A proposed ban on all panhandling and busking on BART trains appears to be moving forward as a new report from the transit agency's legal staff finds that a ban should pass muster if it's only for paid areas like platforms and trains.

Back in August we learned that BART director Debora Allen (Contra Costa County) was pushing to get panhandling — and consequently busking, or performing for donations — deemed illegal on all BART trains. This is part of her effort to address her constituents' concerns about safety and cleanliness on trains, and she says that without the hassle of being asked for dollars and loose change, maybe ridership on BART would start to tick up again after several years of decline.

Now, as the Chronicle reports, agency staff have prepared a report that backs up the legality of instituting such a ban, which critics like the ACLU have said would be unconstitutional. According to the reports, various cities have bans on panhandling on trains, while they do permit busking in certain areas of the transit system.

The idea would be to continue to permit buskers to perform in station entries, plazas, and all unpaid areas, but make that activity illegal in paid areas and on trains.

"Five of the ten largest transit systems in America all prohibit panhandling and/or solicitation inside of their paid areas,” Allen said in a Monday statement. "New York, LA, DC, Atlanta, and Chicago all have ordinances. There is no reason why BART shouldn’t make it six... People come to San Francisco from all over the world and they are shocked by what they see on our transit system... It’s time to bring order, respect and a greater sense of safety to our transit environment at BART."

People aren't likely "shocked" by seeing talented performers doing two-minute shows during the Transbay Tube commute so much as they are bothered by invasive or aggressive panhandling, which BART already has an ordinance against. Panhandling is considered "aggressive" if it involves threats, touching, or the invasion of personal space.

When BART started heading down this road in August, the ACLU penned a letter to the board saying, in part, "Panhandling, as well as busking and other types of communication where individuals may solicit and receive donations, are forms of speech protected under the First Amendment. Singling out and prohibiting these forms of communication would restrict speech based on its content."

And for some buskers, performing on BART is an important income source. SFist covered the Turf Dancers in 2014 not long after they made their way from stations — which shooed them away due to the volume of their amplified music — onto trains.  (TURF stands for "taking up room on the floor," and is a form of dance combining contortions, break-dancing and hip-hop that originated in Oakland.) Oakland North recently spoke with some of the turfers who say they regularly bring in $150 apiece after a day on the trains.

But not everyone is a fan. As one SFist commenter put it five years ago, in response to that video, "Subjecting unsuspecting people in an enclosed space to your performance is literally the worst think you can do as a musician/performer."

Similarly, Allen cited comments from customer surveys like this one: "Grown adults put on 'shows' with boom boxes to intimidate and shakedown for money."

BART's directors won't be taking a final vote just yet on Allen's proposal, but the staff report about other transit agencies' busking bans will be presented to the board at this week's meeting, on Thursday.

Janice Li, one of two directors on the nine-person board who represents San Francisco, tells the Examiner, "I can’t see a world where I would support a straight-up ban. I feel like it continues the trajectory of sanitizing the culture of San Francisco and the Bay. We’ve already displaced the arts, and now we’ll regulate it to death? No thanks."

Previously: BART Board May Ban Panhandling, But Buskers Could Be Barred Too

Photo: YR Media

A bartender an an upscale Oakland restaurant is behind bars today, after witnesses say they watched him beat a homeless man to death outside his place of business.

The alleged homicide happened outside Flora, which describes itself as "an Art Deco restaurant and bar in downtown Oakland" on its website, at around 4:15 p.m. Sunday.

The East Bay Times reports that 42-year-old Cooky York was "panhandling aggressively" outside Flora when he "got into an altercation with a relative" of 29-year-old Oakland resident Juan Espino, a bartender at the restaurant.

When told about the incident, Espino walked out of the restaurant and confronted York, the EBT reports.

Following the verbal confrontation, police told KTVU that Espino "went to an upstairs office and got a baseball bat."

