Mar 3, 2010, Vol: 17, No: 10
Last week, Seattle City Councilmember Tim Burgess unveiled his “Aggressive Solicitation” ordinance before the Downtown Seattle Association. The proposed new law is designed to address the fears of potential shoppers and convention goers while offering services to those in need. This law will do neither, and must be retooled to address the real problems that exist.
The law solves nothing fundamental. The Top 25 Panhandlers, as identified by the Metropolitan Improvement District, are mostly mentally ill people who are already in housing and receiving services. State disability assistance, at $396 monthly, does not cover anyone’s expenses. Services and assistance are grossly inadequate, even for those who receive them.
The law will be expensive. The law will result in thousands of citations that demand court and jail resources. The assumption of the law is that most citations will default to warrants. A mentally ill person jailed on a minor misdemeanor will, on average, spend 100 days behind bars while competency for trial is being established. The law will, without a doubt, create the need for the new municipal jail that most of our electeds – from Burgess to Holmes to McGinn – purport to oppose.
Forced treatment doesn’t work. The success rate of forced treatment that returns the addict to the pressures of the street is abysmally low. A far better solution would be to fund treatment on demand and appropriate follow-up support, or support a methadone treatment voucher program.
The law panders to and creates fear. The stated need for the law rests not on actual instances of illegal activity, but upon reports that the downtown doesn’t “feel” safe, as documented by various surveys that attempt to quantify that fear. Aggressive panhandling, the stated target, is already illegal under current law. The city only prosecutes about 10 cases of aggressive panhandling annually, and achieves a normal prosecution and conviction rate on these.
The law sterilizes the urban environment. The downtown is a diverse, dynamic environment of speech and commerce. Imagine a downtown with no buskers, performers, activists, or sidewalk and newspaper vendors. No panhandlers either. Pretty boring. Why go?
Free Speech is undermined. By defining aggressive solicitation as any request that potentially interferes with certain key urban-environment cash transactions, the law would effectively outlaw all downtown street commerce. Virtually any Real Change vendor could eventually be identified as in violation and cited with a $50 ticket for each instance.
We urge our supporters to join us in stopping bad law from being made, and asking the City of Seattle to more truly address the challenges that poverty and radical inequality create on our streets. For more information, email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
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