Video of 'Officer Friendly' playing hopscotch with a homeless girl in the affluent California community of Huntington Beach is all the rage on mainstream media channels, but few noticed the original reason why the cop was there.
Turns out, anonymous neighbors tried to ‘shop’ the girl and her mother to police.
They rang the authorities to complain about a “suspicious occupied vehicle” Wednesday, rather than doing the neighborly thing by going out to offer assistance.
Officers Zach Pricer and Scott March were dispatched to “investigate”.
Fortunately, they decided not to criminalize them, which is often the reaction by authorities, but instead March contacted the Homeless Task Force while Pricer started teaching the girl how to hopscotch.
The video, which was filmed by March, has been viewed more than 750,000 times.
Comments below the Facebook post reveal a number of people in the area know the mother and daughter.
One commenter recognized them from church and said they had been attending services for years.
“They have lived in their van for a while. Very nice and respectful mom and daughter,” another commenter said.
While most of the comments were gushing with joy at the sight of a police officer playing hopscotch, as opposed to shooting unarmed civilians, another commenter got real.
“Wait. People know this mother/daughter living situation AND they attend a local church AND they've been homeless for years? Why hasn't anyone offered employment or a place to stay for a while, while they save a little money and get back on their feet?” read the Facebook comment.
Huntington Beach is in Orange County, which has one of the most expensive housing markets in the US with values increasing by almost seven percent last year.
The median house price in Huntington Beach is $735,500 and the median rent is $3,000 per month.
The oceanside city has a largely hidden community of homeless people who live in tents and cars, or on the streets.
The county’s homeless population grew by 5 percent between 2013-2015, according to the Orange County Homeless Count & Survey Report, due to rising rents and a lack of affordable housing.
In Orange County, a person must earn $65,760 to afford a two-bedroom apartment, according to the California Housing Partnership Corp.
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With California’s minimum wage at $10 per hour, this leaves low-income employees at a shortfall.
Nearly 4,500 homeless people were counted in the survey, which is carried out every two years and reflects a single day in January 2015, half of them sleeping outside of a shelter, a 31 percent increase in two years.
450 of them are military veterans.
Huntington Beach passed a no camping rule in 2012 in reaction to complaints from residents about the shelters created by homeless people on beaches and in parks.
The Huntington Beach police department created three new roles to deal with the issue of homelessness and now has a full time employee dedicated to outreach.
Eve Garrow and Heather Maria Johnson of the ACLU’s Orange County office told the LA Times that the county spends less than 1 percent of its discretionary funding on homeless services.
The hopscotch-loving cop’s kindness stands in stark contrast to these Orange County police who beat, tasered, and eventually killed Kelly Thomas, a homeless man suffering from schizophrenia in 2011.
Those two officers were found not guilty of murder or manslaughter.