The Homeless Bill of Rights needs to be updated: My testimony for the House Judiciary Committee

"The state may never adequately house and care for its residents, but at the very least, bad actors representing the state should be prevented from adding to the misery of our unhoused siblings."

I need you to testify.

On Wednesday, March 27, starting at 4 pm, the House Judiciary Committee will be meeting in the House Lounge to take up 20 bills concerning housing and homelessness. Most of these bills deserve careful consideration, but I will be testifying on one of them, Representative Jennifer Stewart’s H7967, which would “update the Homeless Bill of Rights to add rules governing the interaction with encampments and require fines for non-compliance, require police and public works departments to adopt written policies and procedures to ensure compliance with the requirements of this chapter and include the right to access clean and sanitary conditions.”

If this and other important bills on housing and homelessness are going to pass, people need to contact their legislators and insist that they do. Testimony can be emailed to HouseJudiciary@rilegislature.gov, I’ll be showing up in person.

Here is my testimony:

I am a reporter who has covered the crisis of homelessness in this state for many years. The current Homeless Bill of Rights has, in my experience, never been all that useful in defending the rights of people experiencing homelessness against the depredations of the state.

State and municipal leaders and members of police departments throughout the state routinely violate both the letter and the spirit of the statute. Judges rarely consider the Bill of Rights when rendering decisions from the bench. When the Bill of Rights is considered at all, it is given little weight. For example, the lawyers on this committee might want to read Judge David Cruise's decision when he ruled in favor of Governor Daniel McKee and allowed the removal of an encampment on State House grounds, ignoring both the State's Homeless Bill of Rights and the original United States Bill of Rights in the process.

But I want to present a less high-profile example, which is emblematic of the common, everyday affronts people experiencing homelessness suffer throughout the state at the hands of state and municipal governments.

On December 4th of last year, I got a message from an outreach worker telling me that two undercover Providence Police Officers went to an encampment and harassed unhoused people, mostly women, living in tents. I interviewed the women at the encampment. For their protection, I am withholding identifying information.

"As I'm walking back to my tent, I see these two guys," said Mary. "They're not in uniform, they have no papers. At the moment they arrived there was no criminal activity going on at all. We were all having a regular morning. We were just waking up. These two male 'officers,' were wearing regular clothes, like a hoodie, jeans, and sneakers. One of them had his gun and badge showing, hanging from his belt."

"They had a badge, but I don't know for sure that it's a real badge," said Kathy. "They told me to come out of the tent and I didn't say anything at first. For the first three times that they said come out of your tent, I didn't say jack shit. And then they literally kicked my tent. Now my tent's already ripped, so they were kicking it where it's ripped, breaking it even more, and said, 'I'm not going to ask again. Come out." And I replied, 'Do you have a warrant?' They said, 'We don't need a warrant. You live in a fucking tent.'"

The two police officers conducted illegal searches, lined people up outside their tents, and verbally harassed them while "looking for drugs." Can you imagine the outrage if the constituents you cared about were treated that way in their homes?

When I called the offices of Mayor Smiley and the Providence Police Department, they lied and told me that no police officers were at that encampment that morning, going so far as to tell me that I got the story wrong and should make a correction. But they didn't realize that I had more information about the police officers than I put in my piece. I knew the make and model of the car they were driving, and a person I didn't put in the story, who I know very well, could definitively identify the men as cops from their interaction with them at another encampment.

I wrote a second story, asking the obvious question - if these men were not police officers, as the city claimed, why aren't the Mayor and the Providence Police concerned about two men in the city pretending to be police officers, brandishing badges and guns, and harassing Providence residents?

Around 24 hours later, the City admitted that the two men were police officers, but added that the police officers "had done nothing wrong." They refused to answer questions about the nature of the investigation that brought them to that conclusion.

It was a second lie.

I confronted Mayor Smiley at an unrelated press conference and pressed him for details. He and his communications person promised me that they would answer all my questions in an email - which turned out to be a third lie.

The two Providence Police Officers violated the Homeless Bill of Rights, as it exists now. Providence Mayor Brett Smiley and his staff protected these two officers with lies and obfuscation. The people who had their rights violated, unhoused and in need of aid, were victimized by the state, and the current Homeless Bill of Rights provided no relief for them.

In a just society, the police officers would at the very least be enrolled in a refresher course on the importance of our legal rights - if not outright fired - and the city would, at the very least, be fined and sued for egregiously violating the rights of people already suffering some of the worst abuses our unforgiving society can throw at them.

I will end with this: The story I told above is sadly common. Human rights violations, big and small, are a daily part of being unhoused in Rhode Island. The state may never adequately house and care for its residents, but at the very least, bad actors representing the state should be prevented from adding to the misery of our unhoused siblings.

The Homeless Bill of Rights needs teeth. The small fines for violating the human rights of unhoused people in this bill might have added up to $10,000 for the City of Providence - if this bill had been law on that day. It's a small amount of money - and I would love it to be more - but it is real money. It's an assessment of guilt against a system that will only care when it has to - and it validates the humanity of people who are too often treated as less than human and beneath the contempt of elected officials such as Rhode Island Governor Daniel McKee and Providence Mayor Brett Smiley.

If our rights as human beings mean anything to the members of this committee, you will pass this bill.