No Home for You Here
Photograph by Steve Appleford
Last week, to mark the anniversary of the police crackdown known as the Safer Cities Initiative, the L.A. Times published a consoling little fairy tale about life on Skid Row, in which the heightened police presence and aggressive policy of street-clearing and ticketing were hailed as little short of salvation for the city’s biggest eyesore – the most concentrated population of homeless and indigent people anywhere in the United States.
The author of the piece, Heather MacDonald, painted a cheery picture of neighborhood cops being greeted by their first names and repeatedly being told by Row residents what a great job they are doing. The Initiative, she wrote, “has saved more lives in a year than decades of litigation by homeless advocates ever achieved … Skid Row’s officers are dislodging a culture of anarchy that allowed crime and violence to flourish at the expense of people trying to get back on their feet.”
Nowhere in this encomium were we told who Heather MacDonald was, or why she might have a vested interest in peddling these arguments. She is in fact a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute, the free-market New York think-tank which dreamed up the Broken Windows theory of crime prevention later put into practice by Rudy Giuliani, and which has more recently been instrumental in advising the LAPD.
Between the Safer Cities Initiative – the benign rebranding of a police initiative previously known as “Operation Enough” – and such spectacular misconceptions as the Muslim mapping project, the Manhattan Institute has in fact earned somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million on its consulting activities in L.A.
None of this might matter so much if MacDonald’s rosy picture came anywhere close to the truth. But it does not. Yes, crime is down on Skid Row. Yes, fewer people are sleeping on the streets there. But that is not because people have been helped “back on their feet.” It is because of a singularly aggressive – and legally dubious – policy of hounding the poorest Skid Row residents that has scared them away but has hardly made them disappear.
Rather, they have dispersed around other parts of downtown and beyond – as even the LAPD has now acknowledged. Many of those who rely on Skid Row’s dwindling stock of cheap flophouse hotels have either lost their housing or risk losing it. The city has made only the most pusillanimous of gestures towards providing them with alternative housing – let alone the mental health and other social services many of them so desperately need.
Ask anyone familiar with Skid Row for any length of time, and they will tell you that Safer Cities is essentially a tool for making the streets of Central City East – the official name for Skid Row’s 50 square blocks – safer for the developers and art gallery owners and loft dwellers who have either moved in or want to, while making it considerably less safe for the desperate, poor, overwhelmingly African American street population who have nowhere else to turn.
A few days before MacDonald’s piece graced the cover of the Times’ Opinion section, civil rights lawyer Carol Sobel filed suit in federal court accusing the LAPD and the mayor’s office of violating the street population’s constitutional rights and creating a pass system similar to the overtly racist policies of apartheid-era South Africa. “The unlawful practices and tactics … amount to a war on the low-income residents of Skid Row,” the suit says.
The police department has not primarily been chasing down violent criminals. Rather, its primary tool has been issuing thousands upon thousands of so-called “quality of life” tickets for jaywalking or littering. The tickets are not issued to the gallery-goers who hang out on the sidewalks of Main Street on Thursday night, take the occasional step into the street itself and sip wine from open glasses. They are issued exclusively to the poor – people who can’t beat Skid Row’s notoriously short pedestrian lights to get across the street before the green man turns red, or people with disabilities, or people whose cigarette ash falls on to the sidewalk.
Among the plaintiffs assembled by Sobel is Montgomery Garnett, a colorful local figure known for his habit of carrying a ram’s horn and quoting from scripture. He’s been ticketed six times in the last year and a half, including one occasion when police objected to him eating a bag of chips on a street corner and then clapped him in handcuffs and accused him of making “terrorist threats” after he cited a few verses from Deuteronomy.
Another plaintiff, Otis Howard, received a ticket after he put one foot in the road, then hastily withdrew it as he saw the green pedestrian light go back to flashing red. He is partially sighted and walks with a cane, which makes one wonder – and makes Sobel wonder – what exactly their motivation is.
The 12,000 tickets issued on Skid Row over the past year – one seventh of the total for the whole of L.A., in an area covering about 0.25 percent of the city’s population – create a huge problem because the street people are in no position to pay them. That puts them on a spiral of debt, court warrants and, eventually, possible jail time – a spiral Sobel likens to the debtors’ prisons of Victorian London so evocatively described and denounced by Charles Dickens.
None of the issues surrounding Skid Row are easy. It is, above all, a monument to the failure of modern urban life. Maintaining a volatile street subculture where desperate people resort to drugs, prostitution and worse is clearly not an option. It’s understandable that Mayor Villaraigosa and others would prefer to see galleries and lofts than destitution and misery so close to the city’s heart – and their own offices.
But L.A. has a long and ignominious history of refusing to identify the key issues and address them with any tool other than the heavy hand of law enforcement. As Gary Blasi, a homelessness expert at UCLA, has written, other big cities – Miami, Philadelphia, New York, Seattle, Denver, Portland, and others – have seen a reduction in their homeless populations because they have provided specialized housing units with access to mental health and recovery services. To date, Los Angeles has talked about providing a pusillanimous 50 extra housing units for the poor.
The approach taken by other cities is not only more humane; it’s also cheaper. Taking proper care of the lowest of the low in our society tends to cost between $15,000 and $25,000 per person per year. L.A.’s broken system of high-profile police sweeps, arrests, emergency medical interventions, and other crisis management tools amounts to a burden of as much as $150,000 per person per year.
Sobel has filed federal lawsuits against the LAPD before and, from a legal standpoint at least, has been remarkably successful. A 2006 ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, for example, held that it was unconstitutional to arrest homeless people for vagrancy when they had nowhere else but the sidewalk to go to sit, lie, or sleep. The court also upbraided Los Angeles for having one of the most restrictive municipal laws regulating public spaces in the country.
Politically, though, Sobel has been spectacularly unsuccessful. Antonio Villaraigosa may call himself a progressive Democrat, but he has been more aggressive in chasing homeless people off the streets than any mayor in memory. He doesn’t get any grief for that from the L.A. Times, which is a black mark against both of them. A city that arrests the blind for jaywalking needs to ask itself just what sort of city it has become.
Published: 11/29/2007
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