Ohio pastor charged for housing the homeless ( wng.org )

Catoblepas , 5 months ago

Kind of annoyed they didn’t include what the alleged fire code violations were (or state outright that the police would not provide that information), because if they are for code violations that actually make the place dangerous that adds nuance.

But I would bet in the absence of the police talking about specifics, the violations amount to ‘letting someone sleep in the wrong zone’ and other violations that are far less dangerous than being unhoused in winter.

BlueLineBae , 5 months ago

I’ve heard stories about people receiving citations for letting homeless people sleep in their garage on nights with dangerous negative temperatures in Chicago. And while I get that we have laws for a reason to prevent certain situations from occuring that may be dangerous, it seems like if your choice is definitely die from -15F overnight or risk maybe the chance that if the garage catches fire, it wasn’t made to the same fire safety standards as a house… Just seems like a no brainer to me. Usually judges are supposed to read emergency situations like this and throw the charges out, but it sounds like they won’t even negotiate with this guy :/

drwho , 5 months ago

Usually, when stuff like that is left out it means that the cops were using it as a pretext law (i.e., it lets them “say-so” without having to provide evidence).

alyaza OP Mod , 5 months ago

the timing of serving the charges would also seem to strongly imply this is an Authority thing more than an “upholding the law” thing–there’s no way these people didn’t think optically about how it’d look to do this on New Years Day, or around that time of year generally

drwho , 5 months ago

New Year’s Day would have been ideal - a lot of folks would be partied out and not paying attention to the news.