Scandal on Skid Row
Despite a wave of international concern, Los Angeles police officers continue to round up homeless people en masse and place them under arrest for petty crimes, such as littering and failing to recycle. Of the 11,000 homeless people reported to be living in Los Angeles’ Skid Row last year, the LA Police Department has reported over 4,800 arrests in the neighborhood between August 2006 and February 2007–that equals nearly one arrest for every two homeless people in the neighborhood within a five month period. Many of the reported arrests have been of homeless parents, homeless veterans, homeless senior citizens, mentally ill people who do not have treatment, and homeless people with addictive disorders.
This disconcerting escalation of police aggression in the 50-block neighborhood just East of downtown LA has now received widespread media attention, having recently been covered by the February 7 issue of The Economist, as well as by other international news sources, such as the Associated Press, Yahoo! News, and Foxnews.com. National news outlets including the LA Times, the Daily Journal and the Washington Post have also reported on the human rights scandal now sweeping the neighborhood.
“There are a number of violations that we’re very concerned about,” reports ACLU staff attorney, Peter Bibring, who works out of the Southern California office and whom the Street Sheet interviewed last week. “For example, there appears to be a pattern of stops and searches without probable cause.” Although the practice of stopping and searching homeless people without probable cause has become a common police tactic in Skid Row, it is illegal.
A number of community leaders working within the neighborhood have also spoken out about the shocking treatment of homeless people in Skid Row. Pete White, founder and co-director of the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LACAN), explains,”We’ve seen frivolous citations being issued for a number of months now; they are giving littering tickets to people for ash falling from cigarettes; we’ve seen citations against people for putting bottles into trash cans instead of recycling bins.” Eventually, many of these citations become warrants for arrest. And many of these police encounters with homeless people immediately turn into arrests.
“The underlying program here is to remove homeless people from the community,” says White. Speaking from the perspective of Mayor Villaraigosa and his police force, White summarized, “We’re getting rid of people by any means necessary. We’re very interested in helping people disappear.” The methods that have now been reported and documented by a variety of community organizations and human rights groups include: illegal search and seizure, illegal detention, false arrests, frivolous tickets, and physical abuse. Area lawyers have also cited serious equal protection and due process concerns, and have observed the illegal confiscation and destruction of personal property.
At least one woman has been arrested and imprisoned for possessing milk crates that were believed to have been stolen; she had been using the milk crates to build a home for herself. As reported in the Daily Journal, another woman was arrested for sleeping on a rain-soaked mattress left on the sidewalk. Although this was the only bed she had access to, it is illegal to sleep on the sidewalk after 6 a.m.
Meanwhile, newly-arrived white and upper-class residents and visitors, who have begun to frequent the area’s emerging art galleries, regularly drink from open containers without any police intervention. “When it comes to the black and brown people and homeless people, there’s different treatment,” explains Austen Delgadillo, the lead organizer for Critical Resistance, a national collective working to end State and Federal reliance on incarceration as a solution to poverty and homelessness. Delgadillo has observed these incidents in person, as well as through LACAN’s video footage documenting interactions between police and Skid Row residents.
According to Delgadillo, many objections have also come from black residents living in the lofts. At bi-weekly police commissions that meet with local residents to discuss police activity, there are frequent complaints from condominium residents of color in the area who experience repeat harassment from the police.
Another important indicator of the City’s deliberate attempt to remove the homeless people of Skid Row can been seen in the area courts: Public defenders in Los Angeles have reported that their caseloads have doubled in recent months: Not only are there twice as many people being charged with crimes, but sentencing for homeless people in Skid Row has also escalated exponentially. Across the board, public defenders are seeing charges that would normally be considered drug possession now being sentenced as drug selling, a considerably harsher designation. According to Anat Rubin of the Daily Journal, of the 1,400 arrests made by undercover drug cops in the area, 1,093 were designated as “possession for sale.” A variety of court documents have also shown that homeless people are now being prosecuted for intent to sale even when carrying less than twenty dollars worth of narcotics.
Although downtown LA doesn’t have a history of gang violence—making it a unique LA neighborhood—of the 200 new officers recently added to address LA’s gang problem, 66 have been brought to the downtown neighborhood of Skid Row. Such an escalation is enormously expensive, since LAPD officers make a minimum $50,000 a year, which totals an increased investment of almost $3.5 million worth of police activity just within a 50-block neighborhood. Combine that with the average cost of imprisoning one Californian for a year at at least $30,000, and you have an exorbitantly expensive approach to solving homelessness.
Explains White, “Everyone wants to see downtown change—everyone, including us. But people don’t want to be a part of a solution that means incarceration without treatment, that means putting people in prison instead of housing.”
Not only are there less expensive ways to end homelessness, there are more effective and more humane solutions as well.
Jeremy