The Criminalization of Homelessness in British Columbia: The BC Safe Streets Act
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The BC Safe Streets Act (BCSSA) criminalizes certain types of panhandling activities, including aggressive solicitation and captive audience solicitation. Given that panhandling is primarily a trade of people experiencing homelessness and extreme poverty, the primary objective of this project was to determine whether the costs of the BCSSA outweigh its benefits. This question was answered through a mixed-methods approach, utilizing qualitative data from a jurisdictional scan and literature review and quantitative data gathered through Freedom of Information requests (FOIs) to police departments across BC, as well as ICBC. The primary positive outcomes stemming from the BCSSA and similar legislation were related to reductions in problematic panhandling activity over temporally and geographically limited contexts. The negative outcomes stemming from the BCSSA and similar legislation were poor physical, social, and economic outcomes for those criminalized under the regime, significant debt burden placed on economically vulnerable populations, exacerbation of stigmatization leading to deeper entrenchment in homelessness and poverty, community rejection of support- and service-oriented policies, and a lack of evidence of long-term effectiveness. Ultimately, the most important recommendation that emerged from this research was that the Attorney General and Minister responsible for Housing should immediately repeal the BCSSA and instead address panhandling through evidence-based policies that address its root causes - poverty and homelessness.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it