Seattle is poised to follow a string of municipalities, numbering over 1,000 and including New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Portland, that have banned smoking in parks. As smoking rates have declined over the past decade to about 22 percent of the population, the trend toward outlawing smoking in public has become more and more of a class-based issue.
Who still smokes? Unsurprisingly, they’re mostly poor. The rate of smoking among those earning $100,000 or more annually has dropped to less than 13 percent. Among those living at around poverty level, chances of being a smoker are roughly one in three. According to the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, about 73 percent of those who are homeless smoke tobacco.
Smoking bans have been credited with clearing parks of homeless people in cities from New York City to Boulder, Colorado, to Arlington, Washington. With fines of up to $1,000 for a violation, parks smoking bans have become a tool for driving the poor from public space.
The National Coalition for the Homeless describes these bans as being among the worst of anti-homeless measures because they appear neutral but are never equally enforced.
While proponents say that these ordinances are needed to protect children and others from the harmful effects of secondhand smoke, a 2013 Columbia University School of Public Health study described the scientific evidence for the harmful effects of outdoor secondhand smoke as “weak.” The chief benefit of these laws, they said, was in the “denormalizing” of smoking.
This is a polite way to say that parks smoking bans promote social stigmatization in the name of public health.
The last time Seattle Parks and Rec considered a smoking ban was in 2010. Concerns with unequal enforcement led to a compromise that banned smoking within 25 feet of play areas or another person.
Since this is the distance in which secondhand smoke dissipates to become harmless, that should have been enough. But public health is not the issue here. The issue is poor people, looking all poor, living in public and making people uncomfortable.
Ground zero is Westlake Park, one of the more contested public spaces in Seattle. Research conducted in 2014 by the Center for Evidence-based Crime Policy found that about one in four Westlake park users, at any given time, were smoking. Other areas where enforcement is likely to focus are Occidental Square and Victor Steinbrueck Park.
According to the parks department summary of the proposed rules change, a verbal and written warning will be issued before a citation is made. This work will chiefly fall upon parks rangers. After two warnings, a $27 citation will be written, and an exclusion order may then be issued that would be enforced by Seattle police.
When ignored, these citations will turn into warrants and contempt of court charges.
Our desire for a healthy community should not be used as a weapon to stigmatize and legally sanction those who live in public. We are already abysmally failing the poor. In January, the One Night Count of unsheltered people rose in Seattle by 22 percent.
Seattle is both an increasingly unequal city and a city that holds progressive values. We are the first city in the nation to reduce the harm of unsheltered homelessness by legalizing encampments on public property. We are becoming a national model for urban-policing policies that offer real solutions to poverty rather than thoughtless punishment of the underclass.
The parks smoking ban is not in line with these values. The ban will be used, as it has been from New York to Hawaii, to remove inconvenient people from public spaces. It will criminalize behavior that is merely annoying, and in doing so, will impose a new set of legal burdens and liabilities upon those whose lives are already much too difficult.
Visit realchangenews.org to sign our petition asking the parks department to not use public health to punish the poor. There are many things our city might legitimately do to create a healthier Seattle.
Harassing the poor out of our downtown parks is not one of them.