With San Jose State’s campus being located downtown, students often traverse an area frequented by both the unhoused and the police.
Students are likely to come across homeless individuals when in the downtown area or on campus and nearly 4,000 SJSU students are likely to experience homelessness each year, according to a Nov. 5, 2021 article from local Fox News affiliate KTVU.
SJSU sociology assistant professor Preston Rudy said the primary function of police officers in the U.S. is to “protect property and people with property,” but the police don’t protect those without property.
“The nature of inequality in our society today is producing collective action from organizational movements who are saying, ‘We want more people to be treated like human beings with dignity and respect,” he said.
Rudy teaches a course titled “Poverty, Wealth, and Inequality.”
“I try to explain to [my] students the political economy of our society, so we have to talk about the kind of capitalism that we have in the U.S.,” he said.
Anthony Majano, SJSU sociology junior and president of the Student Homeless Alliance, said the group aims to help unhoused students by advocating for them.
The Student Homeless Alliance is a student-led organization that focuses on solutions to homelessness and raising awareness of the university's student homeless population, according to the group's Instagram page.
Majano said he believes the university police department and the San Jose Police Department (SJPD) view homelessness as a crime rather than a fault in society.
Being homeless in California is not illegal, but there are many local laws restricting loitering, littering, panhandling and building camps along freeways, creeks and trails.
The Stop Trespassing on Private Property (STOP) program run by SJPD puts officers to work in protecting property when the owners are not present and they will enforce trespass or criminal citations, according to the SJPD website.
The San Jose municipal code prohibits littering or scatter of garbage, furniture and appliances in any city park, according to the San Jose government website.
The California Penal Code prohibits the act of soliciting and specifically asking people face-to-face in public spaces for money, as well as unlawful lodging of a tent at city parks or creeks, according to the San Jose Government website.
“Loitering in some places is a crime, which is just existing outside and sleeping on a bench,” Majano said in a phone call. “They seek to punish these individuals for just existing rather than giving them the systems that they need.”
UPD Captain Frank Belcastro, who is in charge of operations and administration, said there is no overnight lodging on campus for unhoused individuals, but they are permitted to use campus resources.
Belcastro said as students can lie on the grass and take a nap, so can unhoused individuals.
“Any building that's open to the public is open to any member of the community. The Student Union is open to the public, anyone can go in there and buy food. The library is open to the public,” Belcastro said in a phone call.
He said UPD does remove homeless individuals from campus in some cases, including when they try to sleep overnight, but wouldn’t provide further information regarding removal.
Majano said removing a homeless member of the community from campus or the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library with no guidance on where to go is “ineffective.”
Majano said as someone who gathers feedback through the Student Homeless Alliance from those affected by homelessness, he believes police officers often make homeless individuals feel “humiliated” and “dehumanized” or that they’re being “punished” for trying to survive.
He said on-campus resources including SJSU Cares and the Student Homeless Alliance, as well as local food nonprofit programs including Sacred Heart, are not advertised enough to the unhoused students and individuals living on or near campus.
“I think we as a community could raise awareness for these resources . . . to improve on these resources and make sure that these individuals take advantage of the resources available,” he said.
Majano said the programs and resources alone won’t create the change that’s necessary; more funds need to be reallocated toward building shelter and low-income housing.
“Of course they do need more funding,” he said. “Those programs are essentially just like a bandaid for this issue that has deep roots.”
