Move along!

I recall that some years ago during the New York mayoral reign of King Ed Koch the I (that's not a Roman numeral), the city adopted a plan to protect tourists and conventioneers from the downer of seeing homeless people. Police would sweep the streets and take any homeless they found to city shelters. Many of the homeless objected, preferring the streets to the overcrowding, noise, rats, and constant threat of violence found in the shelters. But the policy was that if you refused to go to a shelter, you were for that reason assumed to be mentally unstable and institutionalized.

The policy was ultimately ruled unlawful, but that experience hasn't stopped numerous other cities and states from looking for, uh, "creative" ways to make homelessness invisible without actually having to do anything about it.

To this list we can add Hawai'i, where there is

a new state law that went into effect in May allowing police to arrest homeless people if they return within a year to a spot from which they were rousted,

reported the Boston Globe on August 30. The ACLU of Hawai'i called the new law "patently unconstitutional" and the harshest of its kind in the nation. As a result, Hawai'i is about to make the National Coalition for the Homeless' "Meanest States" list for the first time.

Footnote: The state of Hawai'i of course disagrees, saying it's making "significant strides" in dealing with soaring homelessness, which has more than doubled in four years. Strides such as, again in line with what's been done elsewhere, proposing an inadequate number of "affordable housing" units many of which will be beyond the means of those they are supposedly intended to benefit.