[News] LA's Vicious War on the Homeless

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/skeels03222007.html

March 22, 2007


LA's Vicious War on the Homeless


Crackdown on Skid Row

By ROBERT D. SKEELS

On the morning of February 8, a white hospital van stopped a few feet 
from a curb in Los Angeles' skid row area. According to witnesses, a 
man wearing a soiled hospital gown fell through the doors, and the 
van, later connected with Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, drove away.

The man, a paraplegic, began crawling down the street, a bag of his 
belongings clutched in his teeth and a colostomy bag dragging behind 
him. Other homeless people helped the disoriented man into a nearby 
park, just before police called an ambulance.

This horrible scene came just three months after the city attorney's 
office filed an indictment against Kaiser Permanente for dumping a 
63-year-old patient on the streets of skid row in her socks and a 
hospital gown last year, an incident that was captured on videotape.

Patient dumping has become so widespread there's a bill in the 
California State Senate to criminalize the practice.

But these practices go deeper than a few isolated incidents. They are 
part of a system of abuse against LA's poor and homeless population.

* * *

LA's SKID row--known as "the nickel" because it's centered on Fifth 
Street--has become ground zero in a war on the homeless.

Taking its cue from other major cities like New York, LA is using 
what it calls the "Safer Cities Initiative" (SCI) as a cover to 
gentrify skid row. SCI, announced in September 2006, is intended to 
reduce the visibility of homeless people, not address the root causes 
of homelessness.

Implementation of SCI followed the Los Angeles City Council's 
rejection of a settlement between the ACLU and Mayor Antonio 
Villaraigosa and Police Chief William Bratton, which stopped the 
enforcement of a ban on the homeless sleeping on sidewalks between 9 
p.m. and 6 a.m.

Last April, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that 
arresting the homeless for sleeping on sidewalks in a city with such 
a low shelter-bed-to-homeless ratio constituted cruel and unusual 
punishment. While awaiting the outcome of an appeal, the city has 
gone on an all-out offensive.

Although some funds for increasing services are allocated in the SCI 
package, they don't come close to addressing the homeless 
population's needs, nor do they offset massive cuts in federal 
spending for local services. Instead, most of the program focuses on 
law enforcement, with the LAPD adding 50 officers to its Central 
Division to target skid row.

The new "enforcement focus" has drastically increased the number of 
arrests on skid row.

"I became homeless two years ago due to alcohol and drugs," James 
Maingot, who lives on skid row, told Socialist Worker. "Since then, 
I've seen a lot of changes in the downtown area as large corporations 
have bought most of the buildings to build lofts.

"I've seen more police on the street, and they've begun stopping 
people on the sidewalk, handcuffing them. They'll search you, and if 
you're clean, they'll tell you not to return, or you'll be arrested. 
It's happened to me, and I see this all the time. The police drive by 
two or three cars at a time. They shine their searchlights in your 
face, intimidate you, and put fear in the community. I thought the 
police were there to protect and serve the community, not big 
business. The homeless have been herded like sheep."

A recent police commission report on SCI announced by Central Bureau 
Chief Cayler Lee Carter cited 5,067 arrests in the skid row 
area--3,486 were on felony charges, and about a third of these were 
drug "possession for sales." Charging people with possession for 
sales rather than simple possession disqualifies them from 
consideration under California's Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention 
Act of 2000, or Proposition 36.

Proposition 36 provides certain nonviolent adult offenders who use or 
possess illegal drugs up to one year of drug treatment and six months 
of after-care. Homeless offenders are housed--and can receive 
transitional housing at the completion of their Prop 36 program.

Conviction of possession for sales also means state prison time for 
the vast majority of skid row residents, most of whom have prior 
convictions. Several sources indicate that the district attorney's 
office is no longer negotiating with public defenders on skid row 
cases, and instead is pursuing aggressive strategies to get longer sentences.

The vast majority of these "drug sales" cases are simply addicts 
supporting their own habits. When asked by undercover police where to 
score, they will break off a piece of their own supply.

Another part of the enforcement focus is the city's new "stay-away 
plan," which bans drug offense convicts from skid row while on parole 
or probation. The district attorney's logic is that this prevents 
crime. It also prevents people from obtaining services at the various 
shelters and nongovernmental organizations in the vicinity, unless 
they live, work or are in treatment within the targeted areas.

Since the bulk of emergency services serving meals for the homeless 
are located on skid row, "stay away" is essentially telling the 
homeless to remain homeless and hungry somewhere else.

* * *

Taken together, these enforcement policies have had the obvious 
effect of depleting the skid row homeless population through attrition.

Those who aren't imprisoned grow tired of police harassment and leave 
skid row. A recent Los Angeles Times article reported that 
surrounding areas and shelters are overflowing with homeless people 
displaced from downtown. LAPD Central Division's count of homeless 
camping on skid row for January 15, 2007, was 875 persons--down from 
1,876 in September 2005, before SCI.

Meanwhile, there is little to no evidence of SCI's supposed 
"enhancement and outreach" components. Jose Egurbide of the city 
attorney's office recently stated at a press conference that 
officials are currently waiting on funding that Mayor Villaraigosa 
said he has earmarked to expand the outreach program, as well as 
additional emergency shelter beds and wrap-around services.

At the rate the city is cleansing skid row's street population 
through imprisonment or displacement, one might wonder if the delay 
in those funds is intentional. There are still only 3,400 emergency 
and transitional beds for 6,000 to 8,000 estimated downtown area homeless.

Not surprisingly, downtown business associations and large 
real-estate developers are lauding SCI as a success. With median loft 
and condominium prices in downtown Los Angeles at $739,000 and a raft 
of new development slated for the city's Ninth District, it's no 
wonder City Council member Jan Perry led the fight against the ACLU 
settlement and for SCI.

Perry, whose district contains most of skid row, also led efforts in 
2005 to sell off South Central Farm--public land that low-income 
residents have been farming for supplemental food for more than a 
decade--to developers.

According to the Institute for the Study of Homelessness and Poverty, 
approximately 80,000 people are homeless each night in Los Angeles 
County alone. Within that staggering statistic is a disproportionate 
number of African Americans and a growing number of single mothers 
with their children.

Veterans are also disproportionately represented. "As many as 27,000 
homeless veterans reside in Los Angeles County" states a 2002 report 
by State of California Department of Veterans Affairs. The situation 
is so dire that the report recommended the sate "commit to a plan 
similar to our nation's Marshall Plan following World War II."

Lack of funding is the common theme among all the downtown missions, 
shelters and other facilities. SRO Housing Corporation buys old 
hotels and apartment buildings to create emergency, transitional and 
permanent housing for homeless, formerly homeless and low-income persons.

In a recent interview with SRO Housing Corporation Executive Director 
Anita Nelson regarding the conditions on skid row, the bulk of the 
conversation steered toward lack of funding.

"We just lost $1.5 million in federal grants," Nelson said, "and I 
may have to lay off over 20 employees--many formerly homeless, as 
well as reduce the amount of available beds." She said that SRO 
currently has a 700-person waiting list, but unless they secure 
funding for beds, they can't accommodate the demand.

Widespread homelessness in the world's richest country is a shameful 
indictment of a system that places profit before human need. That Los 
Angeles' best response to its homeless crisis is to criminalize, 
intimidate and incarcerate its most vulnerable shows why we need to 
organize and fight for a world with different priorities.

Robert Skeels lives in LA and writes for the 
<http://www.socialistworker.org/>Socialist Worker.


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