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DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY: STILL A WELCOME PLACE FOR ALL? Story and photo by Robert Davis matter of minutes, he had his head down on the desk. The slow rise and fall of his back told me he was asleep. He dozed quietly, not disturbing anyone with snoring or sleep talk. My fellow learners at the nearby desks seemed unfazed by his slumber. Many people who are homeless find themselves in a similar predicament as the man I encountered at the library. Unsheltered people are regularly contacted by myriad police officers, Street Engagement Team members, security guards for business improvement districts, and downtown ambassadors who enforce Denver’s public camping ban. The choice for them is clear — either stay awake or get arrested. People in shelters often report similar issues when it comes to getting a good night’s sleep. Local shelters can be loud, and the city auditor has found that some shelter operators have struggled to maintain safe environments. Those thoughts made the way the library’s security guards treated the sleeping man even more curious. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw one guard lumbering toward my desk. His shoes squeaked down the walkway between bookcases, and his wad of keys clanged against his hip. Bang! The guard’s fist hit the sleeping man’s desk. “Sir, I need you to wake up,” the guard grumbled. The sleeping man sat up immediately, still bleary-eyed from IT’S ABOUT 9:45 A.M. ON A FRIDAY IN DOWNTOWN. I am one of the huddled masses waiting outside for the Denver Public Library to open. There are people next to me who will head straight for the public benefits desk to ask for help once the sliding doors are finally unlocked. Some of my fellow seekers will dart for the bathrooms to wash their faces or engage in other illicit activities. There are a few who will sign up to vend the Denver VOICE while at the library. I’ll see a few more of them weaving through the stacks of books looking for a good story to take up an afternoon. It’s a gentle reminder that libraries are about more than books — they are a place where humanity happens. Among the stacks are thousands of stories about history, religion, and art that create a sense of belonging. To some, the library is the only place they can access the internet to contact loved ones or service providers or charge their cellphone. It is also a place for people with nowhere else to go to escape the sweltering Denver summer. On this day, I headed to the fourth floor to do a little research about how the Supreme Court’s attitude toward the poor has changed over the last half century. I grabbed a few books off the shelf and took up residence at a desk that faced the Colorado Supreme Court. I wanted to know why it seemed to be getting harder for indigents to find protection from the Court. I had no idea how instructive the afternoon would be. I read about how the Supreme Court the dream he was having. The guard left for a few minutes and came back to find the man sleeping again. Bang! The guard hit the desk. The tango went on for about half an hour. Bang! Bang! Bang! Eventually, two other security guards began patrolling the took a decidedly rightward turn under the Nixon administration, reversing many of the decisions from the 1950s and 1960s that gave the underprivileged more rights and redresses against the upper class. There were decisions like Dandridge v. Williams and Wyman v. James, which held that matters of poverty are none of the Court’s business and that poor people do not have the same expectation of privacy as the rich. Then, I took up Peter Canellos’ book “Revenge for the Sixties: Sam Alito and the Triumph of the Conservative Legal Movement.” I learned these decisions were animated by a desire from an extreme faction of conservatives to return the country to a perceived state of “normalcy” where the Bible was taught in school, and racial segregation was the norm. I had just started reading lawyer Adam Cohen’s book, “Supreme Inequality,” when a disheveled man in a blue T-shirt carrying an oversized backpack settled in a few desks away. I could tell by the look in his eyes that he hadn’t slept well in quite some time. The size of his bag and some of the clothes that the zippers struggled to hold back told me that he was carrying everything he owned. I glanced up at the gentleman periodically, and within a floor. Their radios blared with traffic. One of them stood next to the sleeping man’s desk while the other shook him awake. The once-quiet atmosphere was interrupted by a radio call about a motorized bike riding on the sidewalk, echoing throughout the room. I used scrap paper as a bookmark and watched the rest of the events unfold. A mutual aid worker for the library approached the sleeping man. She sat with him at the desk, took food and water out of her bag, and gave it to him. I couldn’t hear their conversation from my vantage point a couple of desks away, but the impact was clear. After he ate, the man packed up his things and left the library. I asked the library’s communications team about the incident and whether it was something that the Community Resource Team was better equipped to handle than security, but I received no answer before press time. An internal policy memo reviewed by Denver VOICE, though, considers sleeping to be a disruptive behavior that can be cause for removal from the library after a warning. All incidents are required to be logged in the library’s internal reporting system. Watching how that sleeping man was treated illustrated how this idea of “normalcy” that people clamor for has changed the meaning of community. Those who are considered normal are given more leeway to be human than people who are not. I, for one, have taken multiple naps in the music section of the third floor. I have also brought my lunch into the library while I worked. Security guards have never bothered me in those cases. Does that make me normal? It also reminded me of what Justice Sonya Sotomayor wrote in her dissent for Grants Pass v. Johnson, which held that removing homeless people from the public eye is so normal that punitive disciplinary action can’t be considered “cruel and unusual punishment.” “Sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime,” Sotomayor wrote, noting that it is possible to balance the human dignity of people who are homeless with issues like safety. Denverites have heard a lot about what it takes to build a city for everyone over the last several years: creating affordable homes for families, protecting women’s right to abortion access, and promoting worker unions. All these debates highlight the desire to put humanity above the political fray. That desire ought to extend to our homeless neighbors as they search for a welcoming place to rest. The third floor of the Denver Public Library Central Branch 4 COMMENTARY

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