Media's Response To ACLU's Statement On Homelessness

A lot of buzz today, on the ACLU's statement on homelessness. Credit goes to the ACLU for their willingness to promote solutions...

Here is a news account:

Civil rights leaders, business interests and the city have a new plan for cleaning up Skid Row that involves a crackdown on crime without sweeping homeless people off the streets.

At its heart is the theory that the city must reduce crime on Skid Row before it can tackle the underlying social and medical causes of homelessness downtown.

Dozens of additional police officers would be assigned to patrol the roughly 50-block Skid Row area under the plan, with an emphasis on experienced beat officers rather than rookies. More undercover officers also would be assigned to target drug dealers, prostitutes and other criminals.

For now, the area's estimated 8,000 to 10,000 homeless would be allowed to remain.

Los Angeles Police currently allow homeless people to set up street dwellings of cardboard boxes and tents as long as they remove them by 6 a.m. That stretch of downtown has several homeless shelters and low-rent hotels, but it also has a growing community small stores.

Downtown business owners had favored aggressive sweeps to remove the homeless, but they now endorse the plan proposed by criminologist George Kelling and endorsed by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Police Chief William J. Bratton is still considering Kelling's plan, as well as a more aggressive sweeps to move homeless off the streets.

"We've come to the sad conclusion that most of it is a drug problem," Central City Association President Carol Schatz told the Los Angeles Times. "You may be getting a huge number of people off the street by simply enforcing the law."

The ACLU of Southern California, which has been critical of aggressive police sweeps of Skid Row, also agrees with the Kelling approach.

Ramona Ripston, the organization's executive director, said she believes that Skid Row needs more police.

"Sometimes you reach a moment where we have to do something," Ripston said. "We can't let that continue to go on down there. ... One of the steps we need to take is to try to purge that neighborhood of the criminal element."

ACLU of Southern California’s Official Statement On Homelessness

Ramona Ripston, the CEO of the ACLU of SoCal sent me their official statement on homelessness in Southern California. Here is the full statement.

Here are some of the statements:

• Police must enforce the law and good police work is necessary to protect people from crime that exists in areas like Skid Row.

• Law enforcement must respect constitutional rights.

• The jails should not be used as a warehouse for homeless people.
  

Interestingly, the statement also promotes “increasing well-trained police patrols in areas like Skid Row.”

When Elephants Fight…

Years ago, I was in Africa on a research trip. (I was in my early twenties.) One of the elders of a village told me an old saying that I will never forget, “When elephants fight, the grass gets trampled.” What he meant was that when powerful political leaders fight among themselves, the little people below get trampled.

The recent failure to get the State Infrastructure Bond placed on the June ballot is sadly an appropriate example of this old African saying. (Here's what Housing California had to say about it.)

While our political leaders in Sacramento sat in meeting rooms arguing over the details, and ultimately decided not to put this bond forward, the poor and the homeless of our state continue to suffer without affordable housing and services.

The little people suffer.

(And people wonder why we aren’t solving homelessness…)

First Media Outlet Reports On L.A.’s Ten Year Plan

Although L.A.’s plan will not be publicly unveiled until early April, the Santa Monica LookOut was able to see a draft copy of the plan, and reported on it today.

Although the plan was supposed to be announced at a press conference on March 30th, I was told yesterday that the press conference has been delayed until April 6th, do to a scheduling problem with Phillip Mangano, the Executive Director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, who wanted to be there.

The LookOut claims that the City of Santa Monica’s approach to chronic homelessness will be used in downtown Los Angeles’s Skid Row area. It would be interesting to see if stakeholders in downtown L.A. agree with that.

The paper, however, accurately reports on the debate panel members had on whether the plan should promote 11,500 new affordable housing units or 50,000 new units.

Bloggers Weigh In On Skid Row Solutions

Why not bloggers taking a swing at developing a Skid Row homeless plan? Everyone else has… the LA Times, political offices, business associations, and law enforcement…

So LAvoice.org describes an interesting blog interaction between to downtown bloggers who provide two different perspectives on Skid row.

At least people are talking about the crisis of homelessness. Sooner or later, however, we need move from talk to action…

College Paper Comments On Homeless Beatings By Youth

The UC San Diego paper comments on the alarming rate of teenagers beating up homeless people in America. They blame it on an indifferent attitude instilled in today’s youth, as well as the fault of the movie “Bumfights.”

Whatever the case, the recent beatings of homeless people by youth in the last year expose a character flaw in our society. It’s great that a university paper would inform their youth-oriented readers of this flaw.

In fact, the paper goes on to encourage its students to take “public service” courses on community and education as a positive response to the recent beatings.

Here’s how they end the article: “In affluent La Jolla, it is easy to lose oneself to the impersonal luster of business complexes and the core commercialism of nearby malls. But UCSD students need to remain alert to the plight of those people outside the bubble of campus.”

Ten Year Plans? “The Plan To Nowhere?”

There was an interesting article in the Seattle Weekly last week that critiques the Bush’s Administration’s mandate for cities to develop Ten Year Plans To End Homelessness. (Here is the article, “The Plan To Nowhere.”)

The main criticism is that the federal government is mandating cities to develop plans to end homelessness (or else no more HUD funding!), and yet the feds are also reducing federal funds toward homeless housing and services.

They call the Ten Year Plans and the Housing First (that most cities are adopting) movement as “the largest experiment to end homelessness since the latest wave of homeless hit America’s streets in the mid-1980’s.” They are pushing putting homeless people in permanent supportive housing rather than spending exorbitant amounts of money taking care of homeless people in emergency rooms and jail.

The article continues to say that the “talk” goes on while the federal government cut $3 billion from Medicaid (healthcare for the homeless), and $600 million in federal housing dollars.