City to Keep Destroying Property : Mayor Says Santa Ana Won’t Spare Homeless

Santa Ana Mayor Dan Young on Friday vowed that the city would continue destroying the property of homeless people left in city parks and lawns near the Civic Center, rejecting claims by the American Civil Liberties Union that doing so is illegal.

The mayor also suggested that the ACLU start offering shelter to the homeless instead of complaining about their mistreatment.

“If they are so concerned about vagrants, then each one of them in the office ought to take two or three of the vagrants home with them, and that would solve the problem,” Young said. Asked whether he would be willing to take a transient home himself, the mayor said only, “I’m not the ACLU.”

For the past several weeks, Santa Ana park workers have been throwing away homeless people’s belongings found in city parks and on lawns near the Civic Center, actions that city officials said were in response to complaints from residents and business owners about transients in the downtown area. City officials said the complaints ranged from harassment to panhandling and vandalism by the homeless.

On Thursday, the ACLU protested the city’s action in a letter to the mayor. The letter said: “Such a seizure of property violates not only common decency, but amounts to a deprivation of property without due process of law.”

The letter criticized the city for allowing workers to take property from the homeless and for destroying the property instead of taking it to a place where it could be reclaimed. City officials have said that workers only take property that clearly has been abandoned. However, the homeless contend the property hasn’t been abandoned, saying they hide their belongings so they don’t have to carry them when they seek work.

Santa Ana’s sweeps are not unique. In Los Angeles last week, police and cleaning crews carted off transients’ clothes, bedrolls and other belongings from two small camps near City Hall, prompting a wave of protests from the homeless. In the city of Orange, authorities say police have been throwing away homeless people’s belongings for more than a year at one park frequented by transients.

In response to Young’s suggestion that the ACLU house the homeless, Rebecca Jurado, a staff attorney for the ACLU in Orange County, said it should be everyone’s responsibility to care for the homeless.

“I think the city should be concerned about the residents in its boundaries,” she said Friday. “The city has to show a minimum amount of decency to those who are homeless and not destroy what little property they have been able to put together to survive with.”

But Young contended that the city has been helping the homeless all along and that transients have no right to keep their things on public property.

‘Parks Are Not Residences’

“The fact of the matter is that the parks are not residences for anybody,” he said. “These people seem to think they have the right to live rent free on city property. . . . We’re not doing anything different from any other city, be that the city of Orange or L.A.”

City officials have said the sweeps began in response to complaints about transients harming parks and businesses in Santa Ana. But Jurado, whose group investigated sweeps near the Civic Center, said no workers there had complained about the homeless. On the contrary, she said, Civic Center employees often left food for them.

Michael Watkins, a 32-year-old homeless man who used to store his things near the county engineering and finance building, said he had a friendly rapport with some county workers.

“We’ve got people that work in this building that wake me up in the morning so I can get to work,” he said.

Gloria Sharpless, who works in the county’s architecture and engineering division at the Civic Center, said she and her office mates have taken up collections for the homeless staying nearby. “There are a lot of people around here who really do care,” she said.

In Orange, officers began destroying belongings left behind by the homeless in W.O. Hart Park after complaints from residents and business owners more than a year ago.

“What these fellows are doing is building shanties and lean-tos in the shrubbery,” said Dean Richards, the acting police chief. “They generally mess the park up with their trash.”

Richards said police do turn over items such as watches and identification to the Police Department’s lost-and-found unit.

Hart Park is closed to the public after 10 p.m., and the homeless who stay there are forced out by police at night, Richards said.

“We’ll chase anybody down there, whether it be lovers or homeless,” he said. “We’ll tell them to move on.”

Richards said the police cannot be responsible for finding a solution to the city’s homeless problem.

“If somebody could come up with a social remedy, I’d support it,” he said. “But right now, we’re left with enforcing the law.”