“It’s for vagrants,” said the police chief, Donald J. Lee Jr. “People who are out on the streets, disrupting the quality of life or experience for visitors, residents and businesses.” What some call vagrants, of course, others call simply down-and-out. The police say their targets are people like the homeless man arrested last week after he told two teenage girls they were sexy and offered them a swig of his Jack Daniel’s. Yet in a city of 25,000 that claims to have more bars per capita than anywhere else in the country, enforcement can sometimes look selective.

The police now regularly question the homeless but ignore visitors like the man at a table near Ms. Skinner’s Jeep last week. He was passed out before sunset, snoring, with a 16-ounce beer in front of him and two chickens pecking near his feet. Only his pressed shorts and a half-eaten Godiva chocolate bar suggested that he had a home.

Amateur videos online also display the challenge here of defining a quality-of-life offense.

Ignoring the trouble longtime resident Ernest Hemingway might get in if he were still alive, consider this: Does community policing mean that the guy rolling through a puddle at a crosswalk is enjoying his own quality of life or violating someone else’s? If you’re playing air guitar to Ozzy Osbourne, weaving back and forth on the sidewalk, are you a bother or just a passionate fan? The stars of these videos do not seem to have been arrested, though the puddle swimmer acted in front of a police car. The homeless see it as a double standard.