2016/12/15/police-respond-after-taking-blankets-from-homeless. Read the rest of the story, can’t let the facts get in the way of a good headline.

Up until the late sixties, before my time, most cities had a catch all City Ordinance, it was called Vagrancy. Anybody who was homeless, had no identification and did not possess the means to rent a room was subject to arrest. To be sure there was some broad latitude there $1500 suit, Maserati, forgot your wallet upstairs in the penthouse, shitty attitude towards cop – vagrancy. Say hello to the boys at county for me.

That was the exception rather than the rule. If a training film from the late forties, early fifties is to be believed, it was an effective tool. The training film dealt with policing on “skid row” another quaint tradition. Skid Row was where the homeless would congregate with minimal interference from the police. It kept the homeless population outta sight outta mind from the gentry.

Police working skid row would ensure that its denizens made it into the city jail periodically. Jail staff could look them over; determine if the voices were any louder or message any different, get them a shower, clean clothes, a visit to the jail nurse or doctor, some hot meals in them and maybe even a chance to detox. Did anybody get saved? I don’t know but at least somebody was looking at them as individuals.

On particularly cold nights the word would go out to patrol to “pick em all up.” Officers would then go out an arrest anybody they found sleeping “rough”. They would be released the next day. It takes less effort to book a vagrant then it does to investigate a frozen bum in an alley.

The Warren Court (Supreme Court, Earl Warren Chief Justice) decided in the late sixties that being a vagrant was not a crime. They also decided that individuals had a constitutional right to be as crazy as they wanted to be. Any attempt at inhibiting that craziness was a violation of their rights. This threw open the gates of state hospitals devoted to the care and feeding of wackos. Now they were on their own.

What we had in Denver, the other night was a group of people who are not homeless, but in an attempt to be stylish decide to imitate homeless people as a show of support. Give em a choice: “I can sleep out here with you” or “You can come home with me,” get back to me on how that shakes out.

If you haven’t seen it, you owe it to yourself to rent, “His Girl Friday” (1940). Yeah it’s in black and white. It is particularly on point today, I mean today today, because it shows the press of 2016 has not changed a lick from the press of 1940.