Florida Police Exploit Homeless People

Finally homelessness is in the news again, sort of.

Kissimmee, Florida, made the national news last week by having a couple of police officers pretend to be homeless guys hanging out at an intersection. They were there in order to spot traffic offenders for ticketing by cohorts a block away. This trick has probably been done thousands of times elsewhere, but Kissimmee officials were decent enough in this instance to allow reporters to watch the proceedings, so we get to know about it.

Before going on, let's pause to make our expected crack about the name of the town: No, Kissiyyouou, Florida. There, now we can relax and get to this story about fake homelessness.

Back to "Operation Vagrant." Two things seem to irk homeless advocates about this story. First is the fact that it shows once again that people are quite thoroughly aware of the problem. I mean, if the Kissimmee police thought that homelessness were uncommon, they wouldn't have imagined that by posing as homeless they would have blended into the scenery, would they? But what are they doing about that realization? They are exploiting the ubiquity of homelessness to catch people who turn right on red without stopping. This doesn't help homeless people.

The other thing that irks is that now when someone is driving around northern Osceola County and happens to see a homeless guy in the median, instead of thinking, "When am I going to do something about the homeless problem in this country," they'll think, "Uh-oh, better slow down to the speed limit." There is a certain dilution of concern that can be expected.

Some homeless advocates, namely those who are uncomfortable with the police altogether, may fear that a pervasive distrust for the cops could rub off on the homeless. So you're walking down the street and you see a disheveled guy sitting by the curb on a milk crate. In the past you would have said, "Get a job, bum!" Now you would say, "Get off our backs, pig!" That is, if you were already inclined to say things like that. So for these homeless advocates the fear would be that the homeless all might be confused with the police, creatures held in lower esteem.

I see the problem more as a personnel issue.

Let's consider a similar issue and see if we can spot the problem. Everybody remember blackface minstrel shows? Remember why they were so offensive? Because it was racism, right? Yes, but what else was it?

It was a personnel issue. The issue was, they already HAD black people who could sing and dance. They didn't need to hire white people to put on blackface and pretend to be black. They could have hired the existing real talented black people instead.

It wasn't so much the blackface itself that was so bad as it was the usurping of roles. Why does Pat Boone give us the creeps? Because he was getting the radio play when we should have been hearing Little Richard, that's why. He was usurping Little Richard's place at the table. And while we're at it, I think Little Richard should have been in Journey to the Center of the Earth, too, and shot out of a volcano, and landed naked up a tree. Who really wants to see Pat Boone's skinny white ass up a tree?

Likewise, what we have right there in Osceola County is a pair of police GETTING PAID THE BIG POLICE BUCKS to pretend to be homeless people and use a two-way radio (or I don't know, a stupid cell phone) just to call up their buddies and snitch on drivers.

I don't know very many actual homeless people who can't sit on a median strip and snitch on bad drivers. So why won't Kissimmee hire the real thing? Why do they pay for fake teeth and fake tattered clothing and fake ripped off shopping carts when the real deal is already out there courtesy of the real people?