Jimmy Do Wrong Wrong

My agency is downtown. Most of what we do here involves trying to help people who are homeless or struggle with addiction or have garnered a psych diagnosis (or all three). The soup kitchen is next door to us.

One of the signs of summer is that the city has decided to patrol our street corner more regularly. What that translates into is having two RCMP officers (both pseudonymously named "Jimmy") walk up and down the street arresting people for loitering and searching them for drugs and paraphernalia. They write them $250 tickets for loitering and arrest them for the drug related shtuff.

People who loiter don't have $250 in my world. The tickets later turn into warrants, which then result in people being picked up for those. Then they spend 30 days in remand because they can't pay the fine, which by now has doubled. I'd love to know how much is spent on this whole process. I'm betting a housing subsidy costs less.