News: Mayor Newsom and Supervisor Alioto-Pier have introduced the legislation. You can read it here (258 KB PDF).
Read our position paper on the sit/lie proposal here (139 KB PDF).
Conservatives in San Francisco are attempting to get passed a law which would make it illegal to be homeless during the daytime throughout our city. The impetus for the law comes from outsiders who would like to see our city look more like Walnut Creek and run its police department more like The Shield. Unfortunately, these outside proponents have taken advantage of the very reasonable fears that some residents of the Haight have about public safety in order to push a much larger agenda, which includes a conservative slate of supervisors in the November election.
For conservative proponents, there's a very clear political angle. For progressives being challenged, there's a very clear fear. But for us, this is not about conservative versus progressive: This is about fundamental civil rights. When we allow laws that prohibit people from existing in public places, we give the police enormous discretion in determining who's criminal and who's not. In the words of the Supreme Court, this sort of discretion “bears the hallmark of a police state” (Shuttlesworth v. Birmingham). The notion, one supposes, is that we ought to have a police state for the poor and democracy for the wealthy. Examples of such societies fill Western history, from the Roman Republic of Spartacus' time to Jim Crow. The “democratic” exemplars are far from inspiring.
But we don't even have to go that far back to learn from history: San Francisco had a sit/lie law from 1968–1979. The law was initially created to drive hippies out of the Haight, but by the mid-'70s, police were using the law to target gay men in the Castro. In fact, Harvey Milk's "Castro Fourteen"—fourteen gay men who were arrested by the SFPD outside a Castro bar after one had been beaten by a homophobic cop—were charged with violation of the '70s sit/lie law. At least three times in the late '70s, the law was charged on Constitutional grounds, and it was, in fact, found unconstitutional. In 1979, the City repealed the old sit/lie law and adopted new laws—which prohibit people from blocking passage on the sidewalk in their place.
The past few weeks have seen a few hearings—at the Board of Supervisors' Public Safety Committee, at the Police Commission, and at the Youth Commission—that have clarified just what a sit/lie law would mean, and what opponents' core objections are.
| On March 10, Commander Jim Dudley of SFPD Metro, presented to the Police Commission on what the sit/lie law would actually prohibit. Commissioner Petra DeJesus narrowed it down with him: It's a law against sitting. | |
| What's wrong with criminalizing sitting? Public Defender Jeff Adachi presented to the Board of Supervisors' Public Safety Committee who, exactly, would technically be a criminal under the proposed law at a March 1 meeting. Of course, most violators of the proposed law would not be cited or prosecuted, but that's the point: A sit/lie law would give broad police discretion, and let the SFPD determine who was and who was not a criminal based not upon an actual criminal act, but rather upon… Well. We're not sure what. | |
| Criminalization based on police discretion is but one of several arguments against a sit/lie law. Alan Schlosser, Legal Director of the ACLU, details a few others in his presentation to the Police Commission on March 10. |
You can help us prevent the return of an unconstitutional, anti-social, inhumane, ineffective, and unnecessary law.
Do you have a group organizing against sit/lie that you'd like us to list? Send us an e-mail!