Modesto, Ca.) of homeless people reeking in the libraries and being asked to leave because of that.
There is a Youtube video of a person excluded from an airline flight because he smelled so bad that it disturbed the other passengers. This despite the fact that he had purchased a ticket for the flight.
I can see the point of that . I’ve been stuck next to a smelly person on a city bus, and it was pretty bad, even though it was only 15-20 minutes. Several hours on a plane would be quite a problem.
I don’t understand people so odorous that it bothers others. How can they not know? Presumably if they can buy a plane ticket they afford a bar of soap. Do they just not care? Is there a disorder that can cause horrible odor?
On a flight from Sweden to the US, a friend’s daughter vomited all over herself and my friend. They were removed from the plane at its next stop in Chicago, put up for the night at a hotel, and flown the rest of the way home the next day (in hotel-laundered clothes).
I went to college with a woman who smelled like formaldehyde. She was from another country, and she didn’t shower for several weeks at a time, but I don’t know how that made her smell like formaldehyde. It’s a really specific and distinct smell; she didn’t smell like BO. She smelled exactly like formaldehyde. Her roommate was good friends with my roommate, and ended up staying in a sleeping bag on our floor for a while before she got the RA to move her.
It was to the point where the smell of formaldehyde lingered outside her door. We dropped hints that she should shower, but she wasn’t picking them up.
The RA sat her down, and finally told her outright that if she wants to get along in the US, she needs to understand some of our customs, and one of them is showering daily.
Well, she started showering a couple of times a week, but the smell had permeated her room by then, and she didn’t wash her clothes unless they had visible dirt, so she was wearing stuff from the “no shower for several weeks” period. She still reeked.
I have thought about this in subsequent years. It always sort of puzzled me that she smelled of formaldehyde, and not normal BO, and now I wonder if she had some kind of metabolic disorder, and even if she’d washed her clothes after each wearing, and showered twice a day, if she still would have ended up smelling like formaldehyde. I don’t know what metabolic disorder that would have been, though. I Googled once, and came up with nothing.
But it would have explained her behavior. If she knew she stank, and showering wouldn’t help, that would explain why she didn’t hop to it after the RA talked to her.
She withdrew after one semester. There are a lot of reasons she might have. There are some complicated language reasons that could have caused it, and I don’t know what her family’s financial situation was, how her grades were, her visa status, etc., but it could have been that Americans clearly couldn’t deal with her odor that might be due to a metabolic problem. Maybe in her country, people didn’t shower as often, so even if her odor wasn’t normal, it still blended a little better with the general odors of people, or maybe the metabolic disorder is common enough among people in her country that people don’t get to upset over it.
But yeah, people so malodorous that it bothers others-- I just assume that they either have an impaired sense of smell, or they have an odor they can’tr wash away somehow. I have been up close with homeless people, and while they aren’t fresh as a daisy, they don’t necessarily stink to high heaven, and you know they don’t bathe often, so when someone really, really stinks, so that you smell them coming, I really wonder if possibly they can’t help it.
Bad smells can often be in the nose of the beholder. One of the historical myths about the Jews was that they stank so badly that a Christian could be overcome and even die if surrounded by them in an enclosed space. Sir Thomas Browne, the Cecil of his day, refutes this in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Vulgar Errors, Chap. X, That the Jews Stink.
It may be cultural, it may be mental health, it may be educational, but arresting isn’t the answer. In the absence of anywhere else, I’d phone the NHS and have someone take them to the emergency room for assessment.
Like any sensible, compassionate adult would do.
From there, their GP could be contacted and the matter progressed.
Olfactory fatigue?
And if someone smells so foul that you think they need to be taken to the emergency room for an assessment what happens if they refuse to go?
I’m fairly certain I don’t smell bad. Granted if things escalated like that I’d leave on my own, but ignoring that for a minute, if someone came up to me right now and told me I smelled so awful that something must be wrong with me, there’s no way I’d go to the hospital unless it was in the back of an ambulance or police car.
It very well may be different where you live and I it could have something to do with the concept of calling the NHS that I’m not at all familiar with as that’s not something we can do in the states. But here it would go straight from “Sir you need to leave” to “I’m calling the cops”.
