Homeless Arrests Climb After Supreme Court Clears Bans
Homelessness in the U.S. has reached record levels, with more than 771,000 people unhoused on a single night in 2024, according to The Conversation.
Since the Supreme Court’s June 2024 ruling in Grants Pass v. Johnson, cities have stepped up enforcement of bans on sleeping or camping in public, even when no shelter is available. The Court found such laws constitutional, ruling that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment does not protect homeless people from these ordinances.
The decision triggered nearly 220 new local restrictions in cities like Phoenix, Gainesville, and Reno. California, where unsheltered homelessness is highest, responded with an executive order from Gov. Gavin Newsom directing agencies to clear encampments. More than two dozen California cities soon adopted or debated sweeping bans. Not all leaders backed this approach: Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass called criminalizing homelessness “backwards.”
San Francisco illustrates the shift.
The Conversation writes that a few weeks after the Court’s ruling, then-Mayor London Breed vowed to be “very aggressive” in clearing encampments, arguing that “building more housing” would not solve the crisis. In the year since, police arrested more than 1,000 homeless residents for living in public spaces — up from just 111 the prior year. In a 2025 survey of 150 homeless San Franciscans, 10% said they’d been jailed for lodging without permission, 6% for trespassing, and over half had been forced from at least one public space.
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