This is definitely their way of trying to get around our First Amendment rights. The city owns the land, but it’s managed by a private company!!! This must be challenged in court.Just saw a press conference where the officials said they would crack down on visitors for anything they deem unwanted, not illegal, because they can.
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If anyone would be willing to upvote this in hopes of increasing the likelihood of Jeff responding, I would be incredibly grateful.
Can’t wait to hear the rest of this story. I’m trying hard to imagine the relationship of the citizens to a future Urban State where all property is leased to businesses.
Good job identifying this problem, Jeff. Please challenge it.
To anyone who thinks this is okay, it may seem like a small matter for some private company to “manage” a public park, but it is still a public park. It is still owned by the city and is still being funded with public money even as members of the public are capriciously denied access to it. If a company wants to put money into making it better, great! We should welcome investment into our communities, just like we would from a volunteer group doing clean-up work or whatever. But at no point should the company or the volunteers become empowered to decide who can and can’t use the park.
If a company wants to own a park, it can make its own park on truly private property. There’s no rule against it. What’s happening here is some kind of unholy alliance between corporations and local authorities who want to be able to do things they’re prohibited from doing under the law. Normally the cops can’t kick Jeff (or any homeless person, or any person period who’s acting lawfully) out of the park, but now all of a sudden they have this new authority thanks to some questionable public-private deal.
This is wildly unacceptable. Do we have to worry soon about corporations “managing” public sidewalks and other city services so that they can exclude people at their pleasure?
“We appreciate with what you are doing but we are still going to stomp on your rights.” What kind of person prostitutes themselves in this manner? How does a city lease public property out to a private entity specifically to restrict public access to public property? I’d love to see how this works through the courts.
How offensive that the city thinks it can ignore the constitution by entering into a public private partnership or that a corporation like Brown and Brown who could use their significant resources to compassionately assist people experiencing homelessness instead choose to bribe the city to allow them to instead banish them. This isn’t just unconstitutional, it’s morally wrong. The city can’t outsource its unconstitutional actions. Their intent was clear in the statements made in advance. They should be ashamed of themselves and be held legally accountable for their egregious violations of the constitution.
“You’re not even being trespassed.” Immediately followed up by: “If you go back on there, you’re going to jail.”[/bg_collapse]
Are Children Being Kept in ‘Cages’ at the Border?
A semantic debate is raging over what to call the pens where migrant kids are being held after separation from their parents.
editor Joel B. Pollak wrote a post devoted to criticizing the AP’s word choice. “The AP’s choice of words is only the latest in what appears to be a series of politically-charged word choices by the wire service,” he said, and contrasted the AP dispatch with a story in the Los Angeles Times that described “chain-link fenced holding areas.”
.. Pollak insisted that the correct terminology is “chain-link partition.”
.. The Border Patrol, CBS reported, took issue with that description, not because they felt it was inaccurate, but because they were “very uncomfortable” with the implication that the children were being treated like animals... Refusal to call a cage a cage merely because it makes someone uneasy—or, perhaps more importantly, because it is politically toxic—does not transform a cage into a “chain-link partition.”.. Then-Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said unaccompanied minors would be deported, labeling the practice a deterrent. There was outcry at the time, especially from immigration groups, and the Obama White House was forced to stop detaining families by a court. What is different now is that the children being held are being forcibly separated from their parents at the border. So is the scale of the issue—the Washington Examiner reports that there could be 30,000 such children in custody by August... The administration knew full well that the result would be separations. “If you don’t want your child separated, then don’t bring them across the border illegally,” Sessions said in May... White House Chief of Staff John Kelly also said in May that the goal was to dissuade unauthorized immigrants from entering. “The laws are the laws. But a big name of the game is deterrence,” he told NPR. “It could be a tough deterrent—would be a tough deterrent.”.. By Monday, she was defending the same policy she claimed didn’t exist, saying in New Orleans, “It’s important to understand that these minors are very well taken care of. Don’t believe the press.”.. This, too, plays games with the truth, suggesting that the reason for the policy is that both parties won’t simply come together to pass immigration reform. But the battle in Congress over reform right now is mostly within the Republican Party, as moderates, conservatives, and leadership in the House fight over how to proceed on immigration... In theory, the falsehoods in these statements ought to be plain—the representations by Donald and Melania Trump and Nielsen are simply wrong, while Sessions and Kelly are more honest, if politically reckless, in their comments.