L.B. Studies Camping Ban on Homeless
Top city officials are considering a ban on sleeping out-of-doors at night that would force homeless people from parks, beaches and private lots not equipped for camping.
The draft of an ordinance that would prohibit sleeping outside of dwellings between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. has been forwarded by Police Chief Charles B. Ussery to City Manager John Dever, Police Department spokesmen said.
It has not been decided whether the department will submit the draft to the City Council for approval, they said.
In other cities, anti-camping prohibitions, aimed at transients and tourists, have raised questions about the constitutional rights of the homeless that are now being argued in court.
Those laws have also caused disputes among public officials in cities such as Santa Monica, where the city attorney has refused to prosecute violators, and New Orleans, where a new administration repealed a ban on outdoor sleeping in April.
And, even as Long Beach officials are pondering an ordinance, this city has been targeted for special attention by a national advocacy group for the homeless.
Alerted to the draft ordinance by an article in a local business publication, Mitch Snyder of the Washington-based Community for Creative Non-Violence, said both Long Beach and Philadelphia would draw protest demonstrations if they pass anti-camping laws now being considered.
A massive demonstration to begin Sept. 1 is already being organized for Santa Barbara, a pioneer of such legislation, Snyder said.
“When we get done in Santa Barbara, we’re going to make it clear to Long Beach and any other city that we’re not going to let these statutes stand anywhere in America,” Snyder said. “The message is, ‘Don’t try it because we’ll make you repeal it.’ ”
Anti-camping laws are “mean-spirited and irrational, whose sole purpose is to drive homeless people out of town,” he said.
Long Beach police officials and at least one group of local downtown businessmen see things differently. They say that the draft legislation would target vagrants who have long been a problem downtown and elsewhere in the city.
“The main problem both day and night is that these people give the perception that the downtown is untidy, and that people have a reason to fear them because of the way they look. And they’re always bothering people panhandling,” said Deputy Chief Gene Brizzolara, head of the Patrol Bureau and the official who recommended drafting an ordinance to limit sleeping out-of-doors.
“When you say homeless, everybody’s heart kind of opens up,” Brizzolara said. “But there are two categories of homeless. . . . There are people out there actually looking to find themselves a home and employment and to get themselves on their feet, and there are those who are content in remaining homeless. . . . We call (them) environmental criminals.”
The second group, the vagrants, would be one on which police officers would focus their attention, he said. “We’re not particularly looking for picking up homeless families sleeping in their cars,” though that activity would be illegal under the new law, he said. “We’re trying to target those vagrants who might use your car to sleep overnight.”
The ordinance would also be used to identify those who need a place to stay or medical attention, he said. “That’s our No. 1 priority, to get them cared for,” he said. “A lot of times we find them shelter, even in our own jail. We book them and clean them up and feed them.”
On other occasions, the homeless are taken directly to one of three Long Beach shelters that provide overnight accommodations, he said.
But those three facilities--Lydia House for women and children, Samaritan House for single men and the Long Beach Family Shelter--have only 178 beds among them. That falls far short of the need, Brizzolara said. Although there are no statistics on Long Beach’s homeless, government agencies have estimated Los Angeles County’s homeless at 34,000.
Brizzolara allowed that, ultimately, the law’s basic message to homeless in Long Beach would be to move on to another city.
Downtown Long Beach Associates, a 1,400-member business group, endorsed that message last month in the business publication Seabreeze with an article entitled “Transients, keep traveling says DLBA.” The article said the Police Department’s draft ordinance would be “a giant step forward.” And it said its anti-crime Business Watch Committee would not rest until “all transients are removed from the Downtown and put in jail or an institution where they will be cared for.”
Vito Romans, president of the organization, said there are actually very few transients downtown, and they are responsible for little crime.
“But if there is even one, he drives away business. One person sitting on a bench is seen by a hundred people. And once in a while, you get a person released from an institution and he yells. That makes an indelible impression on a person, and pretty soon there’s a slight exaggeration and then (people say) that person pulled a knife.”
Wayne Teuerle, founder of the Long Beach Rescue Mission 14 years ago and operator of Samaritan House and Lydia House, agrees with Romans that the number of transients in downtown Long Beach has been exaggerated. “You’re looking at maybe 20 or 25 highly visible people downtown. You see them over and over,” he said.
Thousands of homeless come to Long Beach each year, Teuerle said, but most stay for just a short time. The mission, with 133 beds in two facilities, housed 25,000 people in the last year, he said. It averages about 80 people a night, he said, and is rarely full.
“You hear there are all these thousands and thousands of people on the streets. . . . but in Long Beach we have sufficient shelter programs to care for these people. We haven’t had to turn anybody down.” Leah Koortbojian, a board member for the Long Beach Family Shelter, noted that other cities have taken what she called a more enlightened approach in responding to homeless people. In Los Angeles, for example, a coalition of influential business, civic and religious leaders announced two weeks ago a major fund-raising effort to help the homeless, she said.
City Manager Dever was unavailable for comment late last week, but Brizzolara said the draft ordinance had been sent to the city manager several weeks ago. If city officials finally send the ordinance to the City Council--and Deputy Police Chief William Ellis said that would not happen for at least two months--they will undoubtedly cite Santa Barbara’s experience with a similar ordinance.
Long Beach’s draft ordinance is modeled “very, very closely” after Santa Barbara’s because it has so far withstood constitutional challenges, said Long Beach Deputy City Atty. Brad Andrews.
At one point, that ordinance was struck down by a Santa Barbara Municipal judge as unconstitutionally vague, but it was reinstated last fall by an appellate panel of the Santa Barbara Superior Court.
Also, the U. S. Supreme Court in April refused to hear pretrial arguments by attorneys for the homeless who said the Santa Barbara ordinance denied the “basic human necessity” of sleep, violated their clients’ constitutional right to travel and to equal protection under the law.
The defendants in that test case have now been convicted and sentenced, and the case is working its way back to the Supreme Court.
Steven A. Amerikaner, city attorney for Santa Barbara, said his city’s anti-camping ordinance will be upheld because the U.S. Supreme Court in 1984 ruled for the government in a similar case involving campers near the White House. Opposing attorneys, however, argue that the 1984 case was not “on point” and sets no precedent.
Amerikaner said that, despite negative publicity, he is convinced that the Santa Barbara ordinance has been successful because it “has discouraged people from using our parks and beaches as a campground.” The ordinance carries progressive fines of $100, $200 and $250, though Amerikaner said his office routinely recommends a $25 fine that is suspended.
The Santa Barbara ordinance was drafted in 1979 primarily to keep tourists from camping on the beach, which was both unsanitary and unsafe, Amerikaner said.
Amerikaner said that not much police and court time is spent prosecuting anti-camping cases. But Dennis Flanagan of the Legal Defense Center of Santa Barbara said that over a two-year period ending early this year, 1,255 citations were issued.
“This is consuming police, court and everyone else’s time simply because people need to sleep somewhere,” Flanagan said.
He is following the Long Beach draft ordinance closely, Flanagan said, because it is a good example of what he has argued in appellate briefs: “that this is a contagion, it keeps spreading . . . (and soon) there will be a whole corridor where homeless people are not welcome.”
