Google's War Against the Homeless in Los Angeles | Hacker News Reader

Google's War Against the Homeless in Los Angeles

yashalevine.com

47 pointskushti28 comments

Something is off in this story. Early on, it recounts the story of a homeless man who, along with his girlfriend, was maced by private security guards (contracted, apparently, to Google) for not clearing off a public sidewalk.

That's bad, but it's not just that: it's a crime, and also a tort. No security company that allowed its employees to pepper-spray nonviolent people on public walkways --- or, really, anywhere --- could long remain in business.

If something like this is actually happening, Google's opponents don't need to generate outrage. They just need to get onto the streets of Venice with cameras, capture it happening, and help the victims make criminal and (lucrative) civil complaints against one of the largest corporations in the country.

What am I missing here?

how many homeless people have the means to sue sombody?

And even if a case was offered pro bono (extremely unlikely before a huge media circus) how many could even reasonably be capable of bringing suit then?

how many police desk officers are going to give a shit about the rambling complaints of some homeless man they wish would just dissappear?

If you really find it so incredible that homeless people end up abused, no matter what some corporate policy claims, you lack perspective.

This is the powerful pushing out the weak in full display, guess which side has easier access to the law.

Lawyers take cases on contingency if they look like obvious wins against someone with deep pockets. The victims don't need to pay a cent.

Is "a guard from the google security team maced me" an easy win? What kind of evidence would be necessary to secure a win?

Hence the suggestion to go out and film this.

If this is indeed such a common occurrence it wouldn't be hard to gather evidence.

Imagine the submitted article had video.

Do you think we wouldn't have people saying things like "there seems to be something off about this. We still only have one video, and it doesn't show what happened before the guard maced the homeless person. Maybe they were being aggressive?"

We see similar comments in every thread where someone alleges injustice. (Often for good reasons - we don't want an uninformed pile on based on one person's account.)

No, I think if you had video of a security guard macing a woman or a dude with both hands full of water jugs on a public sidewalk, you'd have plaintiff's lawyers coming out of the woodwork.

Again: if it were police doing this, different story (ironically): it is much harder to sue a municipality, and there is an unfortunate presumption that police use of nonlethal force is almost invariably justified. But none of that is the case with private security.

Even if a homeless person would go to the police, given what i know about US police they'd likely be blown off. Additionally the evidence situation for something like "getting maced by a security guard" is fairly low. Also your suggestion would possibly come with its own set of legal problems. (Entrapment comes to mind.)

Heck, if you read the article more closely, the security people actually use the police against the homeless.

While I'm not sure I agree with you, let's stipulate that you're right. That's why I'm saying that people who believe Google is sponsoring unprovoked attacks on the homeless should go capture these events taking place with their own cameras.

Ordinary citizens (and that's what security guards are) cannot in fact pepper spray someone on a sidewalk, or even trespassing in a building, simply because they won't leave. If they do, it's battery. It's a pretty cut-and-dried issue.

Ironically, if this were an accusation about the police in Venice violently removing the homeless from in front of a giant corporation's building, I'd have much less trouble making sense of it.

I agree with most of it, and hope this would be done. However the questions that come to mind is:

- How often does this happen? How much cellphone camming would need to be done?

- Would the results be legally admissible, especially when you hang around recording things hoping to catch someone in the act?

- Would the results be enough to get a cop to care? Or maybe a lawyer to care?

I don't know the answers, but maybe the answers would help clarify why nothing is being done.

> No security company that allowed its employees to pepper-spray nonviolent people on public walkways --- or, really, anywhere --- could long remain in business.

What evidence leads you to this conclusion? Can you recall an instance in the US in which any company or any public agency was shut down or even dramatically reformed for abusing non-violent homeless people?

> What am I missing here?

You can do pretty much what you like (short of mass murder) to homeless people and no-one, including police, gives a fuck.

Many homeless people have adversarial at best relationships with police and will be reluctant to seek police assistance.

That's just not true. In many places, it may (unfortunately) be the case that there's no recourse when the police assault homeless people. But ordinary citizens have no presumptive right to use physical force against other people in anything but self defense. Private security guards are nothing but ordinary citizens.

The really famous cases of nonviolent people being pepper-sprayed are instructive: they're university police, a special class of private security guard actually deputized to use force.

I'm not here to argue that the homeless aren't abused, or aren't getting a very raw deal with the law and law enforcement in general. I'm just saying that the details in this particular story seem off. Again, they should be getting this on camera. Those videos could be worth a lot of money.

I'm a little skeptical about the pepper spray accusations myself, but there's no question that a Google security guard harrassed and attempted to intimidate the people making that documentary short film while on a public sidewalk. It's right there in the video on the page.

Empathy?

> Google's opponents don't need to generate outrage.

