Whether or not it tries to defy President Trump on “sanctuary city” policies that protect repeat criminals from deportation, Los Angeles has done the right thing by lifting its ban on street vendors.
Yes! Magazine reports that by creating a permit process for vendors, the city is sidestepping the question of whether it will have to aid in the deportation of people only guilty of creating their own jobs and trying to make an honest living.
Merced Sanchez, 56, became a street vendor in Los Angeles after her storefront burned down about 10 years ago…The problem for Sanchez, and the roughly 50,000 other street vendors here, is that Los Angeles is the only major city in the United States without a permitting system for them.
Street vending is technically illegal, leaving vendors subject to “vigorous police harassment, constant ticketing, onerous criminal justice debt, bench warrants for failures to appear, arrests, and incarceration,” according to a 2015 report by the Criminal Defense Clinic at UCLA School of Law. Since most street vendors are immigrants, largely from Latin America, their legal status compounds the situation….
…Trump is talking about deporting immigrants who are “criminals” but, in an executive order signed on Jan. 25, defined that term so broadly as to include those convicted of misdemeanors and those accused of crimes but not yet charged. So, despite its status as a “sanctuary city,” where local police are prohibited from collaborating with federal immigration enforcement, Los Angeles’ street vendor law would end up helping the Trump administration deport immigrants by labeling vendors as lawbreakers.
The City Council took note of that and on Jan. 31 voted to begin the process of legalizing and permitting street vending. The proposal not only authorized the city attorney to begin drafting a formal permit structure for street vendors, but also decriminalized the practice immediately. Police will cite but not arrest street vendors until a permitting law is passed.
It’s kind of amusing that it took the threat of Trump to prompt this welcome change. But I certainly hope that more liberal-leaning cities react to the Trump era with libertarian policies like this one. Legalization of what should already be legal is a lot more fruitful and helpful to society than shielding actual violent career-criminals from immigration enforcement, the policy that provided the proverbial fish the barrel for Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric.
As unlikely as it may seem in a place like Los Angeles, people there might realize there are actually a lot of benefits to having fewer dumb laws on your books.
One is…well, freedom, of course. Second, there are the economic benefits of letting people buy and sell as they choose, including a greater diversity of goods and services that will be readily available. Third, it means fewer encounters between civilians and police that could lead to tragedy or brutality. Recall that the police killing of Eric Garner in New York City could never have happened but for a law of dubious value against harmless street sales of cigarettes — a law designed to maximize state tax revenues.
And finally, Los Angeles seems to have discovered yet another benefit of liberating commercial activity — it reduces your exposure in terms of potentially having to carry out a federal policy you don’t like.
