Even Hobos Have Property Rights, ACLU Tells Santa Ana

The American Civil Liberties Union, in a letter to Santa Ana Mayor Dan Young, threatened Thursday to take legal action if the city continues to throw away property left by homeless people in city parks and areas around Civic Center.

“Such a seizure of property violates not only common decency but amounts to a deprivation of property without due process of law,” ACLU lawyer Rebecca Jurado wrote. “Given the hardships caused by such cleanups, we ask that this policy be stopped.”

City officials contend that the property is abandoned and not valuable. But Jurado said that in some cases people had been guarding their things and that bed rolls, clothes, food, identification papers and medicine had been confiscated.

Deputy City Manager Jan Perkins said the city began making sweeps of parks a few weeks ago after business owners and residents complained that vagrants were damaging their businesses and the parks.

“We have trash, we have litter, we have people urinating and defecating in the park,” Perkins said. “It’s our responsibility to keep the parks clean so they can be enjoyed by the general public.”

Perkins said she did not know of any cases in which city employees had taken people’s belongings when the owners were present.

‘Owner Can Pick It Up’

“If there is something that is obviously valuable--radios, watches, medicine--that is in plain sight, then the owner can pick it up at the Police Department,” she said Thursday.

But Pat Ford, a 45-year-old homeless man who left his belongings near Civic Center, said park workers took all of his things, including his medicine, on June 21. Ford said the worker would not let him retrieve his belongings.

“He was going through the bushes throwing everything out on the grass,” Ford said, “then loading it on the truck. I lost my bed roll and a flight bag of clean things.

“You can’t go looking for work looking like a slob. . . . Now I’m down to what I have on.”

Johannes Vandervalk, an investigator for the ACLU, said Ford later retrieved his medicine, with the help of a California Highway Patrol officer who flagged down the city parks truck.

Santa Ana City Atty. Edward J. Cooper said his office prepared a legal opinion concluding that the city may legally discard items from the park if workers think they are trash.

“In my experience, it seems that some of those things that are called sleeping bags are nothing more than rags,” he said Thursday. “I told them that if it’s identifiable property that appears to be other than litter, then it ought to be stored.

“If there was identification in them, then they should be retained and at least the person should be allowed to pick them up.”

Legal issues involving confiscation of homeless people’s belongings have yet to be tested. Prof. Jesse Dukeminier, a property-law specialist from UCLA, said he believes that the city is within its legal rights to take property left in public parks but that the city could not destroy the property.

Value Called Irrelevant

Noting that “one man’s trash is another man’s bed roll,” Dukeminier said that from a legal point of view, it is irrelevant how valuable the property is.

“If the city could show with a straight face that they really believed that it was abandoned property and that its owners would never come back and claim it, then they can take it away and destroy it,” he said.

A woman who works in a county building next to a park said she saw city workers confiscating articles from a shopping cart June 21. It was clear to her, she said, that the things belonged to people.

“They have everything in neat little bags in a shopping cart,” she said. “They’re usually wrapped up in something like a shoebox. . . . They wrap them like they’re being waterproofed, and then they put all of these little bundles in a shopping cart, and the shopping cart has a string around it holding it all in.”

Norman Bell, 52, a homeless man who stays in the grassy areas around Civic Center when he can’t find day labor, said some of his food was taken in the June 21 sweep.

“If you went home tonight and everything you owned was gone, what would you feel?” he asked. “The little things we own, we like to keep them.”

Holding out a can of Tom Thumb beef stew, he added, “that’s the bridge between us and survival.”