Can You Spare a Dime -- for Bail?

Richard Demar is a pedestrian's nightmare. Dressed in torn jeans and a partly shredded brown parka, he zigzags down a crowded sidewalk near Seattle's popular Pike Place Market. One hand clenched in a fist, the other clutching a Styrofoam cup, Demar, 32, looks fierce and menacing as he stumbles along, working the crowd. "Got some change, man?" he half demands of an elderly gentleman who promptly escapes into a store. Farther down the block, he fixes his glassy gaze on a well-dressed woman toting a shopping bag brimming with gifts. "Come on, ma'am. Can't you spare me something? I got to have some food, lady. I'm out of work." Frightened, the woman clutches her bag under her arm like a football and quickens her pace. Demar follows for a few steps before giving up. "My God, it's just awful," the woman says afterward. Demar offers no apologies, explaining with a slur, "You gotta get their attention."

As the ranks of the nation's homeless continue to swell, pushy panhandlers like Demar are indeed attracting attention. No longer simply an unpleasant reminder of society's failures, beggars are feared as a potential danger, particularly in a holiday season, when city streets are filled with shoppers and tourists. "There is no contradiction between feeling sad because you don't know how to help and being frightened because one of the people asking for help may hit you on the head," says Michael Zeik, 64, who runs a gauntlet of beggars at New York City's Grand Central Terminal on his frequent visits to Manhattan from his suburban home.

Now Seattle, which is proud of its image as a comfortable, family-oriented city, has taken action. This fall the city council unanimously passed an ordinance making it illegal to "aggressively beg." The law forbids strong- arm tactics as well as the obstruction of pedestrian and automobile traffic. Offenders face a maximum penalty of 90 days in jail and a $500 fine. Business leaders, the police and groups representing the elderly are elated, while advocates for the homeless, antipoverty workers and civil libertarians are appalled.

Seattle's 3,000 or so homeless include a small but highly visible minority of unruly beggars who cadge as much as $15 a day from passersby. Until the new law took effect in November, pushy panhandlers were the city's leading source of complaints. Mayor Charles Royer claims to have stacks of letters from visiting businessmen annoyed by Seattle's rowdy street people. Culling his own substantial collection of angry correspondence, Police Captain Jim Deschane quotes a local merchant: "Our employees are constantly accosted in our parking lot, and our customers are intimidated before coming into our store. We live and work in constant fear."

The ordinance is designed to quell these fears, but it suffers from a glaring flaw: nobody is quite certain how to define aggressive begging. The law makes it a misdemeanor to beg with the "intent to intimidate another person into giving money or goods," a formulation that could give pause to a high-pressure used-car salesman. Jerry Sheehan, legislative director for the Washington State chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, predicts that the new law will be challenged in court. If citizens don't understand what a law prohibits, he argues, how can they be expected to abide by it?