At Key West Beach, Wondering Who’s a Vagrant

[groovedaddy]

KEY WEST, Fla. — Quality of life for Steve Sanderson means securing a good sleeping spot that a new arrival will never find. For Denise Skinner, it means l-i-v-i-n with a view of the ocean from the mattress in her cherry red Jeep. “It’s heaven out there,” she said last week, squinting out her back window. “It’s heaven.”

Simply put, as Mr. Sanderson said, “If you have to be homeless, Key West is the best place to live.”

Or at least it used to be. Over the past three months, the city police have given homeless residents more than twice as many warnings for trespassing as they did last year. Between Jan. 1 and March 23, they made 90 arrests, and the federal stimulus will ensure that the trend continues: the Key West police recently received $813,000 to add four officers to its 89-member department. Their sole mission will be quality-of-life policing.

“It’s for vagrants,” said the police chief, Donald J. Lee Jr. “People who are out on the streets, disrupting the quality of life or experience for visitors, residents and businesses.” What some call vagrants, of course, others call simply down-and-out. The police say their targets are people like the homeless man arrested last week after he told two teenage girls they were sexy and offered them a swig of his Jack Daniel’s. Yet in a city of 25,000 that claims to have more bars per capita than anywhere else in the country, enforcement can sometimes look selective.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/us/31keywest.html?th&emc=th

[ixion]

1. And the Disney-fication of Key West continues...

it's like a plague. :(

[uppityperson.]

2. Interesting.