Santa Ana Tramples on Rights of Its Homeless

Pat Ford recently lost everything he owned. He didn’t make bad stock investments. Nor did he lose his possessions in a fire. They were taken from him near the Santa Ana Civic Center by a city parks employee in a sweep of a park area, according to Ford.

Ford, you see, is one of those people who has no place else to go. He often sleeps in the park or wherever he can. Some people refer to him as homeless. Others call him a vagrant. Whatever he is termed, he is a public problem that should not be ignored--or abused. If legal responsibility or common sense doesn’t dictate that, human compassion certainly should.

But some unfeeling public officials and merchants in Santa Ana seem to have no reluctance to ignore or abuse. They have shown no concern for the problem of finding emergency housing or detoxification treatment for street people like Ford. And now Santa Ana is showing no respect for their rights or property.

For the past few weeks the city has been pursuing the hardhearted policy of making sweeps of the city parks and areas around the Civic Center, tossing away possessions left by the homeless, property the city maintains was abandoned and not valuable. Others claim that in some cases, like Ford’s, people were guarding possessions but still lost them.

A recent city attorney’s opinion contends that the city may legally discard items in the park if workers think they are trash.

But who is presumptuous enough to make that decision? A city worker may not think the property is valuable, but to homeless people, their bedrolls, clothes, medicine, food and identification papers may be all they have in the world. In such a situation, the city’s estimation of value means nothing.

The American Civil Liberties Union on Thursday charged that the city’s seizure of property from the homeless “violates not only common decency but amounts to deprivation of property without due process of law.” The ACLU has threatened to take legal action if the city continues the practice.

Insensitive attitudes and remarks like those of Santa Ana Mayor Dan Young, who on Friday said that the city would continue destroying the property of the homeless and flippantly suggested that ACLU members take transients home with them if they were so concerned, do nothing to solve the problem.

If the city doesn’t stop its official policy of harassment, designed to drive the homeless away to placate some complaining downtown business owners and residents, legal action certainly is in order.

Los Angeles is trying to address a similar problem but already has a policy of requiring that both the city council and the homeless be notified before any sweep is made.

A like policy is the least Santa Ana ought to adopt to protect the rights--and meager belongings--of the homeless.

When it comes to providing emergency housing, counseling and detoxification treatment for street people, Santa Ana, the County Board of Supervisors and most cities are doing far too little. It is cruel not to help the homeless. It is even more cruel to deliberately hurt them.