Special Homeless Census Count in Alternate Years Hits the Ground Running

Counting Santa Cruz County's Homeless

Population In Pairs --

Volunteers Will Also Interview Homeless Folks Individually

By Kimberly White -- Santa Cruz Sentinel

Cheyenne Lewis and Norma Sanchez were out at dawn in Watsonville counting...
photo by Dan Coyro/Sentinel

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WATSONVILLE - Norma Sanchez slowly navigated her car through an alleyway off Freedom Boulevard in Watsonville early Tuesday morning, then paused in front of a Dumpster where a man was foraging, his ragged bike-and-cart combo standing several feet away.

Cheyenne Lewis, riding in the passenger seat, put another mark on the census map, and they continued on their way.

"When we found someone who was homeless, we got excited, but we shouldn't be getting excited because they're homeless," Sanchez later said. "But in a way, we're helping them by helping to get funding."

Sanchez, a 31-year-old Watsonville resident, and Lewis, a 19-year-old Watsonville resident, were among the more than 100 volunteers - including about 50 homeless "guides" - who began traversing Santa Cruz County at 6 a.m. Tuesday as part of the 2011 Santa Cruz County Homeless Census and Survey.

Because their routes mostly took them through residential neighborhoods, by 10 a.m. they only counted six people who they could identify as homeless. Asked what characteristics they look for when conducting a visual count, they paused to consider.

"Do you follow the stereotype of what a homeless individual looks like? It's really difficult," said Sanchez, who's employed as an eligibility worker at the Shelter Project in Watsonville.

It's easy to tell some people are homeless, like the man they spotted digging in the Dumpster. But others - people whose only mode of transportation to work is by bicycle, for instance - are harder to figure out.

The teams that dispersed across the county Tuesday morning conducted visual counts by driving along their routes with their guides and using their best judgment, said Samantha Green a research analyst with Applied Survey Research. The nonprofit social research firm has been conducting the counts in Santa Cruz County since 2001.

"What's the mold, what are you looking for?" Sanchez asked rhetorically. "We're told 'Don't stereotype,' 'Don't stereotype what a homeless person looks like,' but here we are, stereotyping to try to fit somebody into a mold."

To get as accurate a count as possible, Green said, other volunteers walked through the harder-to-reach areas such as Pogonip in Santa Cruz and the Pajaro River in South County.

"We know that this count doesn't reach everybody" and so does the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which requires counties to conduct the counts every other year in order to obtain funding, Green explained. "This is just a snapshot of homelessness in Santa Cruz County."

In addition to the drive-by and walking counts, homeless and transitional shelters took head counts at their facilities Monday night and Tuesday morning and sent that data to the research company. A separate count of homeless teens was conducted Tuesday afternoon, Green said, since youth "don't normally hang out with the rest of the homeless population and tend to come out later in the day."

In addition, homeless representatives from veteran, youth and other communities will begin conducting in-depth interviews next week with their peers. Through those interviews, they hope to find out, among other things, how they become homeless, their health status, and whether they have children.

Last month, 11 programs designed to help the county's homeless learned they would share almost $1.7 million in grants from HUD. Nora Krantzler, senior human services analyst with the county's Homeless Persons Health Project, said that's about the same amount the county receives each year.

Julie Conway, the county's housing project manager and coordinator of the Homeless Action Partnership, said the HUD funds are a significant source of funding for homeless and housing services, but the county also receives larger amounts from other federal agencies.

For example, the county's Homeless Persons Health Project - which provides the homeless with food, supplies, and basic necessities while they recuperate from illness or injury - is part of the national Health Care for the Homeless program. That program, she explained, receives its funding from the federal Health Resources Services Administration.

Results of the survey will not be available until April, according to Joanne Sanchez, a research analyst with Applied Survey Research.

SANTA CRUZ COUNTY HOMELESS COUNT

Every other year, volunteers team up with homeless 'guides' to count the number of homeless individuals living in Santa Cruz County. The census has been conducted by Applied Survey Research since 2001. The $40,000 cost is split among the county and cities of Santa Cruz, Capitola, Scotts Valley and Watsonville. This year's results will be available in April. The previous years' counts:

n 2009: 2,265

n 2007: 2,789

n 2005: 3,371

SOURCE: Applied Survey Research

Rev. Deborah Johnson -- Local Heroine Recognized

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Tony Hill Memorial Award for
This Year Goes to Lively, Nonviolent,
Beloved Reverend Johnson

By TOVIN LAPAN, from Santa Cruz Sentinel

SANTA CRUZ -- The Rev. Deborah Johnson has worked throughout her career to foster understanding among diverse groups and bring divergent communities together to share in dialogue, including work on issues of race, poverty, the Middle East conflict and equal rights for minority groups.

