Opinion: In today’s pages: Stuck on skid row
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Philip F. Mangano and Gary Blasi argue that money spend dealing with homelessness in L.A. could be better spent combating it:
When we add up the arrests, incarcerations, emergency medical care and other crisis interventions, the true costs of chronic homelessness are staggering: $35,000 to $150,000 per person per year. By contrast, the annual cost of supportive housing for a person with serious mental illness or addiction disease is between $13,000 and $25,000. And once stabilized, many can qualify for federal disability and health insurance or get jobs that will further reduce local costs.Yet Los Angeles seems stuck maintaining the expensive and ultimately unproductive policies of the past. On skid row, for instance, the Los Angeles Police Department deployed 50 additional officers and also expanded its drug enforcement effort. In the first year of that initiative, the LAPD issued about 12,000 citations for minor offenses and made about 9,000 arrests -- in an area with a population of about 12,000, about 5,000 of whom are homeless.
Columnist Gregory Rodriguez explores America’s reliance on religion during a disaster and dueling tendency toward more worldly finger-pointing in the aftermath. UC Davis professor emerita Sandra M. Gilbert muses over the meaning behind Halloween and other fall celebrations involving the dead.
The editorial board worries that the CIA’s inspection of its own inspector general’s office ‘has created the impression that a watchdog is being muzzled.’ It gives a thumbs-up for filmmaker Ed Burns’ decision to distribute his new movie through iTunes, and laments Congress’s well-meaning but ineffective move to expand the definition of hate crimes to cover sexual orientation.
Readers react to Rosa Brooks’ column regarding the White House’s sanity. Ronald Jones counters, ‘Rosa Brooks implies that the Bush administration and its leaders are the psychotics, but are they any crazier than those she would conciliate with?’