Business & Tech
Columbia Mall Lifts Ban on Two Homeless People
Officials agree to staff sensitivity training, more specific reasons for banning in future.
Two homeless Howard County people who were banned from The Mall in Columbia for a year in February are now allowed back in the mall, according to a report in The Baltimore Sun.
The ban was lifted, the newspaper said, after a meeting Tuesday between mall and county officials and a representative of the ACLU of Maryland, which had sought the meeting. A spokesman for mall manager Katie Essing also told The Sun she had apologized to Stephan Rabai and Patricia R. “Anne” Francis.
“We’re very pleased with the outcome,” Deborah Jeon, legal director of the ACLU, told The Sun. “We felt the mall took the matter very seriously.”
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Essing was quoted as saying she would “work diligently to ensure that my staff is sensitive to our patron’s concerns."
Francis was banned from the mall on Feb. 3 after she was asked to leave a week earlier by a security guard when she left a suitcase and a book unattended while making a purchase at the Starbucks inside the mall.
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Both Francis and Rabai have said they were forced out into the winter weather by their bannings. Both made video recordings that appear on the ACLU website. Francis also had said she could not catch a Howard Transit bus to get medication she needed because the bus stop is on mall property.
Rabai said he was reading a book on a mall sofa the first time he was asked to leave on Feb. 2. When he returned a week later and was doing the same thing he was asked to leave and given a banning notice, the newspaper reported.
Mall officials said Francis and Rabai had violated their conduct policies. However, the ACLU notes on its website that “Francis and Rabai have no record of creating disturbances.”
Mall officials agreed to be more specific with charges and warnings to patrons, require sensitivity training for security staff and clarify that people who are banned from the mall are allowed to use transit facilities located on mall property, The Sun reported.
This article has been changed to correct the last name of one of the homeless people who'd been banned from the mall.