Subsequent surveillance video shows Espino running toward the victim, who is walking away from him, KTVU reports.

According to the Chron, "A witness said he saw the killer run out a nearby bar and club the victim in the head from behind with a baseball bat." According to KTVU, he "came up to the victim from behind and, with two hands, swung the bat, hitting the victim."

Witnesses say Espino then ran back up the street, tossing the bat down an alley adjacent to the bar, the Chron reports. Investigators say that the two men did not know one another prior to the attack.

Witnesses to the attack flagged down a passing patrol car at 4:18, and emergency responders transported York to a hospital, where he later died.

According to the EBT, Espino fled the scene and was later arrested at his Oakland residence "after police identified him through witnesses and physical evidence." He was booked into Santa Rita Jail on suspicion of first-degree murder early Monday.

On Wednesday, Espino made his first appearance in court, where he Alameda County prosecutors charged him with murder as well as an enhancement and an enhancement for allegedly using the bat as a deadly weapon, KTVU reports.

Espino's family and friends packedthe courtroom "to support him," the EBT reports. According to KTVU, "One man in the audience raised his arm in the air, but Espino did not appear to respond."

In a written statement, Flora Restaurant says that "Sunday's events are tragic and heartbreaking and will have a lasting effect on much of our staff and community. We send our deepest condolences to the victim's family, and to anyone else who was affected by this horrific tragedy. The world has far too much violence in it."

He is no longer employed by Flora, KTVU reports, and "was not on the clock at the time of the killing."

Espino, who did not enter a plea in Thursday's hearing, is expected to do so during his next court appearance, on November 30. Until then, he remains in custody without bail.

There's been an apparent uptick recently in the number of panhandlers working on the BART system, some of them women carrying babies and others men who seem to speak little English, pass out Kleenex packets and notes, and then beg for money to support their families. A post from last October on the Berkeley Parents Network shows a concerned mother wondering what to do after she saw two different women with babies begging, and how it was making her dread using BART. A similar post appeared on Reddit in June, noting the practice of "tissue begging" that has been prevalent in other cities, but not here until now. But now CBS 5/KPIX is reporting that the panhandlers all appear to be part of an organized group who may not be as destitute as they claim, judging by the cars they drive away in. And, interestingly, they're apparently Roma, from the lineage once referred to pejoratively as "gypsies," from Romania.

Two KPIX reporters rode BART for weeks and tried to question some of the panhandlers, the mothers who always appear with babies in tow and signs that say something along the lines of "No job, 4 kids, please help for food." The women were more reticent to speak, but one of the men, finding out that the reporter spoke Italian, was more talkative, and said he rode the trains from 9 a.m. to 7 or 8 p.m., and lives in Hayward.

Most of the panhandlers appear to come from the same Romani community in Hayward, and KPIX's observations suggest that their claims of poverty may not be entirely true:

It turns out the Kleenex crew isn’t as destitute as their 'help me' notes would make it seem. On several different nights we recognized half a dozen of them loading into a couple of Audis, a Mercedes and a Kia and counting their haul for the day.

As for the mothers, day after day like clockwork we watched them stream out of the Fremont parking lot pushing their strollers. We followed them to a residential development about a mile away, where rents for two-bedroom units list at $2,600 a month.

NBC Bay Area reported on a similar spate of apparently Romani panhandlers showing up at places of worship in affluent East Bay communities like Danville and San Ramon back in 2011, so this is nothing new. But perhaps use of the captive audiences of BART riders is a new tactic.

Crackdowns and tensions in recent years around illegal camping, begging, and thievery in France amid a large influx of Roma immigration have apparently led to further immigration to the US, according to one expert who spoke to the station. (And in France, this calls to mind generations of racism against the group, which was also targeted by Nazis.)

BART, for its part, only considers panhandling illegal when it's "aggressive," and made clear during a recent outcry about the practice getting rampant that panhandling itself is protected by the First Amendment.

