A Simple Question of Right and Wrong

The recent amendment to the stay-away ordinance presently before the Santa Cruz City Council significantly enhances the police and park ranger powers to selectively bar those they deem undesirable from our parks and beaches. As a practical matter, this is nothing more than the latest iteration of a continuing policy to criminalize the homeless population in our community. And although there are serious questions about whether this ordinance meets a minimum standard of constitutional sufficiency, the real question is not one of civil rights or civil liberties. Rather it is simply a question of right and wrong.

We as a community are collectively wrong about how we treat people experiencing homelessness and in this political climate that policy is not likely to change. Because rather than addressing the poverty or the lack of adequate shelter or the hopelessness that is the public face of people experiencing homelessness, we have thrown up our hands and decided and that if we make the homeless stay away from their only refuge in our parks and open spaces, they will eventually go away. Perhaps a time will come when an enlightened approach to how we treat the unsheltered will become public policy. But sadly, it will not be today.