In a recent 911 call in Gastonia, North Carolina, a woman can be heard saying that the situation was "bullcrap" and accusing a homeless person of "using the dog to get money."
The police did what police do when it comes to homeless people.

"The officer asked him for his ID," witness Justyn Huffman said. "He wasn't moving fast enough so he tried to reach into his pocket to get his ID. They slammed him up against the car. They put cuffs on him."

Joshua Rohrer is a veteran and his dog Sunshine was trained to help him cope with post-traumatic stress disorder caused by his time serving in the Army in Iraq. When the police began roughing up Rohrer, Sunshine reacted in a way that a dog was supposed to act when its person is being attacked. Sunshine bit one of the officer's boots. The officer then hit the dog with a taser, which caused the dog to run away. Rohrer was charged with panhandling and resisting arrest. Rohrer denied that he was panhandling. While Rohrer was in jail Sunshine was struck by a car and killed.

"She was just doing her job," Rohrer said of the way police handled Sunshine. "The cops started yelling at her and me, telling me to get her to settle down but they wouldn't allow me to physically get control of her...They laughed at me...I begged them to bring her to me or to give her to an officer to take with them but they wouldn't listen, they didn't care."

"I cannot function without a service dog and they stole that from me," he added. "I don't know how I'm going to recover from this."

Roughly one third of homeless adults in the United States are military veterans. A rate that is 50% higher than the general population. Veterans Affairs estimates that 107,000 veterans are homeless on any given night.
At least those numbers were true for 2019. We don't know the numbers for 2020 because "were kept hidden for months by President Donald Trump’s administration for unspecified reasons."
Thank you for your service, indeed.

If there's one thing that Americans absolutely can't stand, it's homeless people.
27% of Republicans and 18% of Independents say that we as a society have no obligations of any kind to help the homeless.

That includes the mentally ill, children, and military veterans.
Fuck you for your service, I guess.
Yesterday Miami passed a resolution that makes homeless encampments illegal. By homeless encampment, that means tents. Texas went a step further earlier this year.

The bill makes it illegal to set up shelter or store belongings for an extended period of time. The offense is a class C misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of up to $500. The bill also makes it illegal for cities to adopt policies that effectively legalize public encampments, as Austin did in 2019.

The state law requires police to "make reasonable efforts" to direct Texans toward medical or mental health services and shelters before ticketing them, but the bill doesn't provide funding for these efforts. Which means that homeless people in Texas will wind up being fined $500, a sum that they can't possibly hope to pay. And that leads directly to throwing homeless people in prison for the de facto crime of being poor.
Even during feudal days people weren't thrown in prison for being poor. Being in debt, yes. But criminalizing simply being poor is a new level of heartlessness.

It has become commonplace to describe homelessness as a problem that will “always be with us.”
But that's a outright lie. Anyone who has traveled abroad knows that America's homelessness crisis doesn't happen in any other 1st world nation. In fact, many developing nations don't allow the homeless to live on our streets like they do today.
How we got to our homelessness crisis was through calculated political decisions. Go to any conservative media or online outlet and they will blame it all on "liberals". That liberals "encourage" homelessness by giving them food, and allowing them to sleep on the streets instead of throwing them in jail. The idea that any mentally ill, military veterans, and children are homeless by choice is offensively ignorant.
Anyone with half a brain knows that the homeless don't go away just because you outlaw them from sleeping. All that you do is move them to another location and make it someone else's problem. But you wind up spend millions of dollars in police enforcement and jails just to get the homeless to move along. For example, in 2019, LA spent around $30 million in homeless sweeps.
If that exact same amount money was spent on housing the homeless, it would have more impact.

The real reason why we are facing a homelessness crisis can be directly blamed on decisions that conservatives Republicans made over 40 years ago.
That they are working overtime to blame others for their terrible decisions just proves that they are too weak to take any responsibility.

Modern, large-scale homelessness exploded across the country in the early 1980s, driven by drastic cuts to social programs and especially to federal funding for low-income housing. In 1979, Congress funded 347,600 new units of low-income housing; by 1983, that number had been slashed to 2,630. These cuts came on the heels of the loss of around 1 million units of inexpensive single-room occupancy housing in the 1970s.

No coincidence, these cuts were accompanied by a racist, “welfare queen” ideology, promoted by President Reagan and his administration, that blamed poor people for their plight. They were part of a larger effort to cut social programs including income support for disabled people and poor families and paint government aid as a sign of laziness or failure.
...
As a result, currently, only one in four of those poor enough to qualify for federal housing assistance receive it.

In 1976, President Ford asked to fund 506,000 new low-income housing units, including 400,000 rent vouchers for Section 8. Under Reagan it dropped to under 100,000 and the federally subsidized housing budget under HUD dropped from $26 billion to $8 billion. In 1996, fewer than 9,000 units were funded.

“If we had provided 500,000 additional low-income units every year since 1976, we would now have about 14 million families living in federally assisted low-income housing,” the National Low Income Housing Coalition wrote in 2002.

Do you think that 14 million additional affordable housing units would make a difference?
Uh, yes. Yes it would. If you go to the U.K. the state owns 11% of the total housing stock. In France it's 16%.
Do you know what those nations don't have? A homelessness crisis.

At the very least, if you support criminalizing homelessness, you support abusing the mentally ill and spitting on military veterans.