Picture the Homeless

From our founding and first organizing meetings, police harassment and the profiling of homeless folks has been raised as an issue. It has always been about justice, dignity and fairness. These discussions and issues dominated nearly every discussion during outreach in the streets, parks and transit facilities and during our early weekly general membership meetings - which began when we moved into Judson Memorial Church in 2001.

In January of 2002 we held an action in front of the Manhattan Criminal Court at 346 Broadway on Martin Luther King's Birthday to protest (then new) Mayor Bloomberg's crackdown on Quality of Life crimes during which he cited the Seven Deadly Sins which included 6 Quality of Life crimes such as public urination and the 7th was homelessness - which is not a crime. We picked this spot because it is the kangaroo court where folks take their Quality of Life tickets and stand before a judge without even the benefit of speaking with an attorney prior to going before the Judge. In many cases homeless New Yorkers are given an ACD which means they cannot have any additional police contact within a period of 6 months - nearly impossible for a homeless New Yorker - without penalty of going to jail - for days, weeks or months. Stemming simply from the initial charge which would not even result in jail time.

Many New Yorkers, including homeless New Yorkers, expected a more rational, softer approach from Mayor Bloomberg than Giuliani. There was a lot of anger that one of Bloomberg's first press conferences highlighted a crackdown on homeless New Yorkers - and again we ask the question whose interest are served by these policies and who does the Mayor work for?


There was a large press turnout for our action. As far as we know, ours was the first against Mayor Bloomberg's policies. Some of our members wore bandanas over their faces so as not to be identified in any media coverage because they had outstanding warrants or feared retaliation by the police.

Hello my name is Michael Williams and I have been a member of Picture the homeless off and on for the better part of 3-4 years. I found out about Picture the Homeless from a friend by the name of John Jones who asked me to attend a meeting which at the time was being held at Judson Church in the East Village in Lower Manhattan. After hearing what was being said I decided to join the struggle of the homeless to get the politic ians to better help the homeless get what we need to live better in the city of New York. The people of New York need to realize that this city is not going to get better unless they resolve the homeless situation in the city. To solve the homeless problem the politicians must come up with the best way possible to make sure that the population of homeless people are lowered so that there would not be a lot of citizens complaining about how many homeless people there are in the city. In this situation I have worked hard with Picture the Homeless to convince politicians to come up with a program that would help get the homeless people off the street and into a place that they can call their own. Also I have worked with Picture the Homeless to stop the selective enforcement of the homeless by the NYPD, in contras the NYPD settled out of court due to a law suit that was filed on the behave of Picture the Homeless by the NYCLU's Chris Dunn.