The City of Jackson could ban homeless encampments on city property and allow the forced removal of campsites. The City Council delayed plans to vote on the issue this morning.
“I don’t want people to say that we’re preventing people from their constitutional rights to assemble or express themselves without us having a solution,” Ward 3 City Councilman Kenneth Stokes said during the Council’s last meeting at City Hall on Dec. 10.
Ward 7 City Councilwoman Virgi Lindsay, who proposed the ordinance, did not attend the Dec. 10 meeting but said at this morning’s meeting that the Council needs to hold more discussions before taking a vote.
The City of Jackson has come under fire in recent years from civil rights and legal advocates for previous ordinances related to homelessness and panhandling.
The Jackson City Council unanimously voted to repeal the City’s former panhandling ordinance in October 2020 after the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi and the National Homelessness Law Center argued against panhandling bans in the state, arguing that the activity was covered under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
“There’s got to be a place to put people,” City of Jackson Attorney Drew Martin advised the Council on Dec. 10.
In addition to figuring out where to house those who camp on the street, Jackson must also be cautious about criminalizing homelessness, he said.
The City would likely enlist the help of the Jackson Police Department and possibly Capitol Police to enforce the ordinance, Martin said.
“We don’t want this to become a mass incarceration situation either,” he warned. “We want to get people off the streets and find humane shelters for them.”
Martin told the Council that the City modeled the proposed ordinance after similar anti-camping ordinances related to sleeping on public property in Grants Pass, Ore.
Those ordinances spurred a legal fight from homeless residents who filed a lawsuit arguing that the city’s enforcement of the ordinances through fines and jail time violated the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment against excessive bail, fines and cruel and unusual punishments.
On June 28, 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority disagreed with the plaintiffs, deciding in a 6-3 vote to uphold Grants Pass’ enforcement of fines or jail time as consequences of public camping.
Their decision overturned a prior 2018 California appellate court ruling against enforcing such penalties as punishments to public camping when the violators could find no other sufficient alternative.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, delivered the Supreme Court’s majority opinion affirming the decision.
“People become homeless for a variety of reasons, too, many beyond their control. … Homelessness is complex,” he wrote. “Its causes are many. So may be the public policy responses required to address it.”
But “the question this case presents is whether the Eighth Amendment grants federal judges primary responsibility for assessing those causes and devising those responses,” he continued. “It does not.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, an Obama appointee, wrote the dissenting opinion against the decision.
“Sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime,” Sotomayor wrote. “For some people, sleeping outside is their only option.” The other two Democratic-appointed justices, Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, also dissented.
A city’s use of fines and jail to enforce such ordinances “punishes them for being homeless,” she said. “That is unconscionable and unconstitutional.”
The ruling directly impacted laws “in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes California and eight other Western states where the bulk of America’s unhoused population lives,” NPR’s Jennifer Luden stated after the decision came down on June 28.
However, she continued, “it will almost certainly influence homelessness policy in cities around the country.”
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