There’s doing you job, and then there’s being a dick. This kind of skews more to the latter than the former. Police in the Melbourne CBD have been cracking down on the city’s homeless, and have allegedly been seizing cash earned by begging as proceeds of crime.
Community outreach organisation Youth Projects has reported that instances of Police seizing begging cups have risen over the past 6 months. The seizure of money gained through begging as a proceed of crime has long been in sporadic practice – begging itself is illegal in Victoria.
Victoria Police have denied the seizures have taken place, insisting that whilst they do charge people with Begging Alms, they do not claim the money earned. But eye-witness accounts have backed up the claim that in some cases Police have either seized money or forced the person to empty the contents of their cup into a charity box. A Melbourne city worker stated that he saw Police seize $20 from the cup of a homeless man last month.
The crackdown is designed to target “aggressive” or “professional” beggars, but law agencies working on the issue have stated that those targeted are not part of that group. Lucy Adams, manager at Homeless Law, explains thusly: “The vast majority were begging passively, just with a sign and sitting on the streets.” Homeless Law currently has 14 clients on its cards involved in the crackdown, with just under 80 percent being long-term unemployed, and all but one person suffering mental-health issues.
“We’ve got a complex social problem, we don’t know what else to do and our first response is law enforcement.“
Photo: Filippo Monteforte via Getty Images.
via The Age.
