Badges - Re: The Professional Panhandling Plague

  • From: C D Rowsell <cd2u@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <badges@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 4 Nov 2011 22:03:05 -0700

Cue not queue…guess I have been standing in too many lines lately…
 
From: badges-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:badges-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On 
Behalf Of C D Rowsell
Sent: Friday, November 04, 2011 8:47 PM
To: badges@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Badges - Re: The Professional Panhandling Plague
 
More like off the left wing cliff. You give me ANY group of people and I can 
find some that are in the group but have different needs than the group as a 
whole. Basically, she is saying maybe 6% are not scammers. So what? That in no 
way excuses the other 94%. Interestingly, I did the same thing as you Cheri and 
turned it off as soon as she started in. Actually, when they brought her on 
screen I found myself immediately profiling her based on her clothing and 
jewelry. Right on queue she worked her way into the BS. Right on queue I closed 
the window. 
 
CD
 
From: badges-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:badges-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On 
Behalf Of Cheri
Sent: Friday, November 04, 2011 7:35 PM
To: badges@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Badges - Re: The Professional Panhandling Plague
 
I liked that piece until the ministries woman said mixed in with the scam 
artists were some truly needy types, thus making me realize, yet again, how the 
liberal f***in’ media will turn any story into a left-wing slant, and I stopped 
watching.
Cheri
 
From: badges-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:badges-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On 
Behalf Of CarlGlas
Sent: Thursday, November 03, 2011 8:34 PM
To: badges@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Badges - Re: The Professional Panhandling Plague
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbF5WC8YHEo
 
 
----- Original Message ----- 
From: Christopher Karney <mailto:chk8093@xxxxxxx>  
To: badges@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
Cc:  <mailto:badges@xxxxxxxxxxxxx%3e> <badges@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
Sent: Thursday, November 03, 2011 9:49 PM
Subject: Badges - Re: The Professional Panhandling Plague
 
I used to deal with one beggar that drove in from a rich suburb in a fairly new 
Lincoln Town Car, park it a few blocks away, do a quick change into poor 
clothes and easily clear 300-400 bux during one of his shifts.
 
after locking him up for interfering with traffic flow a few times in one week, 
I finally got him 15 days od county jail  time for violation of bail 
bond......I never saw him again.

Sent from my iPhone

On Nov 3, 2011, at 21:08, "Cheri" <vibrant1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Great article! This has been one of my pet peeves for decades. I get annoyed 
every time I see someone forking over money to a panhandler. It used to drive 
me crazy when I worked downtown. 
Cheri
Los Angeles
From: badges-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:badges-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On 
Behalf Of CarlGlas@xxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Thursday, November 03, 2011 6:35 PM
To: badges@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Badges - The Professional Panhandling Plague
The Professional Panhandling Plague
A new generation of shakedown artists hampers America’s urban revival.
 Charlie's blunt approach to begging is in vogue across the coun 
<http://www.city-journal.org/assets/images/18_3-sm.jpg> 
Mario Tama/Getty Images
Charlie’s blunt approach to begging is in vogue across the country­and it 
actually works.


Barbara Bradley, an editor with the Memphis Commercial Appeal, moved into the 
River City’s reviving downtown about a year and a half ago, loving its “energy 
and enthusiasm.” But a horde of invading panhandlers has cooled her enjoyment 
of city life. Earlier this year, she recalled in a recent column, as she showed 
some visitors around the neighborhood, “a big panhandler blocked the entrance 
to our parking area and demanded his toll.” Now a nervous Bradley avoids 
certain downtown areas, locks her car when fueling up at local gas stations, 
and parks strategically, so that she can see beggars coming before getting out 
of her car. “When I hear someone call out ‘ma’am, ma’am’ anywhere in downtown 
or midtown, I run.”

She’s not alone. Cities have overcome myriad obstacles in revitalizing their 
downtowns, from lousy transportation systems to tough competition from suburban 
shopping malls. But nearly 15 years after New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani 
and his police chief, William Bratton, vanquished Gotham’s notorious squeegee 
men and brought aggressive panhandling under control, other cities are facing a 
new wave of “spangers” (that is, spare-change artists) who threaten their 
newfound prosperity by harassing residents, tourists, and businesses. Unlike 
their predecessors in the seventies and eighties, many of these new beggars 
aren’t helpless victims or even homeless. Rather, they belong to a diverse and 
swelling community of street people who have made panhandling their calling.