We just don't seem to have an issue with "outrage" when the topic involves encryption. I don't see an issue with this article bringing to light bad practices.

If this article opens up a broader discussion, involving any business participating in such disgusting practices, all the better.

Impressive. I didn't think we'd experience Google explicitly doing evil this quickly. In fact, if the mace anecdote is true, then this isn't even evil, this is bodily assault, this is Google hiring people to commit crimes.

(EDIT: Wait, they have Google employee badges?)

Google will claim that these are not google employees but contractors, and that they're shocked at the lapse in standards, and that they've had strong words with the contractors to remind them of Google's standards. They'll make some token donation to a homeless shelter (or maybe they'll remind people of the donations they presumably already make).

The pepper-spraying will continue, but in future guards will count to 3 before spraying.

Nice, but you forgot the standard "We take XXXX very seriously" Mad-Lib PR statement. Where, in this case, XXXX is "the rights of the homeless".

Is there any evidence that the pepper spraying event even happened, let alone happened how that one person said it did?

Google bought their security guards into the company a few years back to boost diversity numbers.

This is hardly the first evil thing done by an employee at google and really there's no way I would believe that a company of over 10,000 people could avoid sort of thing happening in what is essentially the company's autonomic systems. Now that this article has presumably brought the issue to Google's equivalent of conscious attention we'll see how much Google intends to live up to its motto.

These stories are always interesting to me, both from the author and the target (in this case Google's) perspective.

The author goes out of their way to paint Google as a sort of tone deaf entity with baskets of money spending a small amount on security to hassle and threaten the "lesser" people who, through no fault of their own, find themselves penniless and sitting on sidewalks near them.

The question though is a lot different. What, if any, responsibility does Google have to the homeless? And what responsibility does Google have to its employees?

I think the responsibility for collecting funds from everyone in the form of taxes and applying it the collective homeless problem, is that of the Government. That is in part why we elect people to represent our neighborhoods and our cities, so that they will use our taxes to address the issues the city (or county) faces.

Google has the responsibility for making a safe and enjoyable workspace for its employees. And pretty much that is it.

If we want to use Google's capital to help the homeless, the way we do that is we tax them in the city, we take that tax money, and we apply it to the homeless problem that the city faces.

Easy to say, hard to do. Many people will say that the great dumping of mental patients into the streets[1] in the 1970's was a mistake. While the mentally ill are not the majority of the population of homeless, they are the most impactful on city services and on the perception of the homeless issue.

It sounded from the article that Google was going to far in trying to improve their employee's perception of safety, and the author was going to far in implying that Google's wealth made them responsible to fix the problem. It also sounds like the city councilman is in Google's employ :-) which tells you perhaps the voters can have an impact here.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/30/science/how-release-of-men...

So if a journalist (together with a filmmaker and filmcrew) points a camera at you without your permission, it's 'freedom of the press', but if you point a camera at a journalist, it's classed as "aggressive", "creepy" and "disturbing":

[the guard] "then got even more aggressive. He called us “paparazzi types” and followed us around, repeatedly jamming his Android phone into our faces and recording us in order to document our identities. It was creepy and disturbing — especially because this all happened on public property."

This happens all over the world, in every major city where there is a gap between the rich and poor. This is not a Google, private security, or an LA thing

In Toronto last year, I witnessed a homeless guy get kicked out of an ice cream parlor by an undercover cop the moment he stepped in the door. The bank up the street from me has a security guard outside 24/7, and during the Winter, I saw him kick a homeless man out of the warm ATM vestibule. Last week I watched the police round up a group of homeless sitting outside a McDonalds. There's an article that floats around about Hawaii putting their homeless on a one way trip to anywhere else.

There's no good place for people who don't have anywhere to be. They move to a park and park-goers complain. Any place indoors they will get kicked out of because they don't have money or a reason to be there. They can't stay in shelters because they're overcrowded.

So this article sucks because it doesn't do anything but blame Google. Google is just doing what any other independent actor would do; keeping a healthy and safe appearance.

We can't solve the homeless problem, so I ask, where should they go?

I thought the article was helpful in shedding light on this disgraceful practice. If Google is part of it, it deserves to be called out on it. The problem may be bigger than just one company, but it doesn't mean that just because others do it too, they should not be targeted. I appreciated the article.

I don't know that I would call the practice of "displacing the homeless" as disgraceful, but I agree that the way the private security elevated the situation is. They shouldn't be defaulting to spraying mace, as one might spray insecticide, it should just be there as a last resort.

The disgrace belongs to you and me and the rest of capitalistic society who have let homelessness happen. Since we can't/won't house them, the only thing we can do is shuffle them around.

Disgraceful is a good word for sweeping this huge social issue to places it's less seen.

Yep, there's plenty of blame to go around. I hope we don't become desensitized to the sufferings of others by moving "problems" out of eyesight though.

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