A few weeks ago, we published an editorial titled “Feeding homeless people should not be illegal.” This came after Raleigh Police Officers threatened to arrest the Love Wins Ministries volunteers on Aug. 24 if they offered food to the more than 70 people who had lined up for free sausage biscuits and coffee. But on nearly every Saturday and Sunday for the past six years, Love Wins Ministries volunteers have shown up at Moore Square to offer food to homeless people. And although serving food in Raleigh’s public parks has been illegal for all of these years, Rev. Hugh Hollowell, pastor and director of Love Wins Ministries, said this was the first time the organization had been threatened with arrest. Similar organizations, including Human Beans Together, were also notified that they are no longer allowed to serve food on public property.
As a result of many comments similar to those made in our editorial, Mayor Nancy McFarlane and City Council member Bonner Gaylord have participated in several discussions to find a way to allow these philanthropic acts to persist. At its Aug. 28 meeting, The City Council’s Law & Public Safety Committee decided to continue allowing groups to distribute food—that is, for now. The Committee will reconvene Sept. 16 to discuss alternative locations to give food. And though these efforts are seemingly good-natured, we want to know why anything has to be changed at all. Hollowell said Love Wins Ministries has had “a good working relationship with the Raleigh Police Department” in the past, so it’s not as if the police were unaware this was happening. Why start enforcing the law now?
In our past editorial, we speculated that police decided to start enforcing this ordinance in preparation for the renovation that will soon occur there. In other words, the city is trying to rid Moore Square of homeless people to make the area more attractive to the middle-class population to whom they are trying to sell.
But, of course, the police department can’t cite this as the reason for the sudden crackdown. Instead, they blamed excessive litter, according to Love Wins Ministries and Human Beans Together.
In Police Chief Cassandra Deck-Brown’s Presentation to the Law and Public Safety Committee, she explains that there have been excessive litter complaints and incidences of crime in Moore Square, when compared Raleigh’s other downtown park, Nash Square. “… these statistics do not imply that the less fortunate are causing the crime… it is important to note that too often they are victims of crime as well,” Deck-Brown rightfully pointed out.
Though Deck-Brown seems to recognize that the homeless are not the sole cause of these problems, the police still told the organizations that they cannot give food because it will cause litter. This excuse is hardly reasonable, first because the organizations said they clean up after themselves and second because potential for “excessive litter” is not a big enough consequence that warrants letting people go hungry. The city hosts events all the time, and for much less altruistic reasons, and never cancels them for fear of litter.
Litter, like hunger, is inevitable—it would be nearly impossible to rid the world of both. But if charitable organizations can help rid Raleigh of one at the expense of the other, we hope the police department will agree to save the hungry.
