Public Safety vs Poverty: AG’s Panhandling Campaign Evokes New Controversy


The Guam attorney general is waging a campaign against panhandling on two premises, road safety and fighting a culture of entitlement. Douglas Moylan’s detractors and critics of his campaign are pushing back, suggesting his move to restrict lawful panhandling is unconstitutional and is a purposeful distraction from what they deem as failures of his office in the effective prosecution of violent crime.

Mr. Moylan unveiled his campaign in early January, replacing his monthly message billboards with signs that show a caricature of a local man missing teeth and holding a jug that says “Gimme.” Two of those signs were vandalized with political messages. One message says “Moylan hates poor ppl,” the other says “Housing is a human right.”

 

“Go and get a job,” Mr. Moylan, speaking to Guam’s unhoused, said in a January 6, 2025 interview with Ray Gibson on The Ray Gibson Show on 93.3FM The Point. “Stop asking us for money. The United States is not about giving people money. It’s about finding opportunity to make your life the best. To feed your family, to make a home for yourself. Guam has lost sight of what America is about.”

The Guam Homeless Coalition, which is a non-profit group that – among other things – helps to coordinate social services for the unhoused, said the AG’s billboard “leverages fear, anger and humiliation to address the complex issues of modern society.” The attorney general’s intention to enforce citations against people caught panhandling even if that means the poor are unable to pay the fines and may face jail time, “furthers despair and the downward spiral,” they said. “It risks overburdening our prison system, flooding court dockets, and imposing penalties on individuals who lack the means to pay.”

 

“If the GHC believes that our anti-panhandling law passed by the Guam Legislature is bad for Guam, they need to petition their boss, who is the governor of Guam to introduce a bill, and to persuade the senators to change the law,” Mr. Moylan said in response to the coalition’s statements attacking the program. “GHC’s press release not only mischaracterizes and disparages law enforcement officers and our courts for enforcing our laws, but seeks to create unequal and favorable treatment for a special group of persons not to be subject to laws that the rest of us must follow.  It is akin to allowing speeding and reckless drivers not to have to follow the rules of the road just because they are allegedly poor.  Further, the GHC provides no actual data supporting their reckless conclusion that panhandlers are all poor, debilitated, nor incapable of finding a job and working like the rest of us.”

Guam law makes all panhandling from sunset to sunrise illegal, and further outlaws panhandling on public easements and road medians unless certain conditions are met. Among these conditions are that panhandlers do not chase after cars, do not physically touch any person or vehicle, wear an orange reflective vest, place a warning sign of the panhandling activity at least 100 feet ahead of the activity, and inform the chief of police of their panhandling activities ahead of time.

 

Thomas Fisher, an attorney and former senator who has been a leading critic of Mr. Moylan, has called the attorney general’s program inhumane, and lacking compassion that should be central to a good Christian.

“The obvious adjectives come to mind,” Mr. Fisher said when asked by Kandit for his reaction to the AG campaign, continuing, “appalled, disgusted, shocked. It’s not acceptable. I don’t know what is wrong with some of these rich people. They just don’t seem to understand how difficult it is to be poor.”

Mr. Fisher criticized the attorney general for misplacing the people’s priorities.

 

“He wrote a letter to the presiding judge of the Superior Court saying he doesn’t have enough prosecutors, ‘can we please start moving your cases around because we no longer are able to prosecute the cases,'” the attorney said, “and at the very same time, he’s spending government resources on a campaign to condemn our brothers and sisters here on island.”

As for the attorney general’s qualification of his program as being the enforcement of road safety, Mr. Fisher said that it wasn’t enough for the AG to enforce a legislative panhandling plan to ensure safety, “that wasn’t sufficient for him. He thought they had to be made fun of. He thought they needed to be humiliated. I don’t see where that deeply unChristian, deeply unspiritual, deeply unkind impulse comes from.”

