Kicked Out : Costa Mesa Police Crack Down on Those Sleeping in Parks

It was after 2 a.m. on Tuesday when Officer Garth Wilson arrived at Rea Community Center in Costa Mesa, but the only immediate signs of what local residents have described as an epidemic of transients was a 61-year-old woman named Beverly asleep on a park bench, and an open can of Shur Fine Pork and Beans.

Garth and several other officers, acting on Costa Mesa’s new policy of closing its parks at midnight, combed the alleys and doorways of the center looking for transients. Before the night was over, they would issue seven citations.

Three transients had camped out with their bedrolls in an alcove not far from a tract of homes. There they would be protected from the sprinklers that drench the grass field each night and the helicopter searchlights that blaze down on those caught sleeping on the Rea center’s roof.

The decision last week by Costa Mesa Police Chief Dave Snowden to enforce the city’s ordinance closing parks at midnight is not without precedent in Orange County. In the past few months, a number of cities have taken similar actions. In late May, Santa Ana officials ordered cleanup crews to cart away unattended bedrolls from the Civic Center grounds and other parks. Three weeks ago, Santa Ana Police Chief Clyde L. Cronkhite ordered police to close Center Park at 11 p.m. In Orange, police for more than a year have been confiscating belongings stashed at Hart Park.

Some advocates for the poor, such as Scott Mather, chairman of the Orange Coast Interfaith Shelter in Costa Mesa, fear that the closures may be part of a backlash against the homeless--whose numbers are estimated at 5,000 to 6,000 countywide--that is gathering force in many cities throughout the county.

“Cities are concerned that all of a sudden there is a large homeless population, and they see them being moved from one city to the next,” Mather said. “They feel they have to do whatever they can to stop it, or make sure it doesn’t become a problem in their city.”

Snowden has defended Costa Mesa’s policy by arguing that most of the people sleeping in the city’s parks after midnight have other places to sleep. “Most of these people are not homeless, they’re opportunists,” Snowden said, adding that the majority of those at Rea center are merely camping out for free.

But Jean Forbath, director of Share Our Selves, an organization at Rea Center, which feeds and clothes the homeless, is on a first-name basis with dozens of homeless people and says Snowden’s assessment simply is not true.

“Why would they sleep out in the open if they had a place to go?” she asked. For most, she said, the only other “place to go is another little cubbyhole to hide in.”

Advocates for the poor say that before Costa Mesa police began warning transients

last week that the park would be closed at night, the alcoves of Rea Center, in the 600 block of Hamilton Street, attracted up to 30 people each night. Some were alcoholics whose rantings and squabbles in the dead of night have frightened nearby residents. Others were former psychiatric patients who were unable to care for themselves and often refused offers of shelter. And some were homeless men who could not find a bed for the night because the shelters--which can accommodate only about a third of the county’s male transients--were full and the men had no money to rent a motel room.

But when police began warning transients at Wilson Park and Rea center--a converted junior high school next to an old athletic field--of the impending crackdown, those who had been sleeping there began to scatter. A few, such as Mike and Steve, who were sitting on benches at Rea Center about 8 p.m. Monday, said their only option was to move on to other alcoves and alleyways.

But some of the men Garth and the other officers ticketed Monday night had other options. Three young men cited for sleeping in their car in the Rea center’s parking lot had quarreled with their roommates, they said, blinking into the beam of Garth’s flashlight. They said they didn’t know the park was closed.

Another man, a 20-year-old from Huntington Beach, told the officers he had chosen to sleep in an alleyway at the center rather than stay with his parents.

A man who would give his name only as Daniel, who sometimes sleeps at the Rea Center when he has no money, was visiting friends there Monday evening. But unlike them, this night he had the needed $30.65 for a motel room.

“Up until I guess this weekend, there wasn’t any harassment from the police,” the man said. “People were allowed to sleep here. You could get coffee and doughnuts in the morning at SOS (Share Our Selves), and they have a hot soup kitchen in the afternoon. It was a safe place to be.”