City Council member Angela Hunt last week posted a few startling comments on her Twitter feed.
The first read: “I’m tired of bums in Main St. Garden. Counted 12-many sleepng. Where is DPD? Where is Bridge?! Mary, help!” And it was accompanied by this picture of some dudes:
And this couple:
“And some MORE bums in Main St. Garden. Family-friendly?” she posted later, with this picture:
Is “bums” the most politically correct word she could think of? I doubt it, but the word seems to have worked for her. In this case, name-calling got her attention and created controversy.
There are certain public places — parks and libraries, mostly — that seem to be the domain of homeless people, and that’s the case any place there are homeless people.
As this Dallas Morning News editorial points out, it is illegal to discriminate against a person based on his or her appearance. You can’t arrest someone for not taking a shower or for carrying their worldly possessions in a rolling suitcase. But police can arrest people in parks for things like public intoxication, urinating in public and creating a public nuisance. “This, we hope, is where Hunt is headed with her campaign,” the editorial states.
Hunt notes in the piece that there are no homeless people hanging out in Highland Park. “What is HP doing to dissuade panhandling and abusive behavior?” she says. Maybe it would be a good idea for panhandlers to hit up HP. A graffiti-artist friend told me they serve McDonald’s for breakfast in the Highland Park jail.
The thing that worries me about this rant against homeless people is that Hunt is a lawmaker. The good thing is, she’s a pretty innovative one. So far, she hasn’t floated any ordinance aimed at her “bums”, like a ban on wheeled suitcases in parks or something. It is illegal to push a shopping cart on the streets of Dallas, and if you spend any time in Old East Dallas, you know how well that has worked out. Instead of bums with shopping carts, we have crazy-looking dirty guys pushing baby carriages full of crap. That’s just creepy. Bring back the shopping carts, I say.
