Stuck between a demand to curb solicitation and a justified fear of getting sued over First Amendment violations, the Dallas Police Department has directed officers to stop writing tickets for aggressive panhandling, while continuing “to enforce those laws that are surrounding panhandling,” as Police Chief Renee Hall put it this morning. As a linguistic distinction, that’s already a little muddled. As actual policy, it’s even more confusing.
Police officers are confused. Readers of the news coverage of the policy change are confused. City Councilmembers, who first heard about the policy change from that news coverage, are confused, and maybe a little peeved.
Hall attempted to clear things up for the City Council’s public safety committee Monday morning, to mixed results.
Councilmember Adam McGough gamely tried to sum up the proceedings. “What it appears we’re saying, because this is so complicated now, (is that) our police officers are going to be hands off?”
Sort of?
“We don’t want to give (people) the idea that there’s nothing we can do about it,” Hall says. If there is a convenience store with a particularly troublesome solicitor, for example, police can work with the storeowner to issue a criminal trespass warning to the panhandler. Officers will continue to enforce laws against disorderly conduct, assault, impeding a public roadway, making terroristic threats, and so on. But actual enforcement of a 2007 city ordinance against aggressive panhandling, the kind of code that brings the ACLU sniffing around, particularly after a federal ruling last year affirming that panhandling is protected speech under the U.S. Constitution, is forbidden.
Officers will, however, continue to “enforce the issue of soliciting in a roadway, or adjacent to a roadway,” Hall says, which on the surface seems like it would run afoul of the same things police are tiptoeing around regarding panhandling elsewhere, but we’re too busy trying to wrap our heads around other questions to address that just now.
What about those side-of-road solicitors associated with a charity? The firefighters with boots, or the religious organizations with newsletters? They’ll need to get a permit from the city, Hall says. How long does a permit last? Hall doesn’t know off the top of her head. What city department issues the permit? Hall says she’ll look that up. How much could a typical citation for a Class C misdemeanor be expected to cost a panhandler, who presumably wouldn’t be on the street begging for money if they could afford the trip to court? Unclear. Are the “panhandling-free zones” created by that city ordinance real? Hall is looking into whether those are enforceable.
Wait, what about Give Right Dallas, the city’s proposed public awareness campaign intended to discourage residents from giving to panhandlers in favor of donations to groups that actually can do good? The one with the well-intentioned but dubiously effective donation-taking parking meters, that Councilmembers kicked back to the drawing board in November? Police and city staff are working on “creative solutions” to panhandling, and we’ll hear more about them at a Feb. 26 council hearing.
In the meantime, Dwaine Caraway wants police to organize “a sting” on the “professional panhandling organization” that he says accounts for a good deal of the cardboard-toting solicitors in the city. Sandy Greyson wants Hall to appear in PSAs about panhandling. Philip Kingston wants a heads up when the police department is going to make major policy changes. McGough wants it to be known that “I love free speech like the rest of us,” but that the city needs to do more against panhandling. Everybody else just wants a little clarity.
