Yesterday while we were watching the game, an interesting thing happened. A new panhandler was hitting people up across the street, and we were getting real tired of him because he was approaching families. So, all of us just started taunting him from our perch at the Saucer window. “Leave them alone!” we’d yell every time he walked up to a family. “He’s a panhandler! Don’t give him money!” He turned and looked at us. “Get out of here!” we all yelled at him. “Go on! Go away! We’re running the panhandlers out of this city!” We made it so inhospitable for him to do business that he had no choice but to leave the area.
That worked really well. Several of us have individually yelled “Don’t give him money, he’s a panhandler!” from across streets, but we’ve never really done it before as a group, and we haven’t just hung around and harassed particular bums until they left the area. Maybe we need to start doing that, getting four or five of us together and walking around and shouting down the bums until they leave.
New security patrols are about to start too. One way or another, we’re determined to get these bums out of Downtown Memphis in 2008.