Great post at Bench Conference:
The Stupid Law of the Week Award goes to the cities of Las Vegas and Orlando, both of which have sought to restrict or outright ban people from feeding the homeless in the parks of those cities. You can feed your family at a park in Vegas, and you can feed your friends and neighbors if you have a picnic there in public, but you can’t give a sandwich to a homeless person in a park. In Orlando, meanwhile, city officials have required people to pay for a permit for the privilege of giving food to the homeless at a park.[.]
The new law is especially offensive In Las Vegas because it seeks to criminalize or fine people for feeding homeless people. Can you imagine how the police are supposed to enforce that? Can you imagine why the police would want to enforce that when Las Vegas has monumentally more important crime problems with which to deal? Vegas doesn’t want compassionate citizens “luring” homeless people out to parks (like they were pigeons out for breadcrumbs) because then public drunkeness or litter or crime can become a problem. Of course, the solution would be to simply enforce the existing laws against public drunkeness, litter or crime. But apparently that’s not good enough for the folks who ask the rest of us to go to Las Vegas to gamble, drink and visit prostitutes. By the way, you’ve got to love a city where it is legal to pay for sex but illegal to give away a sandwich in a park.