In recognition of that work, Johnson has been chosen as the recipient of the third annual Tony Hill Memorial Award.

The award is given by UC Santa Cruz in recognition of a resident of Santa Cruz County who exemplifies the work and efforts of the late Tony Hill. It is meant to honor individuals for their efforts to seek solutions to the needs of the community, build bridges across diverse communities and develop innovative approaches to solving social problems.

Hill was a community leader, mentor and mediator who worked to improve the lives of the poor and underprivileged in Santa Cruz County. He championed affordable housing and better race relations in the area. He died in 2007, after which UCSC and Hill's family teamed up to sponsor the award.

"Tony was irrepressibly positive," said Scott Kennedy, the Middle East program coordinator at the Resource Center for Nonviolence, who knew Hill and has worked with the Rev. Johnson. "Tony refused to let his commitment to justice make him relate to people in a negative way. He was adamantly committed to justice, and deeply committed to treating people with respect.

"The same can be said for Deborah." The award will be presented at the 27th annual UCSC annual Martin Luther King Jr. Convocation on Jan. 31.

Teynote speaker this year is civil rights activist Terrence Roberts, a member of the "Little Rock Nine" -- the group of African-American students in Little Rock, Ark., who made history in 1957 as the first to attend classes under the federal mandate to desegregate public schools.

"We live in a community with many progressive people who are doing all kinds of extraordinary work, and to be noticed in such a wide pool of possibilities was really humbling," Johnson said in a statement.

She recalled the words of Martin Luther King Jr. when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize.

"He described himself as a trustee, and said he was accepting the award on behalf of a movement -- and that's how I feel," she said in the statement.

Johnson was in Los Angeles on Monday and could not be reached for comment.

In addition to being the founding minister and president of Inner Light Ministries, an Omnifaith outreach ministry, Johnson is also the founder and president of The Motivational Institute, an organizational development consulting firm specializing in cultural diversity serving the public, private and nonprofit sectors.

Johnson also supported the Sulah Project, which brought together Palestinians, Jews and other groups from the Middle East for cultural exchange and conversation at the Inner Light Center in Soquel. She has been an active participant in the civil rights movement and works on projects designed to help people affected by AIDS.

Recently, she was a vocal opponent to Proposition 8, the California proposition that banned same-sex marriage, at one point bringing together proponents of the proposition at the Inner Light Center for a forum where all sides of the debate could be heard.

She was the successful co-litigant in two landmark cases in California. One set a precedent for the inclusion of sexual orientation in the state's Civil Rights Bill; the other defeated the challenge to legalizing domestic partnerships.

"When she came here, Santa Cruz was blessed to get such an incredible person that is loving and giving and not afraid to call it like it is," said Santa Cruz Barrios Unidos Executive Director Nane Alejandrez, who worked with Tony Hill and has participated in projects with Johnson. "She always brings alternatives to dealing constructively with different aspects of community."

Past award winners are Luis Alejo, former Watsonville mayor and recently elected to state Assembly, and Santa Cruz City Councilman Ryan Coonerty.

Linda's Hearth note: I've attended the worship she offers, along Freedom Boulevard. The wonderful singer, now deceased, Joyce Diamond told me about this church. Last year, I met Raine Eisler there. If you love singing with worship, check it out, wonderful.

Does the Internet Make You Dumber?

The cognitive effects are measurable: We're turning into shallow thinkers, says Nicholas Carr.

By NICHOLAS CARR

The Roman philosopher Seneca may have put it best 2,000 years ago: "To be everywhere is to be nowhere." Today, the Internet grants us easy access to unprecedented amounts of information. But a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that the Net, with its constant distractions and interruptions, is also turning us into scattered and superficial thinkers.

The picture emerging from the research is deeply troubling, at least to anyone who values the depth, rather than just the velocity, of human thought. People who read text studded with links, the studies show, comprehend less than those who read traditional linear text. People who watch busy multimedia presentations remember less than those who take in information in a more sedate and focused manner. People who are continually distracted by emails, alerts and other messages understand less than those who are able to concentrate. And people who juggle many tasks are less creative and less productive than those who do one thing at a time.

