Once you start looking into the laws passed by City Councils all over the United States, which are illegal and/or unconstitutional, it boggles the mind.

You might run across one of these laws in a news story, and then you do a search on Google (because you get curious), discovering that these laws are all over the place -- and most of them are targeted at the homeless.

Wait, there is more! If your curiosity reaches the next level, and you dig just a bit further, you will find that most of these illegal/unconstitutional laws which are currently in the news, are not the first editions of these laws. You find laws like the new Las Vegas law, which states that you can't sleep within 500 feet of feces or urine.

Now, what is that law all about?

Well, Las Vegas  just lost in court (again) over the illegal lodging law they had. So, these imaginative law makers decided that instead of admitting that Homelessness is not illegal (as the high courts have told City Councils all over the US, time-and-time-again), they would come up with a cunning plan to make Homelessness illegal, and this Sleeping near Crap law is their latest cunning plan.

Yes, if you are thinking to yourself: This is a huge waste of my tax dollars, and the time of the City Council which should be dealing with more important issues than these cunning plans, which are going to cost my city another million or so in another embarrassing law suit... you are absolutely right. A browsing through the history of these cunning plans, will show over and over, these plans lead down only one road -- Major Monetary Costs to the Tax Payers.

And in fact, this one does just that.

In November 2006, three homeless men were arrested and charged with "knowingly establishing temporary, portable, or open sleeping quarters within five hundred feet of a deposit of urine or feces that was not in an appropriate sanitary facility". Never mind that the act was no longer a punishable offense under law.

David Hicks, one of the men arrested, summed up my main question from the original story -- how do you know if there's poop in a five hundred meter radius? "I didn't even know it was there. Was I supposed to go around searching for it?" Indeed. Is it possible for anyone, homeless or not, to lay down on the grass with, say, a sack lunch and a book in ANY public park and NOT be within five hundred meters of urine and/or feces? The ACLU, Mr. Hicks, the two other defendants, and their attorney Brent Bryson believe that it isn't possible, and that these three men were singled out because they are homeless.

Because the law never actually went into effect, the city was found at fault, and the men were awarded $45,000 to share in compensation for their experience.

That would be $45k of Your Tax Money, not to mention the court costs, the time it took to make this silly law, the time it takes to talk about the the silly law with the news media, and the embarrassment of knowing that Your City is attempting to illegally oppress a citizenry with Crap Laws.

I use the above because it is easy to find on the web and easy to point out the "obvious" silliness of this type of thinking, as well as how much is directly costs you. The date on that is a few years ago, but use a search and you will find the same exact thing happing in a US city, today. It happens all the time, and it is costing people (tax payers) billions every year.

Homelessness is not against the law, as law makers are finding out, and you are paying for their education.

Homeless isn't even a comprehensive definition of a social status.

Perhaps you need some new law makers, who don't require so much on-the-job training.