Welcome to A Cytations Needed News Brief. I am Neema Shirazi. I'm Adam Johnson. We do these news

briefs in between our regularly scheduled episodes when there is something a bit more pressing to

discuss. We are still on our spring break and Adam you are still transitioning back to the show

from your parental leave which is ongoing. Congratulations to you new dad. Evidently yes I'm enjoying

it very much. I'll spare you the personal schmaltz between a boy done the show but um kids great.

Love the death. Got a good attitude. He's a winner. Very sweet. Peace me all the time. Moving on

we connect to Ethan following a group of activists in Austin who helped us facilitate our episode

on the war on the homeless to the incitement against homeless to part of we did in 2019.

And as it turns out there's a really important vote coming up on something called prop B which is

going to criminalize the existence of homeless people. Right. Recriminalize incidentally. Yeah another

lay of criminalizing by actually making it illegal to camp and lay down on public property which means

you are now making it impossible to be homeless and criminalizing the existence of homeless people.

So we wanted to have them on to talk about this talk about how the media is covering it. There's a

huge PR campaign by the Republican Party of Travis County in elusive legions with some centrist

and imbi types that we think is very toxic and sort of shows how these propaganda anti-homeless

sentiments manifest into policy specifically violent policy which is what's being proposed here

and make no mistake. This will lead to years in prison and shootings and other and other things.

So we wanted to have a couple of the activists on to talk about this and to talk about how activists

are pushing back against these right-wing anti-homeless tropes in the Austin area and of course these

are applicable to places outside of Austin but it's where I went to school so we're biased. I'll go with it.

Yeah in just a moment we'll be joined by two guests Chris Harris a native Texan and advocate working

to transform the criminal legal system currently serves as the director of criminal justice programs

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