Free Haircuts For The Homeless? Not Allowed
In Hartford, Connecticut, a man who's spent 25 years giving free haircuts to the homeless in exchange for hugs was booted from the city park where he's been cutting hair by city health officials. Dave Collins writes for the AP:
Anthony "Joe the Barber" Cymerys has been a fixture every Wednesday for years at Bushnell Park in Hartford, Conn., where he cuts hair and his friends hand out food to the needy.But shortly after the 82-year-old Cymerys set up shop this week, he said, health officials and police confronted him and his friends and told them they had to leave because they didn't have permits.
He said he hopes to continue cutting hair at a local shelter, but says the park is a more central location and people know he's there.
More from another AP story -- about the mayor giving Cymerys a reprieve. But there's also this:
City officials say residents had expressed concerns about sanitation.
Couldn't someone do the humane and intelligent thing and explain to the guy what he needs to do to clean up? It's so much easier to bring The Law down on him, and never mind what that means to all these homeless men whose hair he cuts.
And I'm just guessing here, but this is more than a haircut to at least some of them. It's maybe what allows them to fit in or find part-time work or not have head lice.
via JF
From the article:
That means the mayor and his PR team wasn't consulted.
That means that some idiot saw a few locks of hair blow away on the breeze and called someone else to complain. Or that on a given day an 82 year old man was having problems sweeping up.
Either way -- getting cops involved was not a help for anyone.
Jim P. at June 16, 2013 5:40 AM
Birds love hair for nests, in a park I'd think it would be fine to let it blow, unless we're talking actual piles of the stuff.
I'm guessing what this really is is a NIMBY plan to get rid of him. I don't know Hartford, but if there are people dropping needles/pottying etc in the park, then they may be in the right to stop it. Human feces is about the biggest biohazard there is short of sharing needles.
Past all that though, this man sounds like a truly awesome person.
momof4 at June 16, 2013 5:52 AM
Amy Alkon
http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2013/06/16/help_for_the_ho.html#comment-3751122">comment from momof4Great point, momof4. And again, if things are disgusting, the first step is asking people to clean up. We have wonderfully compassionate community policing officers here who don't just use the law as a hammer against the homeless, but tell them they need to move their stuff so it won't be taken from them (when it becomes a health hazard). When they had to move a homeless guy from our neighborhood, when he got a little unsanitary, they left him a note for much of a week to move his stuff, which he did.
We now have a homeless guy on my block who is no problem.
And when there's a problem, like with a guy who's collecting cans and bottles and making a lot of noise in the early morning -- the most amazing thing -- you can go out and ask them to be quieter, which I did. There was a homeless guy sorting his bottles early on a Sunday morning near my house. It's loud. I went out, brought him a bag of bottles that I usually put out by the trash bins for homeless people, and pointed out to him that there were houses close by and we could hear him, and could he please not sort so near us. He apologized, thanked me for the bottles, and said he wouldn't do that so close to us.
It's amazing that people don't think to start by being civilized like this, and just asking nicely. (Perhaps they did, but there's no mention of it in the piece.)
Amy Alkon
at June 16, 2013 6:11 AM
I'm surprised that there wasn't a fuss about handing out sandwiches. The city council put a stop (at least temporarily) to that because the sandwiches were made in volunteer's homes rather than a regulated, inspected kitchen. I guess the county isn't liable if the homeless eat out of trash cans but is if people hand food out.
Jen at June 16, 2013 9:14 AM
Needing a permit to do harmless things is the definition of Not Free.
Storm Saxon's Gall Bladder at June 16, 2013 10:57 AM
As a former resident of Glastonbury, CT (just southeast and across the river from Hartford), I can attest that for decades successive city councils (albeit with much the same membership) have striven to get all the city's patronage into its hands, regardless of its effect on the local economy. When I moved away nearly a decade ago, there were still vacant buildings that the city had condemned for "redevelopment" in the 1980s.
Akatsukami at June 17, 2013 4:40 AM
I'm on the shore, so I don't get to Hartford much. Pretty much the same thing happened down here in New Haven, though. Nice people handing out sandwiches to those who didn't have any were getting asked, and then TOLD, by the police to stop. It's just ridiculous.
Flynne at June 17, 2013 7:41 AM
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