Targeted by The Police for Existing
bY: Natalie Ziegler & Joe Gaston
Sleeping, a human necessity, is not free from the racism and classism that shape social and political life in the city of Cleveland. The conventional wisdom about sleep suggests that adults need at least seven hours of sleep in order to stay healthy and function well. Conventional wisdom also suggests that external factors and conditions necessary for an adequate amount of sleep include a comfortable sleeping position in a safe and secure environment. In Cleveland, as in cities across America, countless children, numerous families, and many single adults are unable to thrive because of the lack of stable affordable housing. This societal pandemic produces life threatening episodes of inadequate sleep, public health concerns, racial injustice, and the loss of human and civil rights. The term apoplectic Capitalism is most descriptive.
The story of Joe Gaston, a black Clevelander and activist who has experienced housing instability and homelessness, highlights how sleep becomes an opportunity for policing and criminalization within the criminal justice system. Joe was trapped in a crisis of perpetual homelessness. This crisis was not the result of inadequate financial resources. It was the result of a criminal justice system that targets the poor, the disenfranchised, and anyone ensnared in the criminal justice system. Once ensnared in this system, the individual ceases to exist and instead is identified as an unforgivable yet resourceful tool for revenue enhancement. In clearer terms, the individual has been legally dehumanized by the system and relegated to the status of a bare commodity by the state.
Joe had been homeless, and then lived in Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority (CMHA) properties, but a fight in self-defense led to his expulsion from public housing. He then moved into an apartment owned by a slumlord on the West Side. After catching pneumonia due to the living conditions, Joe became homeless again. Joe’s criminal record and time spent in prison meant that, after being barred from CMHA properties, he was routinely discriminated against in the private rental market as well, eventually finding shelter in an unsafe environment.
As Joe says about his overall experience of lacking access to housing, “you get violated all the time.” In September 2019, Joe was accosted by officers in the middle of the night for falling asleep at the West Park RTA station while waiting for the next scheduled train arrival. Joe had been waiting for a train at the West Park station. He and other homeless Clevelanders sometimes spend the nights traveling on public transit rather than in a potentially dangerous encampment or at the county shelters (2100 Lakeside for men, in Joe’s case), known within the homeless community for their simply dangerous and unsanitary conditions. While waiting for the train, Joe fell asleep. As he says, “It’s a perfectly human thing … and four hours of sleep really perks you up.” Joe, like any adult in Cleveland that September night and on any given night, was simply tired and fell asleep while in a sitting position, his body craving physical and mental respite. Joe abruptly woke to officers waving their hands in his face, telling him that they’d taken his picture and were going to ticket him. The officers cited him for “criminal trespassing,” falling asleep at a public transit station in the middle of the night when only a few other homeless Clevelanders were around.
The whole episode was illogical and unjust. It was a particularly striking violation, because the citation for “criminal trespassing” highlights the ways that homelessness and the criminal justice system function together. Joe had a monthly transit pass, which he showed the officers. He was sober. He had a valid form of identification. As Joe rightly points out, “I could go to most public parks and see someone asleep.” Policing within public transit in the region is inconsistent; at some transit hubs, police come through and disregard the people lying down and sleeping. Ironically, RTA and the city promote transit hubs as safe and heated shelters during arctic winter temperatures. Joe pointed out that if this incident had happened in January, he likely wouldn’t have been ticketed. Instead, although “homelessness is an everyday thing that transcends all seasons,” Joe was criminalized.
Joe had previously filed a discrimination lawsuit under the Fair Housing Act and, rather than accept a bogus plea deal for this new criminal charge, decided to plead not guilty in order to set a precedent that would protect future homeless Clevelanders from being targeted by the police. If Joe had pled guilty, the charge would have been dropped from his record and the hundreds of dollars in fines and court fees would have been dismissed. He would also have had to enroll in an eight-week course on police communications at Cuyahoga Community College. As Joe said, “I wouldn’t want it on my record, period, and I had better things to do.” Better things, like challenging a system that simultaneously punishes and profits from homelessness.
He worked with distinguished attorney David King, who had represented Joe before. Joe wanted to know the cops’ rationale for charging him with a criminal offense, and he wanted the case to be publicized, so that the injustice and absurdity of it wouldn’t escape public notice. Instead, the case closed quietly. On the day of the trial, the judge, prosecutor, and attorneys all conferred at the front of the courtroom briefly, then informed Joe that the case would simply be dismissed. Though Joe was relieved, he was mostly disappointed by the lost opportunity to set a precedent against criminalizing sleeping in public. The charge remains in his record, but reflects that it was dismissed in court. His court costs were dismissed as well.
The court costs were a way for the legal and criminal justice system to leverage his indebtedness against him. According to Joe’s eloquent analysis, the existing criminal justice system “is a money-making mechanism” in which “the homelessness situation has gotten so out of control that they [the criminal justice system] can’t solve it, so they decided to contrive legal methods with blurred applications of the law so that the state would make a profit off of it.” In many ways, the criminal justice system and homelessness are mutually reinforcing forces, bilaterally bolstering each other’s existence. Once someone becomes homeless, it’s almost inevitable that they’ll be charged with something and get a record. As Joe says, “you’re eventually going to get sick and fall asleep somewhere.” When that happens, you’d be in the criminal justice system with a record and unable to find housing. The police and the courts aid and abet the problem of homelessness through their policies and practices.
For any small success one has while homeless, such as having court charges dismissed and finding a new place to live, “one foot is coming out of the grave, but there’s a banana peel under it.” Though Joe’s situation has improved in some ways since September, he’s still dealing with the psychological and physical trauma of an issue created by city policies. Joe and other homeless Clevelanders who spend time on RTA buses and trains as a means of shelter rather than subjugating themselves to the indignities of the county shelters, what he calls “a new form of Jim Crow,” are also subject to health issues like blood clots and poor circulation due to sleeping while sitting up. Joe wears compression socks to assuage his own blood clots and varicose veins. Joe asks, “Will you get housing before [homelessness] kills you?”
Many Clevelanders will spend time in RTA stations; few will be criminalized. People experiencing homelessness bear the brunt of city policing and surveilling. Any Clevelander, or any American, is likely closer to homelessness than they think. As Joe says, “one huge medical bill or one criminal charge could send someone spiraling.” Despite this, the city does not examine its current policies allowing landlords to discriminate against potential tenants based on criminal records, nor does it punish slumlords who allow tenants to live in homes with lead poisoning or without running water. It also punishes homeless individuals like Joe and other notable champions of social justice like the Reverend Nozomi Ikuta of the United Church Of Christ located on Denison Avenue, which readers might remember was recently targeted by a member of City Council and became a highly contested terrain which eventually shed light on the city’s unwarranted hostility to Cleveland's shelter resistant homeless community.
Joe’s lived experience is a window into the institutions and systems that have restricted and punished him. His history as an activist, and his refusal to accept such blatant injustices are testaments to his ability to resist and to shape change and offer hope amidst such bleak conditions.