ORANGE COUNTY VOICES THE HOMELESS : The Sins of Santa Ana Make Miserable Existence Hellish : City officials’ systematic campaign against the less fortunate is becoming brutal and ugly.

Not to start on a downer, but in a hundred years everybody reading this will be someplace else.

Almost every religion on earth has picturesque ideas about that Someplace, the consensus being that it has two or more levels, like a parking garage. The lower levels, we are taught, are for those who have failed to leave the world a little better than they found it. The Christian hell is a kind of eternal rotisserie; Asian hells are even worse. Those who believe in reincarnation had better not be right, or the council members and top administrators of Santa Ana will come back as termites, and we have enough of those already.

The city fathers, the majority of whom are professing Christians, began a systematic oppression of the poor and homeless on or about June 6 in the year of Our Lord, 1988. The idea was to make the lives of the miserable even more miserable and thereby drive them away. The more pious surely know that the poor are to be cared for, not kicked around, and that the meek, not the termites, are meant to inherit the earth. Those who take Gospel as gospel will have read far enough into Matthew to know that Christ himself was homeless.

God may reign but the majority rules. The city’s campaign against the homeless and those who feed them blunders on. It hasn’t got rid of the poor and shelterless; they are increasing. Also increasing is the number of Santa Ana park workers, street sweepers and police officers who have become heartily sick of their jobs. They are incorporated to do the dirty work, the rousting, the arresting, the trashing of bedrolls and the dispossessing of the already dispossessed.

Santa Ana police fought shy of this effort until last May, when they conducted a business-like raid on street people at 3rd and Garfield streets, tidying up a corner whose landmark attraction is a junkyard. Since then police have campaigned against Santa Ana’s homeless all the way from the river to the rail yards, rousting them and threatening them, citing them for drinking or loitering, and checking them for outstanding warrants. The smarter officers consider this an empty challenge. But it has become disquietingly clear to the department that some of its cops love dirty work.

With the jail full, these officers face an ugly temptation to administer justice on the spot. At least two officers appear to have succumbed to it, and the city’s war on poverty has turned brutal and raw.

According to a claim filed, on the night of Oct. 16, in Civic Center Mall, one cop felt compelled to slug and wrestle down an inoffensive black man while four other cops stood by. The victim took his bruised ribs and bulging eye to a lawyer, and the names of principals involved are now a matter of public record. The city says the Police Department is still investigating.

And on Nov. 22, according to a number of witnesses, another officer scattered a group of homeless and announced in a voice audible to most of east Santa Ana that he hated “niggers and Mexicans.” The secular shrink might wonder if the cop also hates his family, his job and himself. The theologian might wonder about his state of grace, especially after what appears to have happened the afternoon of Nov. 26.

This same officer (his superiors have his name and badge number) was cruising the lumberyard near the Amtrak station looking for targets. The person he found is well-known around Santa Ana as one of the city’s most piteous poor. She is ragged and unwashed, has been homeless as long as she can remember, and she drags her lame right leg behind her as she forages trash cans for food. She is undersized and undernourished and drinks beer to kill her pains and lubricate a dreadful existence.

I know her well, this lady. She has a number of aggravating habits, but fantasizing isn’t one of them, and I’m afraid I believe her when she says this officer seized her and cracked her head against a lumber pile and bore her to the ground, leaving her with the left side of her face fractured, a blackened left eye and a citation for drinking in public. The officer admits a scuffle but claims the woman “took an aggressive stance.”

He was good enough to sign his name to the ticket, and because two experienced lawyers also believe the woman’s story, he will have the chance to explain his techniques in court.

You’ll remember we started all this with Apocalyptic musings about the hereafter, and we may as well end that way. By tradition and testament, the deal is that we can help ourselves into heaven by prayer, and can even help others if we feel they’re not going to make it. Consider then an armed and uniformed cop who beats up a crippled female half his size while his partner watches. That is not going to make points with whatever archangel keeps score. If we can keep this chap off the down escalator with intercessional prayer, we’d better get at it. He needs all the help he can get.

Save your prayers for those who beat and abuse, not this one tattered victim. After what she’s been through on Earth, she’s got eternity locked up. Like the beggar Lazarus, she’ll sleep in the bosom of Abraham.