In the past weeks, there have been several press reports about police officers stopping and „vegging” hungry people in the queue at our organisation's food distribution in Blaha Lujza Square. Our organisation would like to take a stand on this issue.

Our foundation has been providing food throughout the country since its registration in 1999. In the capital, we have been providing public meals for more than a decade, and with the exception of a two-year period, we have been serving meals in Blaha Lujza Square. We currently serve 500 people a day from Monday to Friday every week, but on major holidays, when we help people in need not only with hot meals but also with cold food, clothes and toys, up to 1,400 people queue up in the square at a time. The service is completely open to the public, the staff do not ask for any kind of document or identification (medical, homeless, or any other kind of life situation) and it is free for everyone. It is our experience that, in addition to the most vulnerable people living without shelter, the presence of unemployed people, people with credit problems and pensioners who are trying to save money by providing a hot lunch in this way has become more and more noticeable in recent years. Our care is thus a preventive service, which can be an important support for all those families, elderly people, single people who, due to their unstable financial situation, can get caught in a dangerous spiral of assistance-debt-housing-loss, whereby the loss of reserves, relational capital and physical, mental and psychological health can lead to complete segregation.

During our food distributions, police presence is a common phenomenon, and they have been patrolling around Corvin for years, even during food distributions, as it is a very busy area of the city, with up to 300 000 people a day. Our work has so far not been disrupted by their presence. During our large-scale events, we have found their presence particularly useful in helping to prevent impatient, sometimes irritable, intrusions. In the past, they have also been used on numerous occasions to check on some of our clients in the queue, and have acted to protect our beneficiaries and ensure the safe operation of our food distributions. Indeed, such a frequency of checks has not been seen as recently. In all cases, the police carried out the procedure without prior notice or consultation with us, including on days that were reported in the press.