Like most countries, America has always had its share of itinerant travelers, 
vagabonds, and hoboes. But panhandling became a more pervasive and disturbing 
fact of urban life in the 1970s­a by-product of the explosion in homelessness 
that resulted from rising drug use and the closing of state-run mental 
institutions, which released scores of helpless psychiatric patients back into 
society. Though studies showed that only a small percentage of homeless people 
panhandled­mostly alcoholics and drug addicts seeking their next fix­the sheer 
numbers of street people still meant lots of beggars. By the crack epidemic’s 
late-eighties peak, New York City in particular was home to a massive 
panhandling presence. A 1988 survey by New York’s Metropolitan Transportation 
Authority found that 80 percent of subway riders disliked the constant 
harassment. “I was raised never to pass a beggar by, but there are too many of 
them and I’m sick of it,” one Manhattanite told the New York Times. “I feel 
like this is becoming beggar city.”

The problem soon turned from irritating to alarming in “beggar city,” as 
incidents of aggressive panhandling leading to violent crime began showing up 
regularly in the headlines. In 1988, an itinerant panhandler on Manhattan’s 
Upper West Side murdered his girlfriend’s three-year-old daughter, whose dead 
body he then stuffed into a baby carriage and took out on his rounds, along 
with the girl’s still-living brother. A year later, an aggressive panhandler 
stabbed to death a 32-year-old computer engineer in a confrontation on West 
114th Street in Manhattan. Shortly after, in the Bronx, an 18-year-old boy died 
from stab wounds inflicted by a panhandling immigrant who knew just four 
English words: “Give me a dollar!”

The escalation­and other cities faced it, too­shouldn’t have been surprising. 
“If the neighborhood cannot keep a bothersome panhandler from annoying 
passersby . . . it is even less likely to call the police to identify a 
potential mugger or to interfere if a mugging actually takes place,” wrote 
political scientist James Q. Wilson. One change in policing that had 
contributed to the growing disorder, observed Wilson, was curtailing foot 
patrols in favor of squad cars. In the past, an officer on the beat would 
discourage panhandlers; now he just drove on by.

New York, fed up with the disorder, began to crack down on panhandling in the 
early nineties. The effort started in the subways, spearheaded by the 
Bratton-led Metropolitan Transit Authority police, who combined policing with 
outreach efforts for homeless beggars willing to come in off the streets. The 
cleanup continued when Bratton became Giuliani’s first police commissioner in 
1994 and took on the squeegee men­insistent panhandlers who intimidated 
Manhattan drivers by washing their car windows and then demanding payment. 
After a study by criminologist George Kelling found that three-quarters of the 
squeegee men weren’t homeless and that half had felony records, cops began 
arresting them for blocking traffic. That put an end to the shakedowns in a 
matter of weeks.

The city then extended the anti-panhandling campaign to other parts of the 
city, including beggar-dominated Times Square. Central to the crackdown was the 
Midtown Community Court, an experimental judicial body to which police could 
drag quality-of-life arrestees the very day they issued citations. Working with 
social-services providers who offered help to those needing it, the court acted 
with lightning speed, usually giving community-service sentences to those 
willing to plead guilty to misdemeanor charges, so that someone arrested for 
panhandling in the morning could be cleaning the neighborhood by the afternoon. 
The immediate results gave police a strong incentive to enforce the city’s 
long-moribund quality-of-life statutes; previously, if an officer issued a 
quality-of-life citation, the panhandler had a month or longer to respond to 
the summons and often didn’t show up in court on the appointed day. As with the 
subways and the squeegee men, the campaign was a huge success.

Other cities, following New York’s lead, worked to reduce their own (much less 
severe) panhandling blight during the nineties­adopting community courts, 
forcing beggars to register for licenses (which discouraged them), and passing 
new anti-panhandling laws. These measures, though rarely as tough as Gotham’s, 
helped spark new development and interest in downtown districts across the 
country.

