More than 200 people packed into a Fremont city council meeting Tuesday as leaders voted to make it a crime to help homeless people by providing them with food, clothing, or other assistance.

The law criminalizes being outside with “camping paraphernalia,” like sleeping bags or cookware, without written permission from property owners or the city. It includes a provision that anyone “causing, permitting, aiding, abetting or concealing” violations is subject to up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine.

“[The mayor] claims no service providers will get arrested, but ultimately, the law prevails,” said Vivian Han, CEO of the nonprofit Abode Services. “This is for all time, not just while he’s mayor.”

Greg Ward, a minister at Mission Peak Unitarian Universalist Congregation, said his church hands out “blessing bags” of food and clothing.

“Putting [them] in the hands of the unhoused could be aiding and abetting,” said Ward. “That could make us criminals.”

  • FirstCircle@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
    6·
    13 hours ago

    “From the slimy, spittle-drenched, sidewalk, they were picking up bits of orange peel, apple skin, and grape stems, and, they were eating them. The pits of greengage plums they cracked between their teeth for the kernels inside. They picked up stray bits of bread the size of peas, apple cores so black and dirty one would not take them to be apple cores, and these things these two men took into their mouths, and chewed them, and swallowed them; and this, between six and seven o’clock in the evening of August 20, year of our Lord 1902, in the heart of the greatest, wealthiest, and most powerful empire the world has ever seen.” ― Jack London, The People of the Abyss