Citing public safety, cities and states are debating a ban of pedestrians, including panhandlers, from street medians, Stateline reports. Yet some past courts have ruled that soliciting money is a form of protected free speech and the ACLU has taken up at least one case. “Everybody’s talking about how we have to get rid of these panhandlers, ‘We don’t want to see unhoused people,’” said Scott Katovich, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union Trone Center for Justice and Equality. The same critics, Katovich says, will then defend the bans as protecting of people. “They turn around and say this is about safety. That’s not going to fly,” Katovich said.
In lieu of bans, a handful of cities have instead turned to incentives: In Oklahoma City, where courts struck down a panhandling ban, offers city cleanup work to panhandlers, as do other cities. Many of the newest banning pedestrians on narrow medians followed one in Sandy City, Utah, which a federal appeals court upheld in 2019. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2020 declined to take up the case, leaving the law in place. The ordinance makes it “illegal for any individual to sit or stand, in or on any unpaved median, or any median of less than 36 inches for any period of time.”
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