Northpinellas: When did feeding the hungry become a crime?

Randy Morrow ran afoul of Clearwater police long before he was arrested two weeks ago by Pinellas sheriff's deputies and charged with lewd conduct with three teenage boys.

The "crime" that brought him attention from Clearwater's finest was feeding homeless people.

The courts will determine whether Morrow, pastor of a storefront ministry in downtown Clearwater called the Church of Hope, is guilty or innocent of the sex charges filed against him. What interested me was that in Clearwater, feeding hungry people can get you in trouble with city cops.

Isn't feeding the hungry a good thing?

Well, that depends. If you are in Clearwater, and you are feeding homeless hungry people, you have to do it a certain way, or it apparently isn't a good thing after all.

Morrow didn't go about it correctly. The former youth minister at a Countryside church opened his Church of Hope in July to minister to street people downtown. He conducted services on Sundays and Wednesdays and handed out clothing and food to those who attended. In no time at all, he had a growing flock of homeless people and others down on their luck.

And in no time at all, Clearwater police came calling. They asked him -- politely, they say -- to cease and desist. No more clothing distributions, no more feeding.

Instead, they invited him to host a meal or help out in some other way at the Clearwater Homeless Intervention Project, or CHIP, a non-profit corporation that runs a shelter and day program for homeless people near Morrow's church. CHIP, they told him, feeds and clothes homeless people the way they are supposed to be fed and clothed in Clearwater.

The CHIP shelter, by the way, opened in 1998 after years of tireless effort by Clearwater police Chief Sid Klein, who is president of the corporation.

But Morrow chose to ignore those repeated invitations and went on feeding people.

"When it was clear that Mr. Morrow was not going to cooperate with us," says Klein, he called in the city's code enforcement officers to check out Morrow's church and see if it violated any city ordinances. Turns out that the area was not zoned for churches, so Morrow was cited.

Some of Morrow's supporters say Klein did more than that. They say that Clearwater police officers intimidated Morrow and his congregation by standing outside the church en masse and even turning on their sirens while Morrow was preaching.

Klein says that never happened, but that officers frequently were called to the church by neighbors because Morrow's congregants were fighting, loitering or causing other "genuine public problems . . . in an area that already has problems."

Klein says Morrow was creating trouble by feeding and attracting "hard-core" street people who refused to go along with CHIP's way of doing things.

CHIP has rules that homeless people must abide by if they want to eat, and Klein wants those rules to apply citywide. So if he hears that some people are feeding the homeless, he visits them and encourages them to stop. Morrow's Church of Hope is one of the few that refused to fall into line.

The CHIP shelter at 1339 Park St. has 48 beds -- 33 for men, nine for women and six for families -- but that isn't nearly enough. Homeless people come from all over North Pinellas and they stay an average of 14 days, though a few have lived there as long as six months.

There is also a day program for those who need food or services but can't get a bed. The day program serves an average of 55 people a day, seven days a week.

No one gets into either program without a CHIP picture identification card. To get a card, they must register and submit to a criminal records check. The check sometimes turns up outstanding warrants, which police can act on immediately. A Clearwater police substation is located in the center.

Cardholders can get free meals at the St. Vincent de Paul Soup Kitchen next door, use the center's showers and laundry facilities, access a telephone and messaging service and, with the aid of counselors, develop a personal recovery plan for getting off the streets. They must get a job within seven days, adhere to a budget and, if they have a drinking or drug problem, they must get treatment and stay sober.

The CHIP I.D. card opens the doors to food and services. But it also can be used to slam them shut. If CHIP clients break some rules, their cards can be suspended for seven days or longer. They risk going hungry.

Ed Brant, program director at CHIP, says some advocates for the homeless were initially offended by the concept of I.D. cards. "We got a lot of flack. It's a scary concept: card-carrying homeless," he said.

Homeless people who don't want the scrutiny or the rules will go to some other town, and there will be no crocodile tears shed for them in Clearwater, a city so embarrassed by its population of troublesome homeless people downtown that it directed the police chief to solve the problem and contributes more than $100,000 a year to the center's $345,000 budget.

Brant doesn't think the I.D. cards and all the rules drive needy people away from CHIP. Instead, "It tells people they have to accept responsibility for their actions -- past, present and future," he said.

And Klein doesn't see his efforts to shut down other feeding programs as intimidation. The City Commission told him to manage the homeless problem downtown, so he found a way that he says is "compassionate and integrated."

Demanding that homeless people toe the line in exchange for the help "is not an unreasonable thing to ask," he said. "Government has a responsibility to protect its downtown."

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