You may have seen yes­ter­day’s Dom­Post sto­ry on beg­ging, which trum­pet­ed that the Coun­cil was “con­sid­er­ing ban­ning beg­ging or fin­ing good samar­i­tans.” This gen­er­at­ed much jus­ti­fied out­rage, even though deep­er into the arti­cle it became clear­er that this was just one extreme option among a wide range of mea­sures that had been con­sid­ered after com­plaints from the pub­lic, and one that had been thor­ough­ly reject­ed by a report that is going before Coun­cil. There was also men­tion of a “kind­ness can kill” ad cam­paign to link beg­ging to drug abuse, which under­stand­ably hor­ri­fied a lot of read­ers.

Luck­i­ly, Rob Kel­ly from Scoop.co.nz point­ed us to the full report, includ­ing a report com­mis­sioned by ThinkPlace and the offi­cers’ rec­om­men­da­tions. It’s long, but worth read­ing if you have the time and can stom­ach some of the heart­break­ing sto­ries of abuse, insti­tu­tion­al fail­ure, and relent­less vor­tices of debt that drag peo­ple into such des­per­ate sit­u­a­tions. Because unlike cer­tain politi­cians and colum­nists, this report actu­al­ly con­sid­ered the evi­dence, includ­ing the results of var­i­ous attempts around the world to deal with the issue, and talked not just to retail­ers and ser­vice providers, but also to peo­ple who beg. Rad­i­cal, I know.

For those with­out the time or spoons, here’s a sum­ma­ry of some key points:

  • The report rec­om­mends that Coun­cil should recog­nise beg­ging “as a com­plex and mul­ti-dimen­sion­al nation­al issue … a coor­di­nat­ed response is required to address the under­ly­ing long-term issues”. Coun­cil should “adopt street man­age­ment as the pre­ferred approach to deal­ing with the impact of beg­ging. This means tol­er­at­ing beg­ging as part of the cityscape con­sis­tent with view­ing beg­ging as pri­mar­i­ly a social issue. It does not imply that Coun­cil approves of crim­i­nal behav­iour includ­ing intim­ida­to­ry behav­iour and Coun­cil would con­tin­ue as now to advise cit­i­zens to con­tact the police when this is either expe­ri­enced or wit­nessed.” I hope they also apply the “intim­ida­to­ry behav­iour” rules to chug­gers and cer­tain magi­cians.
  • In recog­ni­tion that beg­ging’s pri­ma­ry caus­es are noth­ing that a sin­gle Coun­cil can direct­ly con­trol, they also rec­om­mend work­ing with Cen­tral Gov­ern­ment and its agen­cies, com­mu­ni­ty groups and oth­er Local Author­i­ties. Specif­i­cal­ly, Coun­cil should “con­tin­ue sup­port­ing the Te Mahana strat­e­gy which con­tributes to the devel­op­ment of a hous­ing first mod­el tack­ling home­less­ness and asso­ci­at­ed health and social issues. Whilst not all peo­ple who beg are home­less, the project find­ings sug­gest that the chaot­ic lifestyles of many street home­less peo­ple are akin to num­bers of peo­ple who beg.”
  • As today’s Dom­Post sto­ry says, direct­ly employ­ing those who beg might be anoth­er approach. “In response to the project find­ings that lack of pos­i­tive social engage­ment or employ­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties drove beg­ging behav­iour con­sid­er options that would enable peo­ple who are self-moti­vat­ed to change behav­iour. This could be with part­ners, through funding/philanthropic projects and/or through Council’s own ser­vices.”
  • The “kind­ness can kill” idea does­n’t seem to be in the orig­i­nal report from ThinkPlace. It must have been added by Coun­cil offi­cers, based on exist­ing cam­paigns in the UK., though the report does­n’t sound too enthu­si­as­tic about it: “Although there is no strik­ing evi­dence to sug­gest their suc­cess in reduc­ing beg­ging, there may be mer­it in fur­ther exam­in­ing the UK expe­ri­ence of ‘kind­ness can kill’ cam­paigns, and the capac­i­ty in New Zealand for link­ing such ini­tia­tives to increased drug treat­ment pro­vi­sion.”
  • As for the idea of fin­ing those who give? Again, not men­tioned in the ThinkPlace report, and in the offi­cers’ report: “intro­duc­ing a by-law that bans cit­i­zens from giv­ing to peo­ple who beg … [would arguably] min­imise the num­ber of finan­cial and oth­er trans­ac­tions between the pub­lic and those who beg. But it might not res­onate well with an emphat­ic [empa­thet­ic?] Welling­ton pub­lic, or har­ness that empa­thy for com­mu­ni­ty engage­ment in pos­i­tive change ini­tia­tives.”

How did those last two pro­pos­als get into the report, along with oth­er moves to fur­ther demonise the already vul­ner­a­ble, when it looks like no-one who’s actu­al­ly stud­ied the issue in depth thinks they’d work? Maybe offi­cers felt they had to con­sid­er all options, no mat­ter how repug­nant or inef­fec­tive. How­ev­er, one might sus­pect the direct inter­ven­tion of cer­tain coun­cil­lors, hun­gry for tough-talk­ing head­line-grab­bing sound bites. And even though noth­ing like that made it into the “Next Actions” part of the humane, evi­dence-based report, the Dom­Post (despite a much more sen­si­ble and empa­thet­ic edi­to­r­i­al today) has giv­en those coun­cil­lors exact­ly what they want­ed.