Santa Clara County District Attorney's investigator Greg Ovanessian tells KPIX he's had both good and bad reasons for encountering the local Romani population, and he just suggests that BART riders should be skeptical of these panhandlers, and careful about who they give money to, especially larger sums of money.

Everyone who moved here from New York should already know this.

Previously: BART Defends Panhandling As Free Speech, But Says 'Aggressive Panhandlers' Will Be Arrested

A man was arrested at the Bay Fair BART station Tuesday, after he allegedly battered a patron who refused to give him money.

The incident was detailed in a Facebook post published by the transit agency Tuesday evening. According to BART, "an aggressive panhandler battered a passenger after the passenger refused to give him money" at BART's Bay Fair Station Tuesday.

"The suspect tried to run off but our officer detained him," BART says. "The victim identified the suspect and placed him under citizen's arrest for aggressive panhandling and for battery. The suspect was on probation and he was booked into Santa Rita Jail."

He was also "issued a prohibition order which means he can not return to BART," they say.

According to BART, while "panhandling is considered free speech under the law," "aggressive panhandling" such as the type alleged Tuesday "is a violation of the penal code and is not tolerated." That assertion is already being questioned by some respondents to BART's Facebook post, including concerned citizen Ken Meeuwse, who says "Wrong, BART. Panhandling is free speech WITH certain restrictions. BART is a transportation facility...a 'nonpublic forum'...especially inside the paid areas, on platforms and trains."

Citing what appears to be an unofficial publication called "A Guide to Regulating Panhandling," Meeuwse claims that "When one is a paying passenger, the express purpose of these areas is to transit from point 'A' to point 'B', without being harassed. It does not have to be 'aggressive' panhandling for BART to enforce in these areas. Period."

"Why is BART's public relations gaslighting us by avoiding their failure to enforce on panhandling generally and implying it has to be 'aggressive' before they can do anything?" Meeuwse asks in a subsequent comment, calling BART's announcement of the arrest "Incompetent messaging and nonsense."

According to BART, the fact that the victim remained on the scene and cooperated allowed them to make the arrest. "Unless police witness something," BART writes, "we need our riders to provide a statement and identify the suspect as the right person."

Related: The Safest And Most Dangerous BART Stations

Homeless mom panhandles on Market Street with newborn baby: “I’m not harming her in any way.”https://t.co/nSmkszW1qZ via @hknightsf pic.twitter.com/2NItA9gsLe

— SFChronicle (@sfchronicle) July 30, 2017

Pitchforks aplenty were brought out in comment-section condemnation two weeks ago when we covered the story of a homeless mom panhandling with an infant on Market Street. But deep in the reeds of that story was the fact that the “homeless mom” was not technically homeless. 34-year-old Megan Doudney and her infant daughter did have a private room at the Tenderloin’s Hamilton Family Shelter. Certainly there is a fair semantic debate over whether someone staying at a shelter is, in fact, “homeless” — that particular shelter offers private rooms and three square meals a day for up to six months, not as a permanent arrangement.

But that debate is totally irrelevant to the demonstrable fact that many “homeless moms” are not actually homeless. Some are not even the mothers of the children they tote. Chronicle writer Heather Knight, who wrote the original piece that brought national attention to Doudney and her baby, follows up by speaking with several City Hall and law enforcement officers on their experience with the women who panhandle with children in tow.

Former SFPD Central Station captain David Lazar told the Chronicle he often encountered panhandling moms with ‘Need Help’ signs. “I would say, ‘Well, are you staying in a shelter?’ Nine times out of 10, they would say, ‘Oh no. I have a home. I live in Union City or Fremont, and I’m just here for the afternoon,'" Lazar said.

He added that many of the children were not even the panhandler’s children, but essentially ‘borrowed kids’. “They have the children with them in an effort to get people to donate money or other items to them thinking they’re homeless with a child, and they’re not,” he added.

