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.