Mick Coulas

The common thread in these disabilities is the division of attention. The richness of our thoughts, our memories and even our personalities hinges on our ability to focus the mind and sustain concentration. Only when we pay deep attention to a new piece of information are we able to associate it "meaningfully and systematically with knowledge already well established in memory," writes the Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel. Such associations are essential to mastering complex concepts.

When we're constantly distracted and interrupted, as we tend to be online, our brains are unable to forge the strong and expansive neural connections that give depth and distinctiveness to our thinking. We become mere signal-processing units, quickly shepherding disjointed bits of information into and then out of short-term memory.

In an article published in Science last year, Patricia Greenfield, a leading developmental psychologist, reviewed dozens of studies on how different media technologies influence our cognitive abilities. Some of the studies indicated that certain computer tasks, like playing video games, can enhance "visual literacy skills," increasing the speed at which people can shift their focus among icons and other images on screens. Other studies, however, found that such rapid shifts in focus, even if performed adeptly, result in less rigorous and "more automatic" thinking.

56 Seconds

Average time an American spends looking at a Web page.

Source: Nielsen

In one experiment conducted at Cornell University, for example, half a class of students was allowed to use Internet-connected laptops during a lecture, while the other had to keep their computers shut. Those who browsed the Web performed much worse on a subsequent test of how well they retained the lecture's content. While it's hardly surprising that Web surfing would distract students, it should be a note of caution to schools that are wiring their classrooms in hopes of improving learning.

Ms. Greenfield concluded that "every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others." Our growing use of screen-based media, she said, has strengthened visual-spatial intelligence, which can improve the ability to do jobs that involve keeping track of lots of simultaneous signals, like air traffic control. But that has been accompanied by "new weaknesses in higher-order cognitive processes," including "abstract vocabulary, mindfulness, reflection, inductive problem solving, critical thinking, and imagination." We're becoming, in a word, shallower.

In another experiment, recently conducted at Stanford University's Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab, a team of researchers gave various cognitive tests to 49 people who do a lot of media multitasking and 52 people who multitask much less frequently. The heavy multitaskers performed poorly on all the tests. They were more easily distracted, had less control over their attention, and were much less able to distinguish important information from trivia.

The researchers were surprised by the results. They had expected that the intensive multitaskers would have gained some unique mental advantages from all their on-screen juggling. But that wasn't the case. In fact, the heavy multitaskers weren't even good at multitasking. They were considerably less adept at switching between tasks than the more infrequent multitaskers. "Everything distracts them," observed Clifford Nass, the professor who heads the Stanford lab.

Does the Internet Make You Smarter?

Charis Tsevis

Amid the silly videos and spam are the roots of a new reading and writing culture, says Clay Shirky.

It would be one thing if the ill effects went away as soon as we turned off our computers and cellphones. But they don't. The cellular structure of the human brain, scientists have discovered, adapts readily to the tools we use, including those for finding, storing and sharing information. By changing our habits of mind, each new technology strengthens certain neural pathways and weakens others. The cellular alterations continue to shape the way we think even when we're not using the technology.

The pioneering neuroscientist Michael Merzenich believes our brains are being "massively remodeled" by our ever-intensifying use of the Web and related media. In the 1970s and 1980s, Mr. Merzenich, now a professor emeritus at the University of California in San Francisco, conducted a famous series of experiments on primate brains that revealed how extensively and quickly neural circuits change in response to experience. When, for example, Mr. Merzenich rearranged the nerves in a monkey's hand, the nerve cells in the animal's sensory cortex quickly reorganized themselves to create a new "mental map" of the hand. In a conversation late last year, he said that he was profoundly worried about the cognitive consequences of the constant distractions and interruptions the Internet bombards us with. The long-term effect on the quality of our intellectual lives, he said, could be "deadly."

What we seem to be sacrificing in all our surfing and searching is our capacity to engage in the quieter, attentive modes of thought that underpin contemplation, reflection and introspection. The Web never encourages us to slow down. It keeps us in a state of perpetual mental locomotion.

It is revealing, and distressing, to compare the cognitive effects of the Internet with those of an earlier information technology, the printed book. Whereas the Internet scatters our attention, the book focuses it. Unlike the screen, the page promotes contemplativeness.

