Group Tries to Locate the Homeless, but Few Come to Their Census

Shortly before 4 a.m., Inglewood teen-ager Brian Shuford shined his flashlight at a homeless person ensconced in a sleeping bag behind an Alondra Park restroom. But retired Hawthorne truck mechanic Henry Bulder--like Shuford a temporary census taker--shooed his 18-year-old partner away.

“You can’t wake them up,” Bulder said, rejecting Shuford’s argument that they should determine the person’s sex, race and age. “It says in the book. I’ll show you.”

Shuford and Bulder were among dozens of Census Bureau employees of divergent backgrounds who traversed the South Bay before dawn Wednesday in search of the homeless.

The two men and a third group member, Torrance office worker Harlon Patterson, 33, spent their 2 a.m. to 4:30 a.m. shift driving from one reported homeless haunt to another in Shuford’s Suzuki Samurai.

They traveled more than 35 miles to sites ranging from the Tom Bradley International Terminal at Los Angeles International Airport to a trash-filled field behind a Gardena meat market, but they managed to locate only five homeless people.

For Patterson, it was a decided anti-climax.

“I’m glad we’re not getting paid by the head,” he said at one point, peering from his cramped perch in the back of the Samurai. “The three of us have been out for two hours, and we’ve counted four people so far. We haven’t even found a stray dog.”

Their pre-dawn search began at a service station just around the corner from the Census Bureau’s regional office in Inglewood, where a man in a dark sedan menacingly flashed a gang sign to the three enumerators as they pumped gas into the jet-black Samurai’s tank.

Shuford admitted that his low-slung vehicle did look somewhat suspicious as it slinked through the dark South Bay streets in search of the next homeless haunt.

On the freeway, a Highway Patrol cruiser slowed down, flashed its searchlight at the Suzuki and then took off. Later, two sheriff’s deputies eyed the vehicle during one pass on Hawthorne Boulevard and then drew their car alongside it during a second sweep of the street.

Patterson said one of the deputies rolled down his window and said to them: “You guys have been driving around on Hawthorne for the last 40 minutes. Are you lost?”

When the enumerators stated their business, the officers looked at each other and left.

“If we hadn’t had Henry around, we would’ve been spread-eagled against that car,” Shuford said, smiling at the bespectacled Bulder, who at 64 provided a grandfatherly contrast to his two youthful companions.

The trio made their biggest find at the airport when they discovered four people sleeping in chairs and tagged all of them as homeless. But their tensest moment came later, when they spotted a huge pile of brush dumped next to the San Diego Freeway.

Shuford urged his older colleagues to investigate. Patterson hesitated, then joined him. Bulder, toting his census forms in a May Co. shopping bag, waited warily on the other side of the street.

“What’s a homeless man going to do--jump out with an Uzi?” Shuford asked as he crept through the bushes toward the mound. “I’m the Indiana Jones of census takers.”

The mound of brush was just that. There were no signs of the homeless anywhere.

Shortly before calling it quits, the group descended on Alondra Park, which at first glance seemed empty. But behind a restroom near the corner of Prairie Avenue and Manhattan Beach Boulevard, Shuford and Bulder found signs of habitation: a coat hanging from a tree and the owner sacked out in a sleeping bag several yards away.

It was the final discovery of the evening, and for Bulder it was a letdown.

“It’s kind of disappointing that we didn’t find more people,” he said.

Patterson, reached at his office Wednesday morning, was more philosophical. “I expected more homelessness,” he admitted, but he said he would do it all again. “After all, this is history. It’s something I can pass on to my grandchildren some day.”