City in Florida Criticized for Playing 'Baby Shark' To Keep Homeless from Sleeping Near Event Center
A city in Florida is receiving pushback for its new tactic of keeping homeless people from sleeping on the patio of an event center: playing repetitive children’s songs on loop.
The songs “Baby Shark” and “Raining Tacos” are played all night long outside the Waterfront Lake Pavilion in West Palm Beach, Florida, to discourage people from “congregating at the building” and to “encourage people to seek safer, more appropriate shelter,” city spokeswoman Kathleen Walter told CNN.
“The music volume complies with City code, and is a temporary measure, as we are exploring the possibility of having set hours for the Great Lawn and Pavillion,” Walter said.
Mayor Keith James told Fox News “workers in the morning were finding unsanitary things, including human feces, around the Lake Pavillion.”
But not everyone is happy with this new plan.
“There is a fine line between being humane and inhumane when trying to deal with the homeless,” city commissioner Richard Ryles told Good Morning Tampa Bay.
“All of us are probably just one paycheck away from being homeless. And so I would want someone to be compassionate with me,” Ryles added.
Interim director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, Megan Hustings, told CNN this response to the homeless problem “shows a lack of concern for our community members who are struggling through a very tough time.”
“Responding with this kind of discrimination and disgust instead of compassion is … really immoral. It’s disturbing,” Hustings said. “We’re all humans, and we need to sleep.”
Illaya Champion, who is homeless, told the Palm Beach Post that “it’s wrong” to use music to keep people away from the building, but he will still sleep there even though “it’s on and on, the same songs.”
The Waterfront Lake Pavilion brings in about $240,000 a year from events, according to the Palm Beach Post.
“People are paying a lot of money to use the facility. Thousands of dollars,” Parks and Recreation Director Leah Rockwell told the Palm Beach Post.
“We want to make sure people paying this money had a facility that was clean and open and continue to use it in the future.”
This is not the first time the city has played music outside of buildings.
The Orlando Sentinel reported in 2001 that West Palm Beach Police blasted classical music from abandoned city-owned buildings to reduce crimes from being committed in the area.
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