Reading a long sequence of pages helps us develop a rare kind of mental discipline. The innate bias of the human brain, after all, is to be distracted. Our predisposition is to be aware of as much of what's going on around us as possible. Our fast-paced, reflexive shifts in focus were once crucial to our survival. They reduced the odds that a predator would take us by surprise or that we'd overlook a nearby source of food.

To read a book is to practice an unnatural process of thought. It requires us to place ourselves at what T. S. Eliot, in his poem "Four Quartets," called "the still point of the turning world." We have to forge or strengthen the neural links needed to counter our instinctive distractedness, thereby gaining greater control over our attention and our mind.

It is this control, this mental discipline, that we are at risk of losing as we spend ever more time scanning and skimming online. If the slow progression of words across printed pages damped our craving to be inundated by mental stimulation, the Internet indulges it. It returns us to our native state of distractedness, while presenting us with far more distractions than our ancestors ever had to contend with.

—Nicholas Carr is the author, most recently, of "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains"

Linda's Hearth note: This article was published in the Wall St Journal, July 2010

Judge decided to NOT toss the lodging tickets as unconstitutional; doesn't believe sleeping is protected in state and federal constitutions

Judge denies dismissal of camping tickets from Peace Camp 2010

Homeless people and their allies, just before court yesterday. Forgot the man on left (sorry), then Robert Norse, attorney Ed Frey, Gail Page, adn with the great hat, Paul Lee. The top of defendant Gary peeks over attorney Frey's shoulders in this photo. photo by Dan Croyo, Sentinel

By Cathy Kelly - Santa Cruz Sentinel Posted: 01/21/2011 07:40:37 PM PST

SANTA CRUZ - A judge refused Friday to dismiss misdemeanor unlawful lodging charges against six people involved in the Peace Camp 2010 demonstration, despite their attorney's claim that the state law banning sleeping outdoors is unconstitutional.

Peace Camp 2010 began July Fourth as a protest against a Santa Cruz law, which makes it an infraction to sleep outside from 11 p.m. to 8:30 a.m. It began on the county courthouse steps, moved to Santa Cruz City Hall and fizzled out on Oct. 2. Participants wracked up several citations for sleeping outside.

At the courthouse, after issuing warnings, deputies cited sleeping people using a state law that makes lodging outside a misdemeanor offense.

Attorney Ed Frey was arrested during the protest and is representing himself and five others - Gary Allen Johnson, Colette Marie Connolly, Elliott Matthew Anderson, Christopher Doyon and Arthur William Bischoff. A jury trial is set for Jan. 31.

Frey vowed to fight on after Friday's setback, and to appeal if defeated at trial.

About 20 supporters came to the hearing.

Frey argued that the U.S. and California constitutions give people the right to the basics of life, including the right to sleep and the right to be left alone as long as no one else's rights are being infringed upon. He further argued the language in the statute is too vague and that the campers had the right to sleep as a form of protest and that it should be protected as freedom of expression.

"We are not claiming we can sleep anywhere we want; just that we can sleep somewhere," he said outside court.

But prosecutor Sara Dabkowski filed a document opposing the motion to dismiss, stating the right to sleep was not a Constitutional right. And she stated that simply because a person performs an act as an expression or for a symbolic purpose, that does not make that act constitutionally protected.

After court, she said she had no personal opinion about the argument that sleeping is a basic right, but looked forward to presenting evidence at trial.

She said several other anti-lodging cases are working their way through the system.

Homeless advocates say there are about 2,000 homeless in the county and about 200 shelter beds, and that of the 30 homeless people who died in the county last year, four died as a result of exposure coupled with acute substance abuse.

"That is part of why we're doing this. It's very real," advocate Becky Johnson said.

Gary Johnson, 46, said he wracked up 21 lodging violations. Each carries a possible six months in jail and $1,000 fine.

Johnson said he has been in Santa Cruz about 20 years and homeless for about a year. He said he has worked in the computer software field, but has not been able to find work recently.

"How are they going to reform me? Put me in jail and tell me to quit sleeping?" he said.

After Peace Camp 2010, the Santa Cruz City Council voted to dismiss citations for camping if a homeless person was on a shelter wait list when the ticket was issued.

City of Santa Cruz Noisemaker Laws Capture Students

HAVE A PARTY, GO TO COURT

~ Going from being a Nuisance to becoming a Criminal ~

by Linda Ellen Lemaster for Linda's Hearth

Finally leaping into 2011 New Year spirit, I was waiting my turn in the midnight supermarket check-out line last weekend, when a group of five UCSC students que'd up behind me. All in their early 20's I'd guess? One was talking about the "noise tickets" he and his three Westside housemates received Saturday night.

