Key West Vagrants - A Problem

Simply put, “If you have to be homeless, Key West is the best place to live” says one of several vagrants gathered at Higgs Beach in Key West.  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.

The police now regularly question the homeless but ignore visitors like the man at a table near Ms. Skinner’s Jeep last week. He was passed out before sunset, snoring, with a 16-ounce beer in front of him and two chickens pecking near his feet. Only his pressed shorts, lack of strong body odor, and a half-eaten Godiva chocolate bar suggested that he had a home.

Vagrants say the police are “profiling” them with arrests for small infractions, like drinking outside in violation of open-container laws.  At a picnic table with a half-dozen homeless friends. With raspy voices and slurred words — some actually sounded like pirates — they all said they deserved to be left alone.

“God gave us this, not the government,” they said of the island. “This is what he’s given to us. Why can’t we enjoy it?” Some residents and tourists reply that it's often the Vagrants who want to be "given" money for booze, describing the methods used by the homeless to request cash as more man-handling than pan-handling.