Policing Skid Row
[Guest post by Jack Dunphy]
Back in April 2006 I wrote “The Constitutional Right to Be a Bum” for National Review Online. In it I described the dystopian conditions on display in the Skid Row section of downtown Los Angeles. I received quite a bit of angry email from people who identified themselves as “advocates for the homeless” and what have you, all of whom excoriated me for daring to suggest that the laws of the state of California be enforced on Skid Row as they would be anywhere else in Los Angeles.
The LAPD did indeed step up enforcement on Skid Row, lowering crime and bringing a sense of order to the area even as howls of protest came up from the same crowd who so vigorously objected to my column. At the City Journal website, Heather Mac Donald has described the LAPD’s efforts in the area and the disingenuous response to it from the so-called homeless advocates. Mac Donald writes:
For 25 years, Skid Row constituted a real-world experiment in the application of homeless-advocate ideology. The squalor that engulfed the 50-block district just east of downtown Los Angeles was the direct outgrowth of advocates’ claims that the homeless should be exempt from the rules of ordinary society. The result was not a reign of peace and love among society’s underdogs, but rather brutal predation and depravity. Occupants of the filthy tents and lean-tos that covered every inch of sidewalk in the area pimped each other out and stole from, stabbed, and occasionally killed one another. Gangs and pushers from South Central and East Los Angeles operated with impunity under cover of the chaos that reigned on the streets . . .
In 2006, Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton announced a full-scale attack on Skid Row anarchy. His Safer City Initiative (SCI) would be a demonstration project, he said, for Broken Windows theory, which holds that tolerance for low-level forms of crime and disorder allows more serious crime to fester. When the police started enforcing jaywalking, public urination, and public camping laws, thousands of warrant absconders and violent parolees on the lam lost their refuge. Order gradually returned to the streets.
Read the whole thing here.
–Jack Dunphy
Some of the homeless are helpless. This subset has special needs due to an array of mental and or physical disorders.
These people become prey.
The newly homeless are also preyed upon.
You can watch this happen like a time lapse photo.
Female shows up fairly clean in what used to be nice clothes with a bag or cart of all she has left in life.
Then you see her with a black eye, dirty, missing her good shoes and clothes wearing whatever.
She’s been beaten and robbed of her good stuff and probably raped. She has to hook up with protection quick. That’ll cost her… she’ll be pimped out for whatever. If she was not addicted to drugs and alcohol before, she is now to deal with the awful world she’s tumbled into.
Same goes for the new guys or the older ones.
I met an older guy with no money, a mental disability that required medication who was out on the streets who was pretty upset. His sister had come into town and bought him new tennis shoes, new jeans and a new sweatshirt and had insisted he change into it all and throw the old stuff away… he stood out like a sore thumb and was upset because he knew he was going to get his ass kicked and jacked for his shoes and sweatshirt before the night was over.
For whatever reason a lot of the homeless advocates I meet do not want to catergorize some of the homeless as predators and see everyone down there as innocents trapped by circumstances beyond their control.
The police can’t fix the problem, but they can provide protection from predators and momentum.
Momentum is way underrated. “Move it along” towards a shelter or up out of here at least. Move away from and seperate from the addicts, the pimps, the violent psychotics, the dealers.
The most violent places I’ve ever been was alone in hobo jungles. The predators in those areas hit hard first and ask questions later. There is always a sucker punch coming, or they just open the party with a chunk of wood, a rock, or rebar.
One was “owned” by some idiot native Americans up in the Seattle underground area when I got off a freight I’d hopped. Law of the f******* jungle… way worse than jail. I had to fight my way out and was lucky they were too drunk to get organized.
Same thing when I had to exit early up in west Oakland. Walking through the streets next to the projects that are tucked in along the bend of the freeway and rail yard there; getting punched because I wouldn’t pay the “rent” for walking through their neighborhood. They tore off my shoes looking for hidden cash, emptied my pack all over the street and tried to beat the rest of the crap out of me for being ” a white boy with no money”. (I had some cash hidden in my old, filthy pack, but the dumbasses didn’t find it) A good man shamed them away, helped me gather what was left of my stuff and walked me through the streets like a guardian angel to the far side of the rail yard where I could hop another freight to the Roseville hump yard where I could get my own box car go east across Salt Lake and over Promotory point to Wyoming, heal up a bit out in the Wind River range
anyway… wandering memories aside…
Lawless environments breed crime and despair and need more police, not less.
Comment by SteveG — 9/29/2009 @ 5:42 am
Lots of places in Los Angeles smell like urine still though still. I hate that. They build these tunnel thingers under the freeways. You’re not supposed to use them for real … the other day I had to stop these daffy Eurotourists from wandering into one. Maybe they’re used to urine stench or something … but me I can’t get within 30 feet of those tunnels sometimes without wanting to retch. Then they clean them and they stink like some sort of stench-killing chemical for awhile.