He said to his grocery-shopping buddies, "yeah, we EACH have to go to court. But I think it should be easy to clear this up, since two of us were asleep in the adjacent bedrooms when the cops came, and an officer had to wake us to give us the citation."

I wish them all well in court!

The obviously bright young man was believable to me: his story seemed incredible to his buddies. I remember when that 'neighborhood versus students' law was enacted. The Santa Cruz City Council assured their packed-to-the-gills, all-ages audience that police officers would "always use their discretion," as thought this should reassure people.

Again and again, in my view, this City keeps passing innovative, reactionary and experimental ordinances, without making much parallel effort to educate residents, nor appropriately analysing actual underlying needs, nor looking into peaceful and alternative modes of resolution. Legal consequences are meted out without the City's engagement in any process that gets past the structure of upset people's complaints.

Without neighborhood involvement beyond draining bitch* sessions. Without even a hint of community interaction. And it leads to deepening a chasm build out of "them or us" expletives and curses. (Not to mention poor language that wastes time in court later, to the extent that I've heard almost every sitting judge lament the City's impact, "eating up the court's overtaxed time," as one judge said last year. I see that as another different concern.)

I believe there's a serious downside with enacting too much regulatory control over people's native and human behaviors, for they preclude citizens and their friends from even communicating without any chance to find real and inclusive solutions; and then young men become "criminals" without ever having faced their accusers. If it isn't already a "conflict" when these noise complaints are called in to the police, or when weekend gatherings get unplugged, or when the court dates arrive, it will by definition *become* adversarial when it gets to court.

Our City's laws need to fit together with each other on many levels. Passing new laws to reassure people who feel agrieved or gyped, without even clarifying and concretizing and not even testing them out and engaging with citizens in the process of hammering out legal jargon, together, makes mere criminals (and possibly expenses to County and Courts?). It also helps make people become ever-moreso dependent, and even socially and politically incompetent, as citizens and neighbors.

Is this the kind of people we want inhabiting our "built-out" yet still growing little City? It seems ill planned, to me, to set college undergraduates up to have their first run-in with "Cops and Courts" over such an arbitrary, vague and complaint-driven law.

Also, the feedback and lifestyle information that could flow from a more open and less adversarial process would be like *gold* as the City and it's municipal neighbors strive forward together, with goals of higher-rise rental housing along "service rich" arterial avenues.


Linda's Hearth note: *I feel ok about saying the B word, having been so accused and having to come to terms with this. I don't, however, appreciate when mens call womens bitches generally. So be nice!

United Nations Human Rights Fair in Santa Cruz

Human Rights Fair Spotlights Homeless

36.9752

-122.02546

primary

Human Rights Fair Spotlights Homeless

740 Front St, Santa Cruz, CA

/articles/human-rights-fair-spotlights-homeless

/locations/2656233

Activists at Saturday's human

rights fair raises awareness

about global injustices and reveals

new city ordinances affecting

homeless people.

By Niko Kyriakou | December 6, 2010

Becky Johnson, a member of 'Homeless United for Friendship &
Freedom' calls the sleeping ban "insidious." photo: Niko Kyriakou

Section Sponsored By

The third annual Human Rights Fair featured food, crafts, music and tables manned all day Saturday by some 15 rights groups, including Amnesty International, the Resource Center for Nonviolence and the Haiti Initiative, which is run by UC Santa Cruz students.

The fair is put on by the local chapter of the United Nations Association (UNA), which charged non-student groups $10 to run a table and $45 to sell crafts at the Galleria.

Asked whether there are human rights violations here in Santa Cruz, an UNA spokeswoman said yes and pointed to the so-called "sleeping ban."

This city ordinance, passed last June, makes sleeping outside between the hours of 11 p.m. and 8:30 a.m. a ticket-able offense.

"In Santa Cruz, there are many homeless people, services and facilities, but very often not enough. We think that the sleeping ban should be eliminated until they [homeless people] actually have facilities," said Pat Arnold, president of the Santa Cruz County chapter of the UNA.

Arnold says the sleeping ban violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, an international treaty signed by the U.S. on Dec. 10, 1948, in the wake of World War II. The anniversary of that event is celebrated around the world each year as Human Rights Day.

