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A volunteer group in Houston has gotten dozens of tickets from police while handing out food to homeless people, but they say they won't stop doing what they're doing.
Four nights a week for about 15 years, the Houston chapter of Food Not Bombs, an international charitable group, has been serving vegetarian and vegan meals to about 100 to 150 homeless residents outside the city's downtown public library, volunteer Shere Dore told Business Insider.
But it wasn't until earlier this year that they started getting tickets from the city, which the group has been documenting on TikTok, Dore said.
Since March, the group has racked up at least 79 citations, Dore said. The citations are connected to violating a local ordinance passed in 2012, which prohibits giving away food to five or more people without permission from the property owner — in this case, the library.
Dore told Business Insider that a court decides how much each citation is for, but they can be up to $2,000 each. She said the group hasn't paid any of the tickets yet because they plan to take each to trial.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner's office told Business Insider that the city is giving out tickets because serving food outside the library — which Food Not Bombs does after library hours — is not safe for "those seeking food, those who serve, pedestrians, and patrons of the library facilities."
Instead, the mayor wants the group to move to an approved site half a mile away, in the parking lot of a police precinct, Houston's Chron.com reported.
But despite what the mayor wants, Food Not Bombs refuses to relocate, Dore told Business Insider.
"We won't move," said Dore, who's been volunteering with the group for about 12 years. "So that's just a given."
Dore said the city's proposed alternate location is not feasible because, for one, disabled members of the homeless community would have a hard time getting there. Further, Dore said, many homeless residents don't trust the police, and they don't want to congregate on police property.
"We're on public property, we're on public space," Dore told Business Insider of the group's decision to remain in front of the library. "We're really not hurting anybody,"
"We're going out there, and we're serving people who are hungry, and we don't believe that we need to ask city permission or government permission to be able to do that," she added.
Dore said that Food Not Bombs intends to wait out the current mayor's term, which ends this year. The group hopes that the new mayor, who will be chosen this month in a runoff election, will be more sympathetic to their cause.
Ultimately, Dore said they want the 2012 ordinance overturned. But until then, she said the group will continue raking in the citations.