I should probably add, in case it’s similar to calling the NHS, if we called the police because of something like that and the police that arrived decided there was something wrong with the person, it would likely end up with the person being transported to the hospital and no arrest. Much of it would depend on how the situation played out and the local laws/policies. But we do tend to use "calling the cops/911 pretty loosely since in confusing situations they tend to show up first and decide who else needs to respond.
I don’t think most people realize this is really a thing. I know that I didn’t…until after I spent a few months painting dorms. A bunch of us worked over Christmas break - mostly the same crew who’d done dorm rooms all summer - and were painting a hallway when a couple of people walked through and complained that the paint stank. We all looked at each other, wondering how long it had been since we last noticed that latex paint has a strong smell, or much of any smell. It was several years before I could smell it normally again.
Great Og on high, that sounds wonderful. Unfortunately, we don’t have that option. Even worse, if the manager had the authority to take time to really help the person, and if he did take the person to the hospital, The chances are good that whatever medicine or therapy was recommended would be too expensive for the patient to actually act upon.
Our work weeks are extremely long, often 60 hours for someone in a retail establishment, and the commitment of time and money required to help a stranger like that is often far beyond the capacity of the average American.
Don’t know if he was ever arrested butthis homeless guysuccessfully sued Morristown NJ for banning from the public library. I remember the case and his body odor was cited as a reason for the ban which was later overturned.
Interesting note, concerning the public libraries. Now public libraries are government entities. And the OP was whether there are any laws governing human hygiene.
I know when I took high school government, they said there is a complex hierarchy of government. The US Constitution is at the top, because it allegedly takes precedence over all else. Next comes federal statutes, then eventually state laws. And at the very bottom, is policies that places like public schools, libraries and the like (use your imagination) have. Nothing to sneeze at, one of my teachers told us, too. Think of what would happen, say, if your kid’s public school teacher violated his/her first amendment rights. (It happens.)
I know where I live, Detroit, MI, the public libraries have a policy against particularly strong BO. But I suspect it is largely directed against homeless people, cf. the equal protection clause of the Constitution. (Yeah, they also have a policy against washing your hair and face in their restroom sink. Like some 68 yr. old grandmother from Grosse Pointe is gonna wash up in their sink LOL.)
Phantosmia could be the cause of some complaints about bad smelling people.
There are posters in the travel subforums who have said they don’t want to travel because they are so repelled by the smell of travelers on the bus. There can’t be so many smelly people to actually spoil a trip. I’ve traveled a lot, on low budget, and I can’t recall ever noticing a bad smell from any passenger.
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In fact, there are such disorders. Or at least one, but I expect there may be several.
Some unfortunate people have a mutation that prevents them from producing an enzyme that breaks down a certain smelly chemical. I don’t remember the name of that chemical, but I’m sure it’s not formaldehyde. (Or at least the one I read about was not. If someone gives off formaldehyde, I would expect it’s because of something in their diet.) Anyway, the smelly chemical is extruded from their body and they smell. Things like deodorant and frequent washing do little or nothing to help them.
I’m surprised, I didn’t know homeless people were an epidemic at libraries, I haven’t been to a public library in years (I like to keep all books i’ve read, have a small collection of about 100) though so I couldn’t comment. I understand where Joey_P is coming from, if I owned a store, I wouldn’t want someone with BO roaming around, that stuff sticks around (I’ve seen a documentary on this Seinfeld; “The Smelly Car” NBC, April 15, 1993) and doesn’t leave if someone lingers too long. I wouldn’t frequent a store or shop if it had a bad smell.
To go further, I looked up what RivkahChaya and dtilque are discussing and cannot find it, but i’m fairly positive I’d rather smell that stuff than body odor/pit stank. I’d rather smell a heavy smokers gross clothes, but BO and booze stink are the ones I cannot stand. I still really wonder if a country outside of the U.S. or Canada has laws against this kind of stuff and what the punishments are. Not that i’d agree with punishing people more than forbidding them to enter a place, just curious.
What prompted me to start the post was noticing the smell of being ‘unbathed’ at a friggin Target store on a couple people… I just would expect that to be a summer thing with the armpit smell.