But over the last several years, the urban resurgence has proved an 
irresistible draw to a new generation of spangers. And while New York City’s 
aggressive emphasis on quality-of-life policing under two successive mayors has 
kept them at bay, less vigilant cities have been overwhelmed. Indeed, 
panhandling is epidemic in many places­from cities like San Francisco, Seattle, 
Austin, Memphis, Orlando, and Albuquerque to smaller college towns like 
Berkeley. “People in New York would be shocked at what one encounters in other 
cities these days, where the panhandling can be very intimidating,” says Daniel 
Biederman, a cofounder of three business improvement districts in Manhattan, 
including the Grand Central Partnership, which grappled effectively with 
homelessness in the city’s historic train station in the early 1990s. 
“Panhandling has gotten especially bad in cities that have a reputation for 
being liberal and tolerant. They have tried to be open-minded, but now many of 
them see the problem as out of control.”

A big part of the cities’ woes is the professionalization of panhandling. The 
old type of panhandler­a mentally impaired or disabled homeless person trying 
to scrape together a few bucks for a meal­is giving way to the full-time 
spanger who supports himself through a combination of begging, working at odd 
jobs, and other sources, like government assistance from disability payments. 
Some full-time panhandlers are kids­“road warriors” who have largely dropped 
out of society and drift from town to town, often “couch surfing” at friends’ 
homes, or “street loiterers” who daily make their way downtown from the suburbs 
where they live. Some, like New Yorker Steve Baker, have turned begging into a 
full-time job. “If you’re inside a bank, you’re a doorman,” he says from his 
perch inside a bank lobby. “You’re not gonna rob from nobody or steal from 
nobody­you come in here and make a job for yourself.”

People’s generosity encourages the begging. About four out of ten Denver 
residents gave to panhandlers, city officials determined several years ago, 
anteing up an estimated $4.6 million a year. Anecdotal surveys by journalists 
and police, and even testimony by panhandlers themselves, suggest that begging 
can yield anywhere from $20 to $100 a day­though police in Coos Bay, Oregon, 
found that local panhandlers were taking in as much as $300 a day in a Wal-Mart 
parking lot. “A panhandler could make thirty to forty thousand dollars a year, 
tax-free money,” Baker says. In Memphis, a local FOX News reporter, Jason 
Carter, donned old clothes and hit the streets earlier this year, earning about 
$10 an hour. “Just the quasi-appearance of being homeless filled my cup,” 
Carter observed. That all the money is beyond the tax man’s clutches adds to 
the allure of professional panhandling.

Carter prepared for his stint on the street by surfing the Internet, where a 
variety of websites dispense panhandling advice. NeedCom, for example­subtitled 
“Market Research for Panhandlers”­offers tips from Baker and other pros on how 
to hustle. The website’s developer, Cathy Davies, wants it to get people 
“thinking about panhandling as a realistic economic activity, rather than 
thinking that panhandlers are lazy or don’t work very hard.”

The rise of online panhandling advice helps explain why panhandlers and “sign 
flyers”­beggars who use signs to solicit donations­exhibit remarkably similar 
methods around the country. Currently, the direct, humorous approach is in 
vogue. That’s why in many cities today you’ll hear some version of: “I won’t 
lie to you, I need a drink.” Panhandlers also report that asking for specific 
amounts of money lends credibility to pitches. “I need 43 more cents to get a 
cup of coffee,” a panhandler will declare; some people will give exactly that 
much, while others will simply hand over a buck.

If it seems unlikely that a homeless person would surf the Web for advice on 
how to panhandle, that’s exactly the point: many aren’t homeless and are lying 
about their circumstances. A reporter for KUTV in Salt Lake City followed and 
filmed panhandlers for several months, documenting their scams. One 
twentysomething woman wielded a sign informing people that she was homeless and 
needed a bus ticket back to Seattle. The reporter followed her one day, 
however, and discovered that she lived in a nearby suburb. Confronted by the 
reporter, the woman explained away her deception: “I don’t say anything to 
anybody. I hold this sign. I don’t make anybody give me money.” Her story isn’t 
unique: homeless advocate Pamela Atkinson told KUTV that some 70 percent of 
panhandlers in Salt Lake City aren’t describing their situations accurately. 

