Miami attempts to exclude registrants from homeless protections

This is yet another sad legacy of the Julia Tuttle Causeway debacle, which continues to this day despite shutting down the camp nearly three years ago.

This is FloriDUH politics at its finest. It wishes to reinstate the practice of harassing and destroying the belongings of those forced into homelessness. http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/04/11/3339297/miami-to-go-to-federal-court-to.html


Miami to go to federal court to undo homeless-protection act  

BY CHARLES RABIN AND ANDRES VIGLUCCI
CRABIN@MIAMIHERALD.COM
The City of Miami, concerned that loitering homeless people are stunting downtown growth, will go to federal court in an attempt to undo major provisions of a historic legal agreement that for 15 years has protected the homeless from undue arrest and harassment by police.

Miami commissioners voted unanimously on Tuesday to petition the courts to alter a landmark settlement in the 1988 Pottinger v. Miami case, in which 5,000 homeless people and the American Civil Liberties Union sued the city, contending that the police practice of sweeping them off the streets and dumping their belongings for loitering, sleeping on sidewalks or other minor offenses was unconstitutional.

The case, settled by consent decree in 1998, led to a significant expansion of public services to the homeless that has been held up as a national model. The settlement also bars Miami police from arresting homeless people for such “involuntary, harmless acts’’ without first offering them an available bed in a shelter.

Under the resolution adopted Thursday, which drew little to no public attention before the commission meeting, the city will hire an outside attorney to ask a federal judge to grant police greater latitude to detain homeless people and seize and dispose of their belongings. The city will also ask the judge to exclude sexual predators from the Pottinger settlement’s protections.