Petition To: Miami City Commission — Chair, Commissioners, and Mayor Eileen Higgins

Ordinance 19457 would increase the arrest of unhoused Miami residents — not because anyone hurt another person or damaged property, but simply because they have nowhere else to sleep. We, the undersigned residents, faith leaders, service providers, and advocates for justice, call on the Miami City Commission to reject this ordinance.

WHAT THIS ORDINANCE DOES

●       Eliminates the 24-hour written warning that lets outreach teams do their job. Current law gives a full day's written notice before enforcement — real breathing room that lets police and homeless outreach workers actually connect someone with housing or shelter. This proposal throws that away and replaces it with an undefined "reasonable time" to gather belongings. What counts as "reasonable" will vary from officer to officer, rendering the standard meaningless and cutting outreach workers out of the process before they can do their job.

●       Eliminates officer discretion to warn, and mandates fines or making arrests. Once the conditions are met, arrests and fines become mandatory — police lose the ability to simply treat someone as a person who needs help instead of a case to close.

●      Turns police into predators, not protectors.  Discretion is what lets an officer treat someone as a person instead of a target. Remove it, and officers stop being someone you can trust — you become someone who runs from them. That makes every encounter more volatile and more dangerous, for residents and officers alike.

●       Escalates arrests without ending anyone's homelessness. A person arrested for sleeping outside is released with nowhere to go, and is arrested again, and again. It's a revolving door that consumes police time and public money forever, while solving nothing.

●       Does nothing to add a single unit of housing. Not one bed, not one apartment, not one path off the street. It only expands who gets handcuffed.

IT IS FISCALLY IRRESPONSIBLE

An apartment costs roughly a third of what it costs to jail someone. Arresting people for being homeless doesn't save the city money — it spends far more of it, for a strategy that guarantees the same person will be back on the street, and back in a cell, within weeks. Expediting arrests is a wasteful, unending diversion of public money that should go toward Housing First solutions — the only approach proven to actually end chronic homelessness.

IT IS MORALLY INDEFENSIBLE

No one should be handcuffed for the crime of being too poor to afford a home. Using the criminal justice system to punish poverty is not justice — it is the persecution of our most vulnerable neighbors. A city's character is measured by how it treats those with the least power to defend themselves, and Ordinance 19457 fails that test.

This isn't new territory for Miami. These protections trace back to Pottinger v. City of Miami, a federal consent decree born from Miami's own history of criminalizing poverty. Federal oversight ended in 2019, but the protections stayed in place and worked. This ordinance unwinds the core of that progress.

This is an unnecessary ordinance. It would lead to more arrests, less effective outreach, and worse homelessness — not less. Turning arrests into the city's homelessness policy is not public safety. It's cruel, it's costly, and it solves nothing.

WE CALL ON THE MIAMI CITY COMMISSION TO REJECT ORDINANCE 19457

Sign this petition to tell the Commission: don't criminalize poverty. Invest in housing, not handcuffs.