Detail from “Spanish Romani people” (1853) by Yevgraf Sorokin.
Whether you can really arrest the growth of homelessness by arresting homeless people remains to be seen. But like some jurisdictions in the United States and Canada, some European countries are reacting to increasing homelessness by trying to treat it as a crime.
But there’s a genuine question why European authorities would try to tackle homelessness this way. Any willingness to resort to criminal prosecution of street people in Europe runs the risk of looking more like persecution; on both economic and ethnic grounds.
Arresting beggars is a bit of a cop out
Under the headline “Arresting beggars doesn’t help anyone” Guardian newspaper columnist Suzanne Moore explains how some communities in the UK are increasingly resorting to the expedient of arresting beggars to clean the streets of their unsightly presence.