You can fight City Hall. Ocala homeless lawsuit heads to federal court, grounded in 8th and 14th Amendments, championed by ACLU and Southern Legal Counsel.
Enough goofy gooberishness from lawless redneck peckerwood lawmen in Ocala.
St. Augustine has grown compassionate in its approach to homelessness. Thanks to enlightened leaders.
May Ocala learn wisdom and experience better treatment as a result of its trip to federal court.
Homeless advocates sue Ocala in federal court. (Ocala Star-Banner)
Challenge the city’s ordinances and enforcement efforts like ‘Operation Street Sweeper.’
Legal advocates for more than 200 homeless people filed a class-action federal lawsuit on Thursday that challenges the City of Ocala’s ordinances related to trespass and open lodging.
The suit contends that enforcement of the ordinances amounts to cruel and unusual punishment and a denial of due process that unfairly targets the homeless.
Attorneys with the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida offices in Tampa and Miami, the Southern Legal Counsel office in Gainesville and attorney Andrew Pozzuto of Ocala, who is working pro bono, filed the suit in the district court for the Middle District of Florida.
“Ocala’s ordinance against sleeping outside explicitly targets and discriminates against homeless people. It allows you to sleep outside if you have a home, but not if you are homeless,” said Jacqueline Azis, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Florida, in a news release announcing the filing.
The city is “issuing trespass exclusion orders, permanently banning homeless people from public squares and parks and making their mere presence in public a crime,” the release states.
The lawsuit states that the plaintiffs have been jailed and assessed fees, costs and fines of $210,246.58 between January 2017 and May 2019.
“One plaintiff has spent 148 nights in jail and been assessed a total of $3,690.50 in fines and court costs imposed for 10 counts of open lodging, according to the complaint,” the release says.
The 67-page lawsuit lists three named and about 200 additional homeless individuals as plaintiffs. It states that the city’s open lodging ordinance “unlawfully criminalizes homelessness in violation of the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and infringes on the plaintiffs’ and class members’ rights to due process.”
“The city of Ocala has adopted and enforced unconstitutional ordinances as part of a deliberate campaign of arresting people in a broken-windows policing strategy called ‘Operation Street Sweeper’,” Kirsten Anderson, litigation director for Southern Legal Counsel, said in the release.
“Broken windows” refers to a policy that includes a “vagrant patrol” to target and arrest homeless people for violations like open lodging, thereby “driving homeless people out of the city,” the lawsuit contends.
The City of Ocala is “trying to force homeless people to leave town” and “the Mayor’s goal is to ensure vagrants will be gone from the city’s downtown area,” the lawsuit says.
In a column published last September on the Star-Banner’s opinion pages, Ocala Mayor Kent Guinn explained why the city was adopting the “Broken Windows” theory:
“In essence, the Broken Windows theory suggests that visible signs of crime, anti-social behavior and civil disorder create an urban environment that encourages more crime and disorder, including serious crime,” Guinn wrote. “The theory suggests that policing methods which target minor offenses such as vandalism, public drinking and panhandling help create an atmosphere of lawful order, thereby preventing more serious crimes.”
Guinn rejected the notion that the city was targeting the homeless.
“I’m talking about targeting behavior, no matter where it comes from,” he wrote.
Guinn did not immediately reply to an email or return a call to his cellphone Thursday afternoon seeking a comment on the class-action lawsuit. An executive administrative assistant who answered a phone in his City Hall office said the mayor had indicated he could not comment on pending litigation.
An Ocala Police Department official stated in April that the agency had made 223 Operation Street Sweeper-related “quality of life” arrests between Dec. 3 and April 1. The arrests included 87 for open lodging, 41 for panhandling and 20 for trespassing.
From 2017 to 2019, annual counts in Marion County indicated an average of 590 homeless people here, 295 of whom were unsheltered, the lawsuit states.
This summer, a panel of Marion County judges ruled that the state should not have suspended a man’s driver’s license for failure to pay the court costs and fees he was assessed for violating the city’s open lodging ordinance. The panel also determined that almost all of those costs and fees should not have been imposed in the first place. The ACLU and Southern Legal Counsel also were involved in that case, as well.
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