Like their counterparts back in the eighties, some spangers refuse to take no 
for an answer. Aggressive begging has grown so common in Memphis that a group 
of residents, members of an online forum called Handling-Panhandling, have 
begun photographing those who act in a threatening manner, seeking to help 
police catch those who violate the law. “One of the guys we photographed for 
the Handling-Panhandling group last summer was obviously a loose cannon,” forum 
host Paul Ryburn writes. “When employees of a Beale Street restaurant asked him 
to stop begging in front of their door, he threatened to stab them.”

Reports of similar incidents are on the increase in many cities. A pizzeria 
manager in Columbus, Ohio, told the Columbus Dispatch earlier this year that 
panhandlers were entering the store asking for money, then following women back 
to their cars to scare them into giving it. “One of the bums threatened to stab 
me when I asked them to leave two women alone,” the restaurateur added. In 
Orlando, panhandlers have started entering downtown offices and asking 
receptionists for money, prompting businesses to lock the doors. San Francisco 
police have identified 39 beggars who have received five or more citations for 
aggressive panhandling, racking up a total of 447 citations. Tourist guidebooks 
and online sites are replete with warnings from travelers. A business visitor 
to Nashville, sharing his experiences on Fodor.com, writes: “Every day I was 
there I was not just approached but grabbed or touched by folks asking for 
money.” A traveler to San Francisco, describing his trip on Virtualtourist.com, 
warns prospective tourists about the pervasiveness of persistent beggars: “If 
you come to San Francisco and are not hit up for change, you have spent too 
much time in your hotel room.”

Widespread begging bears much of the blame for lingering public impressions 
that downtowns remain unsafe, even in places like Minneapolis, where crime has 
fallen. In a survey last year, more than a fifth of Minneapolis’s downtown 
workers called the area “extremely unsafe” in the evening, largely because of 
extensive panhandling (nine out of ten downtown workers report getting asked 
for money at least several times a month). Aggressive beggars have tried to 
extort cash from waitresses at local restaurants by threatening to harass 
customers. Families visiting downtown report panhandlers following them down 
the street and cursing at them if they refuse to give, according to the head of 
the Downtown Council, a local business group. The bullying shakedowns are 
having an economic effect on the city: some firms have balked at renewing 
leases. Downtown business owners in Nashville now rank panhandling as their 
Number One problem.

In St. Louis, another city battling perceptions that it’s dangerous, two-thirds 
of respondents to an online poll by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch said that 
they’d encountered aggressive panhandling. Matt Kastner, a real-estate agent 
who has moved back to St. Louis from the suburbs, believes that panhandlers are 
perpetrating much of the minor crime­such as car break-ins­that plagues parts 
of St. Louis. Many solicit him on the city’s roads. “They’ll come right at the 
car as you’re getting off an exit ramp,” he says. “I’m afraid one of these days 
I’m going to hit one of them.” Kastner’s fears aren’t misplaced: in Austin, 
where persistent begging has given new meaning to the term “Texas panhandle,” 
the police chief noted last August that more than a third of the people killed 
in traffic accidents that year had been cited for begging in the past.

Confronting the new panhandling plague, many cities have been hamstrung by 
local factors that have made it hard to attack the problem in the aggressive, 
enforcement-driven New York style. Some places, for instance, never transformed 
their police forces to emphasize quality-of-life crime and the importance of 
the cop on the beat. Certain states, such as California, prohibit community 
courts for misdemeanors. And sometimes a city’s political tradition is so 
liberal that the notion of cracking down at all is anathema. When Seattle city 
attorney Mark Sidran proposed muscular anti-panhandling restrictions in the 
early 1990s, protesters burned him in effigy; today, despite complaints from 
visitors, Seattle pols still have no real plans to deal with the new wave of 
panhandling. Anti-panhandling efforts in Oregon and other states also have run 
into legal obstacles from state courts, which have broadly interpreted begging 
as a protected form of free speech and shot down new laws curtailing it.

Still, some locales, while not going to New York’s lengths, are experimenting 
with innovative ways to curb panhandling. Orlando allows begging only in 
“panhandling zones,” demarcated by blue boxes painted on the sidewalks in 
several locations. A more common response has been to educate the public about 
panhandling and to offer alternative ways to help those who really need it. The 
Nashville Downtown Partnership, for instance, has launched a publicity 
campaign, “Please Help, Don’t Give,” which explains through posters that money 
given to panhandlers often supports drug and alcohol addictions. The 
partnership asks people to donate instead to organizations that provide local 
services.