Comment by happyfeet — 9/29/2009 @ 6:22 am
If they are from Paris they certainly are used to it.
Comment by Old Coot — 9/29/2009 @ 6:31 am
As a former business owner in the South Bronx I have had years of experience with the Homeless. A few blocks from my business was a ” Box City” of homeless living on the grounds of a brickyard. GThe owner would pay them to clean cement off used bricks. I also would employ them in various odd jobs but none of them were reliable. Almost every single one of them was a male substance abuser. I remember one young man they called HERCULES who I tried to help. He was incredibly strong but hooked on crack. I don’t think he was 23 yet but he was a very likeable fellow. One evening in the produce market a few of my men called in sick and I was desparate for help so I asked Herc if he wanted to work. He agreed and said he would return after bathing at a fire hydrant and getting something clean to wear. Herc never returned and later I found out that he broke into a vehicle to steal the clean pants. I am not sure what can be done with these folks. They can be in prison for year and within days of release they return to crack.
Comment by Dennis D — 9/29/2009 @ 7:29 am
I used to take my students to the skid row area in their first year of medical school. For years, we had a guide who had lived on the streets for ten years. He had been a crack addict and he showed us his spot on the sidewalk. There is a long mural and he lived under the painting of Florence Griffith Joyner (Who lived in Mission Viejo). He said he would get high and lie there and watch her run. He had been clean for years but still knew most of the people there. One was a woman midget who he said had once been in the Roller Derby.
Anyway, we met some real advocates, the ones who do something about it instead of talk and showboat. We would always go to the Downtown Drop-in Center, which was new then. The manager told us that 60% of the homeless are mentally ill and 60 % are addicts. Half of each group is both. The center was staffed by former clients who were getting themselves clean and lived in local SRO hotels. We could walk outside and see the drug dealers working the street but the video cameras kept them outside the center where clients could shower and launder clothes and sleep in a bed for 8 hours. There was a waiting list for the beds.
We also visited the Midnight Mission, another no nonsense place which locked the doors at 7 PM. The men could come and go all day but after 7 they could only go out, not come in until morning. Our guide was scheduled to speak one night for cocaine anonymous. The room was packed; all black men. He was a spellbinding speaker. We were the only whites around.
There are places that try with these folks but the homeless problem exploded with the closing of the state mental hospitals in the 1960s and, until the public attitude about mental illness changes again, nothing can be done. The jails fill with people who should be in mental illness facilities.
I took the students there to show them where a lot of their patients came from and how foolish it is to prescribe a medicine that requires refrigeration to someone who lives in a refrigerator box, or a medicine to be taken every six hours to someone who does not own a clock.
There are a lot of misconceptions. One shelter manager told us that the homeless clients he saw could eat six hot meals a day if they chose to. Nobody starves. They can also keep appointments. There is a medical clinic in a motor home that makes the rounds of the shelters on a schedule. Homeless shelter residents, who are those with less pathology and better thinking, can have a blood test drawn one week and get results the next week. Most of them show up for the results.
This is a problem that can be largely solved but it will take a change in public opinion. So far, that seems unlikely. We had one patient with badly ulcerated feet who lived on the sidewalk in front of a church in Pasadena. One of the parishioners, known to one of my students, had offered to put him in a hotel room at his expense to get him off the street. The patient declined saying he was waiting for an apartment. We saw him in the County Hospital a few weeks later, where I heard the story. He was probably going to lose his foot.
Comment by MIke K — 9/29/2009 @ 9:03 am
It is not going to take a change in public opinion, Mike K., but in constitutional law. The state mental hospitals largely lost their ability to compel treatment due to ACLU “victories” that create high standards. Those cases can’t merely be overturned by public opinion nor even legislation.
Comment by SPQR — 9/29/2009 @ 8:15 pm
Yes, there are many misconceptions. Anecdotally, the artists who are encouraged to buy lofts down there are aligned with the LAPD against advocates. They know the true score down there. A student friend of mine wrote a good paper on the problem, and the do-gooder advocates are a big part of it.
My question is, who is advocating that these criminal or mentally ill or drug-addicted persons should be exempt from the laws of society? Is this part of some Cloward-Piven strategy?
Comment by Patricia — 9/29/2009 @ 8:23 pm
In the late ’80′s I worked with homeless families at one of the few LA shelters that would take them in. I started out believing that most of the families were different from the chronically mentally ill and drug addicted single homeless men, that they were poor people that had been pushed into homelessness by the gentrification of their buildings and neighborhoods by Reaganomics. I was soon to change my naive attitude. All, I repeat, all of these homeless families had lost their housing due to the parents spending the rent money on crack (including the photogenic family in a popular coffee table book of artistic photographs of the homeless). Shelter staff did not make this public as it would have endangered our funding base.
At least we had a zero tolerance policy regarding crime and drug use in the shelter.
The children were the ones who suffered from their parents addictions and the willfull blindness of the staff.
Comment by BigGato — 10/14/2009 @ 8:31 pm