Instead of focusing the powers of Los Angeles on creating fast and safe homeless housing, the city is ticketing, jailing, rousting and victimizing these residents over petty wrongdoing, subjecting L.A.’s poorest residents to maltreatment by police, city garbage crews and others.
If you don’t think seizing the modest property of the homeless is rotten, we urge you to watch this VIDEO of Sharon La Gue, a smart and heartfelt elderly lady in a wheelchair. She lives on a sidewalk in Hollywood.
UN Monitor Phil Alston has slammed Los Angeles leaders for using criminalization to “conceal” the homeless in jail, where their lives are made far worse over very minor crimes:
- In July 2015, L.A. City Council approved 2 ordinances that encourage seizing homeless people’s property.
- Ticketing them for sleeping in their cars has been a favored L.A. practice since February of 2017.
- According to the L.A. Times, in 2016 some 14,000 homeless were arrested citywide, a 31% jump from 2011.
Ticketing a homeless person can land them in jail for wrongs that other Angelenos commit at will — the homeless get tickets for sleeping in parks. And rousting them from sitting beneath underpasses and on sidewalks is common practice.
This, in a city that has sunk to the bottom of the rankings in providing humane nightly shelter.
Los Angeles city crews snatch up the clothing, pillows and soap of the homeless, forcing them to trek miles to retrieve their precious things.
Is this city policy? Or torture?
This week brought some hope that city leaders are feeling shamed enough to act: The Los Angeles City Council finally discussed and “tentatively” supported the concept of converting motels to shelter housing and the radical notion of cutting red tape to build long-overdue supportive housing. The Council’s decision to fund temporary trailers Downtown was another positive step — if years too late.
Until Mayor Eric Garcetti and the City Council actually cut their red tape, allowing innovative and emergency actions common in other cities — converting old motels, setting up building-sized industrial tents — L.A.’s out-of-date city government needs to stop victimizing these people.