(KPRC 2 News)
Mike Morris & James Pinkerton,
Houston Chronicle
A Houston statute that allows people to be ticketed for rummaging through trash bins, as a homeless man was last week near City Hall, has been on the books since 1942, city records show.
The statute, which in 1942 was labeled “molesting garbage containers,” first appeared close to its current form in 1981, and has been amended four times since.
In 1988, the wording was changed to include recycling bins, in 1995 to add specific penalties for violators, and in 2002 to include all garbage bins – not just those picked up by city workers – as part of alterations meant to restrict the behavior of the homeless downtown.
(News 92-FM)
The most recent revision, a small wording tweak in 2009, was made three years before Mayor Annise Parker and the City Council outlawed feeding homeless people without permission of the property owner, a move that caused ample controversy last year. Parker said the changes were meant to channel such efforts to places where they could do the most good. Civil libertarians, volunteer groups and religious leaders were opposed, however, saying the law “criminalized charity.”
Houston attorney Randall Kallinen, a key opponent of the feeding ordinance, is representing James Kelly, 44, who was ticketed last Thursday. A Tennessee native who recently arrived in Houston en route to California, Kelly said he spent about nine years in the Navy but has fallen on hard times. His military service has not been confirmed.
Kallinen on Tuesday acknowledged that the ticket had been written under the long-standing scavenging statute, and was not linked to the feeding ordinance as he had said Monday.
“It’s not a part of that ordinance,” the civil rights attorney said. “However, it’s the same reasoning – to push the homeless people out of the downtown business district.”
Kallinen said he considers the Houston garbage scavenging ordinance unconstitutional, citing a 1988 U.S. Supreme Court case.
(Read more of this story at Chron.com)
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