Raids Meant to Rid Skid Row of Its Homeless Encampments
Los Angeles city officials said Wednesday that a series of Skid Row raids, initially described as a crime sweep, are, in fact, designed to rid the area of its numerous makeshift encampments of homeless people.
When the sweep began Tuesday, coordinators said it was aimed at eliminating crime, especially drug trafficking. But Wednesday, as police and sanitation workers bore down on a homeless camp not known for criminal activity, the operation appeared to take on a new purpose.
Los Angeles Deputy Mayor Grace Davis confirmed Wednesday night that the sweep, expected to focus on 10 homeless camps during the next two months, is meant to dismantle the makeshift settlements and help their inhabitants relocate in nearby shelters.
But Davis said the mayor’s office was not involved in planning the raids, and that she was concerned that efforts to relocate people driven from the camps had not been very successful.
Indeed, by Wednesday afternoon several transients rousted from one camp had returned.
The raids have provoked the ire of several social service providers, although they have involved no arrests. They contend that the sweep is pointless and ill-timed, coinciding, they say, with a diminishing supply of affordable Skid Row hotel rooms.
“I’m dismayed they would go like this. . . . It’s one thing to say we want to get rid of drugs, but it’s not a crime sweep. It’s just a sweep,” said John Dillon, director of the Chrysalis Center, a self-help agency.
Moreover, some Skid Row workers see the raids, which were prompted by the complaints of a local business association, as an opening salvo in a fight over neighborhood land use that pits commercial interests against the indigent and those who take care of them.
The Skid Row sweep began Tuesday morning as squad cars and sanitation trucks surrounded a small enclave at 6th Street and Stanford Avenue. It resumed Wednesday, targeting two locations, including a large camp on South Towne Avenue that is regarded as one of Skid Row’s more law-abiding settlements.
“It’s not a prominent crime location . . . but it had other problems, such as health violations, the inordinate number of people . . .,” said Los Angeles Police Lt. Orley Barton, who is coordinating the sweep. “We’re trying to clean up the community. This is not a police raid.”
“It is possible that the City of Los Angeles is saying you cannot set up camps within the 50-block area known as Skid Row,” said James Wood, chairman of the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency, which is responsible for providing low-cost housing in the area as well as protecting the interests of local businesses.
Wood drew a distinction between dismantling the camps and prohibiting people from sleeping on the streets.
“The camping aspect is what we are trying to get at, the jumble of furniture on the street, the open fires. But no one is telling people they can’t sleep on the streets,” he said.
Wood said the impetus for the sweep came from Central City East, a business group representing about 40 companies on Skid Row that for two years have been urging City Hall to take more aggressive action against crime and to clean up the area.
The group has been in close touch with the city councilman for the area, Gilbert Lindsay, and representatives met last month with Mayor Tom Bradley.
The director of Central City East, Lauri Flack, said the sweep grew out of several meetings with police, fire and sanitation officials, along with social service providers and members of the homeless community.
Flack said the purpose of the sweep is to serve notice on criminals who work out of the camps and to clean up unsanitary conditions. But she stressed that social workers are present during the raids.
As the same time, Flack acknowledged that Central City East is not receptive to the creation of new shelters in the area of Skid Row, between San Pedro and Alameda and 3rd and 7th streets, where most of members of the association are located.
The group is urging the city to adopt a community plan for the area that would make it difficult to build any more low-cost residential hotels of the kind that currently house most of Skid Row’s 11,000 to 12,000 residents.
Several social service workers disputed Flack’s claim that the sweep is supported by a broad coalition of local interests.
Dissenters included Dillon, Jill Halverson, director of the Downtown Women’s Center, and Alice Callaghan, director of La Familias del Pueblo, a day center for Skid Row families.
“We knew it (the sweep) was in the planning. But we didn’t want to go to the meetings because we suspected we would then be characterized as part of some pro-sweep consensus,” Callaghan said.
However, the task force of public agencies and community groups that supported the crime sweep included Adam Bennion, 37, leader of the camp on Towne Avenue between 4th and 5th streets, who said he was “dumbfounded” when the city cars and trucks descended Wednesday morning, adding: “I was misled.”
“They said let’s get drugs off the street, and I supported that,” Bennion said as about 40 of the regular dwellers brought their tents and mattresses back to the block in the afternoon. “But that isn’t what this is about. They’ve proved that today.”
Bennion’s encampment is different from others in the area, having two portable toilets, which the street inhabitants are assessed $2 a week to maintain. People are also assigned work details for security, street sweeping and cooking, Bennion said, and the group even has its own single-sheet newspaper, called “Love.”
The owner of a rice cake and fortune cookie factory taking up a large portion of the block, however, had a less positive view of the group.
“We couldn’t open the back door, it was so smelly,” said Tak Hamano of Umeya Rice Cake Co. “It got so crowded. . . . I was gritting my teeth wondering what would happen, but the city never did anything until now.”
He has been concerned for his employees’ safety, he added, since a female worker was recently mugged.
The third raid was conducted Wednesday afternoon on San Julian Place between 5th and 6th streets, not far from the Russ Hotel. The block has a reputation for drug dealing, Barton said, but no arrests were made.
