Supreme Court orders arrests and fines for homeless people

The US Supreme Court ruling on homelessness will make it easier for elected officials and law enforcement authorities nationwide to fine and arrest people who live on streets and sidewalks, in broken-down vehicles or inside parks of the city – which can have a wide health. consequences for homeless Americans and their communities.

In a 6 to 3 decision City of Grants Pass v. Johnson On June 28, the justices in the majority said that allowing the targeting of homeless people who occupy public spaces by enforcing public sleeping or camping bans with criminal or civil penalties is not cruel and unusual punishment, even if there are no alternative options for housing or housing. for those.

“It’s hard to imagine the chaos that will happen. There will be dire mental and physical health consequences,” said Ed Johnson, director of litigation at the Oregon Law Center and the lead attorney representing the homeless defendants in the case.

“If people are not allowed to engage in survival while living outside by having things like a blanket and a pillow, or a tarp and a sleeping bag, and they have nowhere else to go, they can die,” he said. .

The case, the most important for homelessness in decades, comes amid widespread public frustration over the proliferation of homeless encampments — particularly in Western cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix and Portland, Oregon — and the unsafe and unsanitary conditions that often worsen around them.

More than 650,000 Americans homeless

An estimated 653,100 people were homeless in the United States in 2023, according to the most recent federal estimates, the vast majority residing in shacks, dilapidated recreational vehicles, and tent camps scattered across urban and rural communities.

The Oregon city of Grants Pass, at the center of the legal battle, successfully argued that it was not cruel and unusual punishment to fine and arrest homeless people who were living outside or camping illegally on public property.

Mike Zacchino, a spokesman for Grants Pass, released a statement Friday that the city was “grateful” to make the decision and is committed to helping residents struggling to find stable housing. Theane Evangelis, the city’s top attorney, told the Superior Court in April that if it could not enforce its anti-camping laws, “the city’s hands will be tied. It will be forced to surrender its public spaces.”

In the majority opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch argued that the homelessness crisis is complex and has many causes, writing, “With encampments lining neighborhood sidewalks, adults and children in these communities are sometimes forced to navigate around used needles, human waste and other hazards to go to school, the grocery store, or work.”

However, Gorsuch wrote, the Eighth Amendment does not give Supreme Court justices the primary responsibility “for assessing those causes and crafting those answers.” A handful of federal judges cannot “begin to ‘match’ the collective wisdom possessed by the American people to decide ‘how best to handle’ a pressing social issue like homelessness,” he wrote.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the decision focuses on the needs of local government and “leaves the most vulnerable in our society with an impossible choice: Either stay awake or be arrested.”

Moving people for health and safety

Elected officials, both Republican and Democrat, have increasingly argued that life on the streets is making people sick — and they should be allowed to relocate people for health and safety.

“If the government offers people help and they can’t or won’t accept it, there should be consequences. We have laws that need to be used,” said Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, who is California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s adviser on homelessness, referring to laws that allow the state to require mental health and addiction treatment, for example.

The high court’s ruling could further encourage cities to wipe out encampments and could force homeless people to be more transient — constantly moving around to evade law enforcement. Sometimes they are offered shelter, but often they have nowhere to go. Steinberg believes many cities will more aggressively clear encampments and keep homeless people moving, but he doesn’t believe they should be fined or arrested.

“I’m comfortable telling people you can’t camp in public, but I wouldn’t criminalize it,” he said. “Some cities will fine and arrest people.”

Advocates for homeless people say continued displacement will further endanger the health of this population and increase public health threats, such as the spread of communicable diseases. They fear that conservative-leaning communities will criminalize street camping, pushing homeless people toward liberal municipalities that offer housing assistance and services.

“Some cities have decided they want to fine, arrest and punish people for being homeless, and the majority opinion tells communities they can go ahead and do that,” said Steve Berg, chief policy officer for the National Alliance. to end homelessness. . “If communities really want less homelessness, they need to do what works, which is to make sure people have access to housing and support services.”

Arrests and fines

As they are dispersed and displaced — and possibly arrested or hit with fines — they will lose connections to doctors and nurses who provide primary and specialty care on the streets, some health care experts say.

“It’s just going to contribute to more deaths and higher mortality rates,” said Jim O’Connell, president of the Boston Health Care Program for the Homeless and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “It’s difficult because there’s a public safety versus public health debate” that cities are grappling with.

As homeless people get sicker, they will cost more to treat, O’Connell said.

“Stop thinking about the emergency room, which is cheap compared to what we actually see, which is homeless people being admitted to the ICU,” he said. “I have 20 patients at Mass General today that take a lot of money to take care of.”

In Los Angeles, which has one of the largest homeless populations in America, street medicine provider Brett Feldman predicts more patients will need intensive emergency care as chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease go untreated. .

Patients taking anti-addiction drugs or those undergoing treatment to improve their mental health will also struggle, he said.

“People are already being displaced and the camps are involved all the time, so we already know what happens,” Feldman said. “People lose their medications; they lose track of us”.

Homeless people die at rates two to six times higher than residents living in stable housing, according to a May report from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. Drug overdoses and coronary artery disease were the two leading causes of death as of 2017.

Feldman said it could become more difficult to house people or place them in treatment programs.

“We rely on knowing where they are to find them,” Feldman said. “And they rely on us knowing where they are to get their health care. And if we don’t find them, often they can’t fill out their housing paperwork and they don’t get in.”

‘Make Homelessness Worse’

The Biden administration has pushed states to expand the definition of health care to include housing. At least 19 are directing money from Medicaid — the state-federal health insurance program for low-income people — to housing assistance.

California is going big, pumping $12 billion into an ambitious Medicaid initiative, mostly to help homeless patients find housing, pay for it and avoid eviction. It is also dramatically expanding street medicine services.

The Supreme Court’s decision could end those programs, said Margot Kushel, a primary care physician and homelessness researcher at the University of California-San Francisco.

“Now you’re going to see disengagement from those case managers and housing navigators and people just losing touch in the chaos and the shuffle,” she said. “What’s worse, though, is that we’re going to lose the trust that’s so essential to getting people to take their medicine or stop their drug use and, ultimately, to put people in shelter.”

Kushel said the decision would make homelessness worse. “Just fines and jail time make it easier for a landlord to refuse you housing,” she said.

At the same time, Americans are increasingly disillusioned with the encampments that are spreading through neighborhoods, ringing public parks and popping up near schools. The spread is characterized by more litter, dirty needles, rats and human feces on the sidewalks.

Local leaders across deep blue California welcomed the conservative majority’s decision, which will allow them to fine and arrest homeless people, even if they have nowhere to go. “The Supreme Court took decisive action today that will ultimately make our communities safer,” said Graham Knaus, CEO of the California State Association of Counties.

Newsom, a Democrat who leads a state with nearly 30% of the nation’s homeless population, said the decision gives state and local officials “the ultimate authority to enact and enforce policies to clean unsafe encampments from our streets,” giving them end the legal ambiguity that has “tied the hands of local officials for years and limited their ability to take reasonable measures to protect the safety and well-being of communities.”

This article was first published by California Healthline on June 28. It is reported by KFF Health News, a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the main operating programs at KFF – an independent source of health policy research, polls and journalism.