Denver’s anti-panhandling initiative seems particularly promising. The city has 
turned 86 old, unused parking meters into donation boxes and placed them around 
downtown. The meters allow people to give directly on the street, where they’re 
likely to encounter panhandlers, assuring donors that their money will go to 
programs to assist the truly needy. “$1.50 provides a meal for a homeless 
person,” the meter proclaims. Between donations and corporate sponsorship, the 
meter program is generating about $100,000 a year, distributed to local groups 
to provide housing, job training, and other services, says Jamie Van Leeuwen, 
head of the city’s homelessness-combating Road Home program. The meter 
initiative is also deterring spanging­the city estimates that it’s down a 
striking 90 percent. “Panhandling and homelessness are not synonymous,” says 
Van Leeuwen. “Our homeless underscore that just because they are homeless, that 
does not mean that they panhandle.” Several cities are already copying the 
Denver initiative, including Chattanooga, which calls its version “The Art of 
Change,” and Minneapolis; others, like Las Vegas, are considering it.

Cities are also coming up with new anti-panhandling legislation designed to 
pass muster in the courts. Several cities have passed “sit, lie” ordinances, 
for example, which say nothing about panhandling but ban people from sitting or 
lying on streets and sidewalks. Portland officials proposed a “sit, lie” law 
and then won over local homeless advocates by promising new spending on 
services for the truly needy. “In Portland, only about 10 percent of the people 
loitering on downtown streets and begging during the day were homeless,” says 
Mike Kuykendall, president of the city’s downtown business improvement 
district. He credits the anti-panhandling initiative with playing a part in a 
29 percent decline in street crime downtown over the last three years.

Similarly, several cities and smaller communities have banned motorists from 
giving to beggars, framing the legislation as safety ordinances. Courts have 
also upheld laws that prohibit beggars from touching people without their 
consent, intentionally blocking their path, and using obscene or abusive 
language.

Yet even as cities experiment with new approaches, those traditionally opposed 
to restrictions on panhandling are fighting back­notably, civil liberties 
groups and some homeless advocates, who oppose any actions that might 
criminalize conduct by even a minority of the homeless. In 2003, San Francisco 
residents overwhelmingly passed a ballot proposition authored by 
then-supervisor (and now mayor) Gavin Newsom outlawing in-your-face 
panhandling. But the ordinance has been ineffective because scores of volunteer 
lawyers, many from the city’s biggest law firms, have fought every citation. 
People cited for panhandling don’t even need to appear in court. They simply 
drop their citations in boxes at various advocacy groups, and the lawyers pick 
them up and appear in court, where judges have ruled that cops must file 
lengthy reports in order to get a conviction. The courts are dismissing about 
85 percent of all tickets handed out under the ordinance, frustrating police, 
prosecutors, politicians, and residents who voted for it. “If you had been here 
several years ago, before the ordinance passed, and came back today, you 
wouldn’t see a difference in the level of panhandling. There’s as much as 
ever,” says supervisor Sean Elsbernd.

Such battles between civil libertarians and those who want to limit panhandling 
remain common. Austin civil rights advocates got the city’s ban on panhandling 
along roadsides overturned; the court ruled that the city hadn’t adequately 
demonstrated that panhandling was a safety issue. Even New York City, which has 
long been able to stave off court challenges to its panhandling ordinance, 
isn’t immune. A local judge has ruled that police have sometimes overstepped 
the bounds of the city’s aggressive panhandling legislation and arrested people 
for peaceful solicitation. Last year, a court awarded $100,000 to a beggar 
arrested eight times in the Bronx.

But there’s no doubt that some cities have been more effective than others at 
building anti-panhandling campaigns. “I recently visited New York City and was 
shocked to discover that for a city with ten times our population, it has one 
tenth as many beggars,” one San Franciscan wrote on the San Francisco 
Chronicle’s website. “The few I did see sat silently with their signs and said 
nothing. I didn’t witness a single instance of aggressive panhandling. The 
reason for this? The city passed laws against such conduct and has enforced 
those laws. If it can work over there, it can work here.”

Steven Malanga is senior editor of City Journal and a senior fellow at the 
Manhattan Institute. He is the author of The New New Left, a collection of his 
City Journal essays.
http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_3_panhandling.html







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