We had a kinder, gentler way of dealing with homeless people and transients in the 1970s in Kerrville, Texas where I was first a police officer. Anybody who was living on the streets and wanted a place to sleep could come to the police station any evening and request to spend the night in the city jail.
The jail at that time consisted of five or six spartan, steel walled cells with doors that had windows only big enough to peer through to check on occupants. There were steel bunks with thin cotton mattresses, steel toilets, and steel sinks. It was the polar opposite of luxury, but for people with no other place to sleep except outdoors, it offered a warm, dry place on cold, rainy nights.
A local restaurant fixed breakfast plates every morning for everybody in jail. The dispatcher would call with the number of plates needed and an officer would go by and pick them up. They would still be warm when we handed them through the little windows to the occupants.
We called the folks who were simply spending the night there “sleepers.” I’m sure that if a Kerrville police officer today went back to the book-in cards prior to the late 1970s, they would find a significant percentage of the persons booked into jail during a year’s time were sleepers.
Once they had finished their breakfasts, they were released back into freedom, no charges filed and no charge for the room and board. Like I said, it was a kinder, gentler place back then, my Texas of the 1970s.
With the population of homeless people today, I can’t imagine police departments would still extend the courtesy of accepting sleepers and giving them free breakfast. I don’t imagine large cities did it, even back then.
Sometime in the late 1970s, we quit accepting sleepers. The chief explained that in another city that took in homeless people on bad nights, one of the sleepers had awakened one morning with a toothache. I don’t know the whole story, but the upshot of it was that the sleeper filed a lawsuit and the court found that once the jail booked a person in as a sleeper, it became responsible for his needs including any medical attention he required before he was released the next morning.
A lot of good things get ruined by one person demanding too much. As we were told, the city where that event occurred was on the hook for major dental work for the one-night sleeper but every other city in the good old USA that had allowed sleepers immediately stopped the practice.