We should note that San Francisco Child Welfare Services will not remove children from panhandling parents. They remove children only in the case of abuse, malnourishment, or health issues — panhandling with a kid does not qualify. And we should also note that there are indeed homeless youth in San Francisco, with the most recent homeless point-in-time count finding that there are 1,363 children and transitional-age youth on the streets of the city.

Related: Lady Gaga Passed Out Money To Homeless People After Her SF Concert

For people likes Fox News' John Stossel, who believe panhandlers are really raking it in for upwards of $80K/year, here's a news flash: according to a survey funded by the the Union Square Business Improvement District, San Francisco panhandlers make less than $25 a day.

According to the survey, which involved 146 people over a two-day period around Union Square, "the typical panhandler is a disabled middle-aged single male who is a racial minority and makes less than $25 per day despite panhandling seven days a week for more than five years." Contrary to popular suspicions, 94 percent said that they use the money they glean for food (44 percent use it for drugs or alcohol).

Other findings:

• 83 percent are men


• 48 percent are African American


• 31 percent are white


• 69 percent are single


• 26 percent served in the military


• 70 percent are 40 to 59 years old


• 58 percent have been panhandling for at least five years


• 53 percent panhandle seven days a week


• 60 percent make $25 a day or less


• 94 percent use the money for food


• 44 percent use it for drugs or alcohol


• 62 percent are disabled


• 25 percent are alcoholics


• 32 percent are addicted to drugs


• 82 percent are homeless

Researchers also surveyed 400 people who had given money to panhandlers in the past year, and found that the majority were young working-class Bay Area residents (not tourists or tech workers). Meanwhile, a New York Times article notes that Twitter's payroll tax break will save them at least $22 million over six years in their new nearby mid-Market offices.

[Think Progress]
[NYT]

With sit-lie proving more or less ineffective at curbing the city's panhandling problem, San Francisco's Homeless Czar Bevan Dufty launched a new program that he hopes will get beggars off sidewalks and into the city's dog parks. The new program — which Dufty believes is the first of its kind in the country — is called Wonderful Opportunities for Occupants and Fidos (which: WOOF) and offers a $75 weekly stipend for panhandlers who foster puppies from local shelters until they are ready for adoption.

Dufty is aware of the painful eye-rolling that comes with the announcement. As he sees it, other anti-panhandling measures have taken the wrong approach. "I'm tired of pushing people around. You can make it difficult for people to panhandle, but ultimately they're just going to go do it somewhere else," the former city supervisor told the Chronicle. "Why not try to meet their needs for income in a way that helps the city and its animals?"

The "Look I've Got a Puppy!" approach has been a favorite move of those looking for a handout in the past. So, what's to keep WOOF applicants from abusing the system for free money and an adorable panhandling accessory? Animal Care and Control will screen homeless applicants. Those with a history of violence and anyone who might be a hoarder will be filtered out. Potential pet owners will also have to promise never to panhandle with the pups, and anyone caught doing so will see their new canine companion head back to the shelter.

According to the Chronicle, the city has "anecdotal evidence" that most panhandlers have housing, but beg on the streets because they don't have anything better to do with their time — something that actually makes them ideal caretakers for hyperactive or shy foster puppies who need constant attention throughout the day and are at a high risk of being put down. None of the city's supportive housing facilities currently allow pets, but a representative from the Tenderloin Housing Clinic hinted that the animals could be allowed as service dogs or companion animals.

The pilot program is funded by a $10,000 grant to Animal Care and Control from local puppy-eyed socialite Venessa Getty, which will also cover all costs for dog food, toys, leashes and vet visits for the foster owners who will have the pups under their watch for two to six weeks at a time. When it comes time to part ways, the new dog owners can either offer to adopt their pup permanently or foster a new dog from the shelter.

[Chron]

Via Brian Monnier: "Just saw a homeless guy bum $2 from someone and then burn it in front of the guy. Just awesome, I love sf."