"The United States has ratified this treaty, which codifies it into law," says Arnold. "So on a local level, we should be abiding by the declaration."

Technically, she's right.

According to the Constitution, international laws signed by the U.S. are the supreme law of the land—meaning they trump laws set at federal, state, county or city levels. At least one lawyer, Ann Fagan Ginger of Berkeley, has taken the matter to court. In practice, however, international law is rarely—if ever—given priority.

Pat Arnold organized this year's

Human Rights Fair.

The passage of the UN Declaration relating to the homeless ban, found in Article 25, states:

"Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services."

As Arnold sees it, a right to "housing" means a right to have a place to sleep—and if you are homeless, that includes sleeping outside.

"We decided in our board that it [Article 25] applies to the sleeping ban," she says. "Housing means a place to sleep, and that's how most people look at it. In fact, the law says that the people who are ticketed are not fined, if on that day there were no beds available in local shelters. But they still have to go through the whole process of being ticketed and going to jail and being fined."

Becky Johnson, a member of Homeless United for Freedom and Friendship (HUFF), which had a table at the fair, describes the homeless ban as "insidious" and part of a wider attack on homeless people.

"On the top burner of HUFF today is the criminalization of homelessness," says Johnson, who spent three years on the board of the Citizen's Committee, now the Homeless Services Center. "It's the tendency by a lot of local governments with a lot of little petty ordinances to make all the things that homeless people do in the course of their day illegal, whether they sit on the sidewalk, whether they beg for spare change, whether they lie down in an public place or cover up with a blanket, or sleep at night."

When homeless people try to sleep in parks at night, she says, they are slapped with a double fine, one for sleeping in public and one for trespassing in a closed park. As a result, homeless people often are up all night.

"They're extremely exhausted, so they go there [to parks] in the daytime to sleep, but then people go, 'Oh, look at those lazy homeless people lying around,'" Johnson says. "Well, let them sleep at night, and they'll probably be doing a lot better, looking for a job in the daytime or finding housing or getting back into programs or school. Most homeless people do get back into housing."

The average length of homelessness in the city is four months, according to the 2009 Santa Cruz County Homeless Census, conducted by United Way. At that time, there were 2,265 homeless people in the county, down 20 percent from 2007.

Other ordinances that make life unnecessarily difficult for homeless people, according to Johnson, include bans for the following activities—lying on benches, playing guitar within 10 feet of a statue, sitting on public property not "customarily used" for sitting and loitering in public parking garages.

A homeless man visiting the HUFF table said the ordinances are part of a push to gentrify Santa Cruz.

"They've eliminated all the housing and jobs around here that normal people do and expect that everybody is just going to go away," said Lee, who gave only his first name. "It doesn't work like that."

Lee has been without a home for the last five years. "Basically," he said, "this town is on an unviable path toward gentrification."

Lodging Law being tried Friday, January 21, 2011, at 1:30 pm in Department 2

CRIMINALIZING HOMELESS PEOPLE

FOR LODGING

AT THE COURTHOUSE ~~

Sleeping Outside at Night Deemed Illegal,
as Everywhere Else in Public

excerpt of article from Becky Johnson, One Woman Talking, on Blogspot

This Friday, following a flurry of briefs filed back and forth between the City and the District Attorney's office, the first major court hearing will be held this Friday, January 21st, 2011 at 1:30 PM in Department 2. The State anti-lodging law makes it illegal to "lodge" anywhere within the state boundaries absent a deed, a mortgage, a lease, a rental agreement, or a receipt for a local motel room. This is a misdemeanor which allows for immediate arrest and jailing.






Peace Camp 2o1o had been protesting the City of Santa Cruz' MC 6.36.010 section a also known as the Sleeping Ban, which is an infraction, when sheriff's surprised them by making arrests under the more serious, anti-lodging law.

Frey, representing himself, along with six other defendants including Gary Johnson and Collette Connally, two of Peace Camp 2010's most courageous protesters. Both are protesting the law which makes it a crime to sleep out of doors anywhere within the city limits outside of a home or motel room, outdoors or in a legally parked vehicle. A separate provision outlaws the use of a blanket at night even if the person remains wide awake.


Linda's Hearth note: see more photos and rest of this article at onewomantalking.blogspot.com. Her photo above features my wonderful friend, Colette, getting awakened by the state, outside Santa Cruz County courthouse plaza.