He said Mr. Moylan’s campaign simply is one meant to shame the poor. “It is plainly unconstitutional to outlaw [panhandling] altogether,” the attorney said while defending the legislature’s prerogative to institute safety regulations on panhandling while scrutinizing Mr. Moylan’s enforcement tactics. “I don’t know that the problem is the law as much as it is an individual with an enormous amount of power who has decided to wield that sword in such a way as to unfairly, inequitably hurt people.”

 

The attorney general has said the anger at his program is misdirected, asserting he is doing his job by enforcing Guam’s panhandling statute while the governor is remiss in her duties to provide the social services necessary to lift people out of poverty. He pointed to an early-2023 on-the-ground program he forged to address the gathering of unhoused residents in encampments adjacent to the main roads.

Mr. Moylan led a multi-agency effort to bring social services to homeless encampments and to move the squatters out of the encampments, some of which reportedly are outdoor dens of drug abuse and violence. He initially received support from the former and current mayors of Dededo, where many of the encampments are located and from which many of the panhandlers come. Support from agencies began to wane last year following criticism from attorneys and the Guam Homeless Coalition.

“This is the governor’s cabinet’s job,” Mr. Moylan said on Mr. Gibson’s show, highlighting what seems to be growing poverty and homelessness due to a number of factors, along with the governor’s command of a $1.2 billion annual budget.

 

“The governor is the crux of all these problems,” Mr. Moylan said. “It’s the governor!”

The governor’s office called the AG to task for what they assert is a misrepresentation of the facts.

“Let’s set the record straight,” the statement from governor’s spokeswoman Krystal Paco-San Agustin begins. “The Attorney General claimed it was his “understanding” that the Governor’s Office “stopped” meetings of the relocation task force nearly two years ago. That is simply incorrect. This team of stakeholders, which included the AG, was formed to address a specific homeless encampment that posed unique challenges. That encampment was addressed and we are open to coming together again. If the AG truly believed this team was meant to be ongoing, why did it take him two years—and a wave of criticism for his callous views on homelessness—to even bring it up? His sudden interest feels less like concern and more like a deflection.”

Her statement also accused the AG of creating a new controversy to gaslight the public from internal issues at the Office of the Attorney General. Over the past two years the OAG has had to deal with a severe shortage of prosecutors and a quickly rotating revolving door of staff, to include attorneys. Recently Mr. Moylan has been embattled by criticism that his office hired his fiancee to be his chief of staff.

 

“This seems to be a pattern: when the AG’s own ship starts taking on water, he throws buckets at others, hoping no one notices the leaks,” Ms. Paco-San Agustin said. “Instead of trying to distract the public by inventing faults in others, we urge him to focus on building real solutions for Guam’s most vulnerable.”

The attorney general has been direct about his thoughts about the governor and lieutenant governor’s complicity in the growing poverty and associated crime problems facing the island. He has said that someone needs to take action since Lou Leon Guerrero and Joshua Tenorio – who is in charge of providing solutions to the poverty problem – have failed. Among his latest proposals is for the government to create a “tent city,” or a large and manageable encampment for the unhoused to live in a commune of enclosed canopies as their housing from the elements.

The governor’s office has shunned the idea, with Ms. Paco-San Agustin saying: “Once again, Attorney General Moylan wants to use outdated and failed ideas from the past to address issues such as homelessness instead of using the tools available in 2025. Maybe he is unaware of what happened when Typhoon Omar devastated our island in 1992, leaving more than a thousand people homeless. At the time, the solution was to build a tent city. The so-called “Camp Omar” was located across the road from where General Moylan proposes housing the homeless–in tents again–some 33 years later. That tent city became a long-term fixture on Route 16.

“Has the AG considered the manpower and resources needed to maintain the safety and well-being of individuals and families in a tent city? Camp Omar became a place of illness, crime, and immense sadness. Conditions were borderline inhumane. Hundreds of government workers, especially from the Guam Police Department, were required to restore order and protect the people residing in tent city and the neighboring homes and businesses beyond its fences.”

 


1 Comments

  • WTH? All must follow the law or why should anyone follow any law? Not following the laws should result in penalties, no matter the circumstances.

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