Mayor, Businesses and ACLU Are in Same Camp on Skid Row

Leaders from the ACLU and downtown business interests have joined Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa in backing a cleanup plan for skid row that involves cracking down on crime but not sweeping up homeless people from their tent cities.

The consensus gives a decisive boost to the plan and comes after years of debate and competing visions about how Los Angeles should tackle crime and blight in skid row.

It also marks the first time two of the main adversaries in the skid row debate -- downtown business and civil libertarians -- have agreed on an approach.

The united front arrives at a key moment, amid a new push by state and local officials to improve conditions in a district that has the largest homeless population in the Western United States. State legislators are considering several bills to address skid row’s ills, including the so-called dumping of criminals and patients in the area.

The various parties are lined up behind a plan put forward by criminologist George Kelling, who has called for the LAPD to crack down on the drug dealers, prostitutes and other criminals on skid row.

His strategy would put dozens more officers on the streets of skid row, with an emphasis on experienced beat cops rather than rookies. In addition to the heavier uniformed police presence, there would be more undercover officers assigned to target the area’s drug bazaars.

But the plan would leave in place for now the homeless encampments that stand near the increasingly gentrifying sections of downtown where historic buildings have been converted into upscale lofts and condos.

Police Chief William J. Bratton is considering Kelling’s plan as well as a second, more aggressive, proposal that calls for sweeps designed to move homeless people from the streets. Bratton is expected to make a decision in the next few weeks after consulting with various officials including Villaraigosa.

Downtown business interests, traditionally the biggest advocates for a “take back the streets” approach to cleaning up the area, say they support Kelling’s plan even if it would allow homeless people to remain in their tents for now.

“We’ve come to the sad conclusion that most of it is a drug problem,” Central City Assn. President Carol Schatz said. “You may be getting a huge number of people off the street by simply enforcing the law.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, which has long criticized the Los Angeles Police Department for being too aggressive in its actions on skid row, has come to a similar conclusion.

Ramona Ripston, the organization’s executive director, said she has in recent months gone on police ride-alongs, met with homeless services providers and realized that above all else, skid row needs more police.

“Sometimes,” said Ripston, “you reach a moment where we have to do something. 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.”

The ACLU’s sign-on is considered particularly significant because the group has successfully blocked in court several previous efforts by the city to clean up skid row, including Bratton’s original 2002 campaign.

But even with Ripston and Schatz as backers, the Kelling plan has an even bigger advocate: the mayor.

Villaraigosa says the city has tried blanket sweeps before -- and then became ensnarled in the courts. Any plan relying on sweeps to rid the area of tent and box cities, like the one proposed last week by LAPD Assistant Chief George Gascon, is doomed to failure, the mayor said.

“As far as I’m concerned, there’s only one option on the table: the George Kelling model,” Villaraigosa said. “We’re committed to addressing the causes of crime.”

Kelling argues that the department must reduce crime before the city can tackle the underlying social and medical causes of homelessness downtown. Adding officers in skid row would be similar to the “flood the zone” technique the LAPD has used -- with some success -- in reducing crime in parts of South Los Angeles.

The plan, however, would not immediately make a dent in the thousands of homeless people who camp on the streets of skid row nightly. Current LAPD policy allows homeless people to set up tents and cardboard box dwellings as long as they remove them by 6 a.m.

By contrast, Gascon has proposed to Bratton a more aggressive plan that would involve regular sweeps of areas where thousands of homeless people set up nightly tent and cardboard cities. Gascon suggests that police -- with help from service providers and prosecutors -- go through the tent cities, identify who is there and deal with them appropriately. Those suspected of crimes would be arrested, those with drug problems would be offered treatment and others would be given shelter beds.

Among downtown’s business interests, officials said they would like eventually to see an end to the tent camps. But several downtown leaders have expressed concern that there are now not enough shelters to house the homeless people who would be swept up, making it likely that they would just move to different parts of downtown.

They are not the only ones trying to find common ground.

Ripston joined the city’s homeless commission last year and said that has helped her better understand the problem.

While saying that she believes “the antagonism between the ACLU and the LAPD is overplayed,” she also said that having more police officers would offer a temporary fix.

“We have to come up with some short-term remedies,” Ripston said, “even though they are not going to solve the problem.”

Indeed, even if the LAPD steps up patrols and targets drug dealers, officials agree that the underlying problems won’t change without more money for shelter space, long-term housing and treatment for drug addicts and the mentally ill. As the residential population downtown continues to grow -- it’s currently at about 24,000 and is expected to double by 2015 -- they say the political will for fixing downtown’s ills is strong. (There are an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 homeless people downtown).

Villaraigosa is spearheading a $50-million effort to build thousands of heavily subsidized apartments for the most intransigent street people, placing them in buildings that will also offer medical care, counseling and job training.

Officials hope the money will come from a state housing bond measure being considered in Sacramento. Los Angeles County has already received $70 million to help thousands of mentally ill and homeless people. Those funds came from the voter-approved Proposition 63, the Mental Health Services Act.

Becky Dennison, co-director of the Los Angeles Community Action Network, an advocacy group for the homeless that has often been at odds with the business community, now finds herself on the same side as her sometime adversaries.

She said her organization agrees with Bratton that police cannot solve skid row’s problems alone. “Between Kelling and Gascon, we choose Kelling,” Dennison said. “But it doesn’t work without all the other stuff happening at the same time.”