Encouraging the homeless to find a new haunt is nothing new, but managers at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium may be breaking ground by attempting to do it sonically.
Of course, Manuel Noriega is and David Koresh was familiar with the acoustic warfare tactic, which at least one now-vanquished homeless San Franciscan felt was a harsh reaction to his and his cohorts' squatting, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
Between 20 and 40 homeless had been hanging out and sleeping at Civic Center Park, and according to the newspaper, it was a source of frustration for police, the mayor, the city Recreation and Parks Commission and the concert promotion outfit, Another Planet Entertainment, which operates the auditorium.
To combat this scourge, Another Planet began using the building's outside speakers to blare a cacophony of the world's most jarring noises - chainsaws, motorcycles, jackhammers, an aircraft carrier alarm - in hopes of shooing the homeless off of its stoop.
The clamor, which begins nightly at 11 and continues until 7 a.m., prompted building manager Robert Reiter to comment to the paper, "I thought it was the building alarm going off."
Another Planet Vice President Mary Conde and founder Gregg Perloff said people attending events at Davies Symphony Hall and the War Memorial Opera House, both about two blocks away, had issued "an enormous amounts of complaints" about the homeless people in the area.
Blasting them with various "industrial" sounds, which Another Planet acquired from iTunes, has been "tremendously effective" so far, Conde said.
San Francisco has one of the worst homeless problems in the nation, according to the Chronicle, which has an entire special section devoted to the issue on its website. According to the Coalition on Homelessness, about 37,000 households are on the waiting list for housing, 6,000 people in the city experience homelessness each night and 2,200 homeless children are enrolled in public schools.
The problem gets worse each year, despite the city's spending $200 million annually to combat it, according to the newspaper. In March 2011, police began enforcing what is known as a sit-lie ordinance, which fines repeat offenders who sit or lie on public sidewalks between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m. - the hours when jackhammer and chainsaw noises aren't emanating from the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium speakers.
Though some business owners say the sit-lie law has been a success, the ordinance was frowned upon by local homeless proponents prior to being approved by city voters. A national advocacy group in December cited the law in giving San Francisco low marks for its handling of the city's homeless.
It would appear that Another Planet's tactic for dispersing the homeless is being received similarly.
"What (expletive) behavior," said Oscar McKinney, a homeless man who said he had 6,100 quality-of-life citations who was chased out of the area by the overnight noise coming from the auditorium, according to the Chronicle.
Sonic warfare has been used as a psychological tactic to run folks out of an area in the past. In the 1993 Waco, Texas, siege, the FBI reportedly "used bagpipes, screeching seagulls, dying rabbits, sirens, dentist drills, and Buddhist chants" in an effort to flush Koresh and the Branch Davidians out of their compound, according to author Steve Goodman.
The method was also employed in 1989 when U.S. troops surrounded the Vatican embassy in Panama City, Panama, where Noriega and some his men had taken refuge. The troops directed loudspeakers at the embassy and played Christmas music all day on December 25.
The following day, the U.S. Southern Command radio station began taking requests from soldiers and played a variety of appropriately titled songs for the next few days, including the Rolling Stones' "Rock and a Hard Place" and The Animals' "We Gotta Get Out of This Place."
It didn't work. Noriega remained in the embassy until January 3, five days after the music stopped.
(For the complete Noriega playlist, click on pages 4-6 of this document at George Washington University's National Security Archive.)
© 2012 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
| Advertising practices | Advertise with us | About us | Work for us | Help
Just give the homeless the option of work camps or work farms. Room and board for work – you earn your keep.. They can do the jobs that illegal aliens do. Of course that won't work on those who are true bums and don't want to do anything – but at least it would seperate the "bums' from the "homeless". For the bums you do what was also done in the past – run them out of town.
Homeless people are gross. They deserve far worse than a little noise.
