|
?:reviewBody
|
-
On 12 December 2016, the Dallas Morning News published an article about a new initiative to recruit panhandlers for day labor — but as is sometimes the case, a single excerpt of the piece caught readers' attention: The origin of the $50 per hour figure was not immediately clear, but both the author of the piece and the person quoted (Alan Sims of Neighborhood Plus) made statements about the potential profitability of panhandling. But the assertion that panhandlers make large sums of money is not new; one version posted to our message board in 2009 repeated the rumor that many downtrodden beggars were secret millionaires, made wealthy by posing as people in need: Rumors about dishonest beggars often serve as parables to illustrate our broader fears and attitudes about panhandling and being swindled, vulnerability to those who would fleece us, and general anxiety about to how often our trust in others might be misplaced. Kindly people getting defrauded or harmed by those posing as victims is a perennial theme in modern folklore, inviting us to test and reframe our true opinions about the poor, needy, and down on their luck. A stranded or distressed person isn't just often a potential con artist in these tales of caution, but also frequently a violent individual, gang member, or murderer. Because of the inherent risk of extending trust, the rumors say, we're more likely to become a victim than to help one. As for the age of the trope itself, readers pointed to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 1891 Sherlock Holmes short story The Man with the Twisted Lip; a primary plot point involves the discovery of an apparently destitute man who is in fact living a secret reputable life. Just as its impossible to produce even a ballpark figure of how many folks on the streets are truly, desperately in need, so too is figuring out how much the average panhandler can make. Location, season, visibility, personality, appearance, the economy, and a giver or mark's own views of the activity are among the variables that affect how lucrative it can be. Numerous articles including estimates of panhandling incomes are available; one penned by a self-identified panhandler described an average is closer to $15 than $30, adding that panhandling for more than a few hours at a time was nearly impossible due to police, weather, and public aggression. A 2002 paper from the Department of Justice's Community Oriented Policing Services, or COPS, typically cited other police materials or dated research in an excerpt about the Economics of Panhandling: The absolute highest estimate was placed at about $300 a day, or $50 per hour for six hours of begging. But the report estimated a daily average of $20-50 was more common, and came from the perspective of policing panhandlers. Research conducted in Toronto and published in 2002 referenced both some more rigorously collected average panhandler takes, as well as one of myriad news articles alleging that begging was surprisingly lucrative: Informal findings collected by one individual and reported by a news outlet in 2013 tracked more closely with the actual research than the wealthy panhandler trope: A $300 monthly average income and spending donated money on food was far less attention grabbing than the trope of the wealthy panhandler, but research didn't indicate anywhere near a $50 hourly take was common for beggars under the best of conditions. That dichotomy was present in a November 2015 article titled How Much Do Panhandlers Make? New York City Homeless Man Earns $200 An Hour Sitting On Sidewalk With Dog[.] Although the headline suggested yet another tale of street beggars drowning in money, its content belied the commonly referenced idea: Although hard, reality-based numbers about panhandler income are difficult to track down, no credible source suggests that panhandlers are regularly earning $50 an hour under any conditions. Most studies indicate that a monthly average is well below minimum wage earnings (and that money was determined to most likely be spent just on food). Although panhandlers intermittently do report random incidents of extreme generosity, wealthy panhandlers seem to exist primarily in questionably authenticated news exposés about begging scams. We have contacted Sims as well as the original article's author, but have not yet received a response to our question about the origin of the $50 figure.
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}