At least according to certain San Francisco hotels. You see, they’ve taken out ads on billboards which say things like, “Today we rode a cable car, visited Alcatraz and supported a drug habit.” Which, when taken with taken with the government’s current crop of anti-drug propaganda means that by giving money to beggars, you’re funding terrorism.:rolleyes: Yeah, right guys. I dislike obnoxious pan handlers as much as the next person, but I’m not going to claim that everyone who’s a pan handler is a drug addict, spreads STDs (kind of reminds me of Winston Smith’s “confession” in 1984, “I deliberately contracted syphillis.”), or is a con artist.
I thought they were commies for not participating in our fine, capitalist system.
Was I misinformed?
Please try to keep up.
“Communist” and “terrorist” are synonymous in this great land. And they’re all drug users, don’t you know? Especially in San Francisco.
You’re known by those you willingly associate with. Some homeless people take drugs. Therefore if you’re homeless you probably take drugs. Drugs are bad; therefore homelessness is bad; therefore if you’re homeless, you’re bad. Q.E.D.
I’d like to see a billboard that says “What part of ‘Feed My Lambs’ did you not understand? --God”
I was recently part of an anti-begging initiative in my city. This involved identifying the worst offenders and their reasons for begging, and supporting them in finding housing/places on detox programs. If they continued to beg after their needs had been addressed, the police became involved. It’s called ‘Increasing Coersion’, it worked very well, we helped a lot of people begin to make permanent changes to their lives.
So I got to know every single street beggar in my city, I’m now on a first name basis with them all. Our city is not atypical in the UK; 100% of our street beggars identified drugs dependency as their primary reason for begging. I knew one guy who was making around £1000 weekly (it’s hard to tell exactly, he claimed he made over £1500 but everyone inflates their figures as making a good amount is a matter of pride) and spending the lot on a drug habit. He’s now clean and back at home building bridges with his family. The majority (I’d say around 80%) of our street beggars were not rough sleepers. They were still homeless in the sense that most of them were accomodated in emergency housing or support hostels, but they weren’t sleeping out nights.
I don’t give out change to street beggars. I don’t get asked in this city any more as they all know me, and know I’ll give out cigarettes or perhaps be persuaded into buying a sandwich. I don’t give out change because of my job, and because I’d look like a huge hypocrite if I did. But I get asked this by people I know, should they give change to beggars, or are they just funding a habit? The answer is yes, to both, probably. You may not feel comfortable knowing that your small change goes towards the next fix. However, consider that most street people (in my city at least) have developed a criminal history, plus a need for their drug that overtakes everything else in their lives. If the general public don’t provide their drugs money one way, then they’ll do it another; all the beggars I know without fail said that they’d be committing crimes such as mugging or burglary to get their drugs money, if they didn’t have the outlet of begging. The women I know shoplift and turn tricks, but they’d all been purse-snatchers in the past.
So give your spare change to a beggar and think of it as an insurance payment on the contents of your wallet or home. If you’re not comfortable with this, support your local detox programs in any way you can. Or put pressure on your city council to come up with slightly more pro-active ways of addressing the needs of street beggars rather than just putting increasing pressure on them to go away.
re: STDs - Hep C and HIV are rife in this city’s drug user population. I recently had a needlestick injury at work, so currently have my fingers crossed every which way I can. It is a problem. So again, if you care, help out your local support agencies.
Potter, thank you so much for your analysis. This subject is something I’ve always wondered about and I’m glad to have your input. Good luck with your injury/tests/whatever.
Potter, that’s a very clever idea to deal with panhandlers. I’m curious… how many panhandlers are there in your city? What did this program cost?
We had 57 identified regulars, 40 of which were our main caseload. This is the biggest city in this region, but still, we’d barely make it as a town in the US, so the impact of those numbers begging in our city was cause for concern. My city is one of the primary centres for homelessness in the UK i.e we have a high level of homeless traffic entering the city from other parts of the country. The anti-begging initiative received country-wide press coverage, not all of it good, as nothing like it had been attempted before; we certainly forced our clients’ hands on various issues, hence ‘coersion’. The national press kept a close eye on our ethics throughout the project (which is still going on, I’m just no longer working with it due to a change of job) and not all of our press coverage was entirely positive.
The initiative was made up of five workers from different agencies and projects working together, we’d also liase with others such as direct access hostels and drugs support services. It was funded by both central government funds and by the city council, I have no idea of what it cost in the larger sense as that had nothing to do with me, but the project received funding in the tens of thousands just to ‘buy’ places on detox and rehab programs for our clients. Some persistant offenders who were refusing to address their dependency issues and/or carrying on begging were taken to court by the project and police combined. This resulted in a few people effectively being ‘banned’ from our city streets; after that, if they were picked up begging again, it meant gaol time. We worked on a ‘steps’ principle - first we’d identify a persistant street beggar, which was done by two of our workers who spent the majority of their time out on the streets. We’d then talk to the client. If they had mental health issues, we’d refer them to specialist mental health workers. We’d fast-track methadone scripts or detox and rehab in order to address drug dependancies. My main role within the project was to refer those who were rough sleeping onto specialist supported housing, and also to provide tenancy support once they were in; I also spent time addressing any problems the rest of the clients were having with housing, liasing with their hostels or tenancy support workers in order to give them the best chance to complete a detox and carry on getting clean.
On first contact, a client would dig his/her heels in, refusing to have anything to do with the project as they didn’t want to be forced into making such a huge lifestyle change. Once it was made clear that we were giving them a priority chance and all the support they needed to get clean and make a new life, and that the alternative would almost certainly mean time spent in court, most were happy to work with us and we had a lot of success. It was an experimental program for a limited amount of time, hence my part in it being over, but it received full funding to go permanent and other city councils around the UK with high levels of street begging look likely to be initiating something similar.
Sorry, Tuckerfan, I appear to have hijacked this into something of a lecture. The problem as I see it with the ads on the billboards linked to in the OP is that, like most other ‘solutions’ to street begging, it’s very much a ‘ignore the problem and hope it goes away’ ideaology, which simply never works.
No need to apologize, Potter, I’m glad to see that there’s folks out there taking a sensible approach to dealing with the problems of homelessness and drug addiction. I hope that more programs like yours catch on here in the States.