With all the money that a city like San Fransisco has, they could certainly allow them shelter somewhere. Oh wait, that's what the prison industrial complex is for. What a bunch of uncompassionate crooks. I thought they were all supposed to be former hippy liberals out there.
Agree that people should be treated with respect and this just seems wrong. But shelters might not be the problem. I always hear some homeless people prefers to sleep out on the street with their own group rather then in the shelter with a lot of other people. Don't know if that's true or is that the case here.
Huh?
for every homeless person in the US, there are 45 empty homes. I have an empty home next door fully furnished, no one has lived there for 12 years
That's great. Thanks for sharing.
The homeless are People, not flocks of birds or herds of deer -
How about showing some compassion and finding them homes instead of 'shooing them away'?
If even the liberal bastion of San Francisco is acting like this, we really are lost as a country.
Thank you, Luke. That is part of what I found disturbing about this article. These are homeless PEOPLE, not a flock of persistant geese. The homeless situation needs to be dealt with, but not by driving them around like a herd of unwanted cattle.
Yeah, a city protecting the economic and civic well-being of its greater population really underlines our societal dowturn. Good point. Here I was thinking, wow, a liberal city like San Francisco is allowing non-violent means of dissuading potential threats to health, economic and civil order to be carried out? How progressive to considerate to think of everyone and not the narrow few...thanks for opening me up to the greater viewpoint.
You want these dirty smelly bums laying in front of your house?? I sure don't. They have LOTS of other options!! They choose not to use them and instead break the law.
where is lady gaga???? This is bullying!!!! These are humans and we are not a third world country.........well we weren't.
And what is a human? Nothing more than a mammal. Stop pretending we're granted some special right to this planet just because we've set ourselves up on a pedestal. If 40 dogs came to sleep in your front yard every night, you'd be on the phone to animal control in no time.
I think I'm going to go to San Fran and distribute ear plugs.
I live right in the Civic Center area and homelessness a huge problem. I'm no republican, but this problem is the worst in the most liberal areas. When you coddle drug users by giving out needles and refusing to prosecute, then homelessness gets worse. No other city in the US is like San Francisco and no other city in Canada is like Vancouver when it comes to street junkies. I agree that it's all but impossible to pick yourself up from rock bottom, but tough love means not letting our brothers and sisters hit rock bottom in the first place. This is not a jobs problem. This is a drug use and mental health problem. Prosecute hard drug users/dealers and mandate safe lodging in phsyciatric hospitals for the mentally ill.
You have to experience SF's homeless to really understand. SF homeless are unlike homeless I've encountered in any other city. There's more that are abusive to everyone around them and deliberately making a nuisance of themselves than in any other city I've been in. I don't understand it, I know I'm not going to give anything to a pan handler who is acting like a jerk.
BEAR
What will they do when we are all homeless?
What will they do? Die under a human wave of anger. The French treat the poor like they're made of eggshells for a reason, they understand first-hand what happens if it gets bad.
Funny, the French treated the Germans the same way... how did that work out for them?
that's shameful.
Why don't they just blast dubstep instead?
I'm sure the "non-homeless" living nearby are also enjoying this immensely.
Whatever the issues are, IMHO they should spend money on a solution. What happened to corporations doing charity work? Seems to me that this is a prime opportunity for the big businesses and neighborhood to work together and solve the problem. I believe that finding a couple of people to work towards a solution which includes the city, businesses, neighborhood, and homeless would be a better long term investment to address this.
200 million(what the city spends annually). If rent were 2000 a month, for 6000(number of nightly homeless in San Fran per the story), that is 12 million a year, to house all the homeless. San Fran is expensive, but I would assume 2k a month at least gets you a bathroom and bedroom. Leaving 188 million to clothe and feed them, annually. Seems the city is really good at wasting money. 200 million a year should easily handle 6000 homeless. Perhaps they should use the money to create housing and care, rather then try to "combat" the problem.
Your math needs some work: $2000/mo/person * $12mo/yr * 6000 people = $144M, not $12M.