Homeless Dilemma Tests Santa Monica’s Tolerance

Frances Finnen--89 years old and hard of hearing, but as feisty as they come--had stopped her shopping cart in the bakery section at Vons near her Santa Monica home last March when a young, “not too clean” man approached and asked, innocuously enough, “Where’s the mayonnaise?”

As Finnen raised her arm to point, Finnen testified in court last week, the man shoved a pair of scissors into her side, grabbed her purse and ran. Minutes later, police arrested James Earl Tillman, a 31-year-old homeless man, in a nearby alley.

The attempted murder case, now being deliberated by a Superior Court jury, has made Frances Finnen a symbol for Santa Monica’s latest political struggle--a debate over whether to run its highly visible transient population out of town. For Santa Monica, a city that prides itself on tolerance, compassion and rent control, the homeless issue presents an especially awkward civic struggle.

The street people, many Santa Monicans insist, have worn out their welcome. Nonetheless, Santa Monica’s traditional leniency toward the downtrodden remains in evidence each afternoon on the City Hall lawn, where as many as 300 transients line up to receive a free meal from a charity group.

Scenes like these anger some citizens. “They finish eating her sandwiches,” one woman said, referring to a volunteer in the meal program, “then they come and defecate on my lawn.”

They have focused their ire on Santa Monica’s liberal city attorney, Robert Myers, who they say has all but invited the homeless to the city and who they want to unseat. Defenders of Myers contend he is but a convenient scapegoat for a perplexing social problem, and they question the political motives of the conservative leaders of the movement against him.

Santa Monica Mayor Dennis Zane, a leader of the council’s liberal majority that supports Myers, describes the community as deeply conflicted, seeking a balance between tough law enforcement and aid for those in need. A Chamber of Commerce poll found that although Santa Monicans want tough law enforcement against transient lawbreakers, they also favor improved social services for the homeless.

” . . . Myers is being (blamed) for the policies of Ronald Reagan and George Deukmejian, ironically by people who supported Ronald Reagan and George Deukmejian,” Zane said, a reference to cuts in national and state mental health programs.

While precise numbers are not available, hundreds of homeless men and women are believed by officials to make their beds each night in Santa Monica. With its temperate climate, sandy beaches and easygoing lifestyle, the city has long attracted a disproportionately large number of street people. Social workers believe it is perhaps the county’s largest concentration outside of Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles.

The dramatic increase in homeless nationwide during the 1980s, including thousands of deinstitutionalized mentally ill, was magnified in Santa Monica, as more and more transients found their way to the western terminus of old Route 66.

Santa Monica--so liberal that conservative wags sometimes call it “Soviet” Monica--reacted by increasing social programs and providing more food, clothing and shelter.

City Atty. Myers, rather than prosecuting the homeless for such nonviolent misdemeanors as panhandling and sleeping in the park, instituted a program of referring minor offenders to service agencies.

Today, amid a rising rate of crimes blamed on transients, many Santa Monicans suggest the city was too hospitable. The attack on Frances Finnen “woke us up to how bad the situation really is,” said activist Leslie Dutton.

A veteran of conservative causes, Dutton is leading an initiative that calls for the city attorney position to be elected rather than appointed. About 7,900 signatures are needed to qualify for the November ballot; so far, Dutton said, the group has collected almost 9,000 and plans to hand over its petitions to the city clerk Friday.

The Santa Monica backlash seems to mirror a national anti-homeless trend: Los Angeles sporadically conducts police “sweeps” on cardboard communities on Skid Row; New York has attempted to enact an anti-begging statute for subways, and Costa Mesa in Orange County has forced a social agency to relocate from a middle-class neighborhood to an industrial zone.

While there is contentious debate over who to blame, most Santa Monicans seem to agree that the homeless have created serious problems.

A recent Santa Monica Chamber of Commerce poll found that the homeless are a chief concern of city residents, comparable with the polluted bay and far ahead of traffic and development. Palisades Park and Lincoln Park, once favorite family picnic spots, are now so dominated by transients that many residents stay away. Grocery stores have hired security guards to discourage theft and panhandling. The Police Department, in addition to regular patrols, recently instituted a two-officer task force that exclusively patrols homeless haunts.

According to Santa Monica police statistics, 30% of the department’s time and money is devoted to calls regarding transients. Since 1986, increases--sometimes dramatic--have been recorded in the number of arrests of transients suspected of homicide, rape, assault, robbery and burglary. Victims of crimes committed by transients are most often transients themselves, officials said.

There are notorious exceptions. The February, 1989, slaying of social worker Robbyn Panitch, allegedly stabbed to death by a transient in a county mental health clinic, provided a stark example of how people who try to help can become victims.

Myers, along with a deputy city attorney, was slightly injured when attacked a few weeks ago by a man who appeared to be mentally ill. The attacker fled and it has not been determined whether the attacker was homeless.

Nonetheless, the city attorney is being held up by opponents as the embodiment of soft-hearted liberalism that makes grocery-store stabbings possible. Activists claim Myers’ refusal to prosecute nonviolent misdemeanors such as panhandling and sleeping in public parks have led to more serious lawlessness and exacerbated public fears.

Myers has long been a controversial figure in Santa Monica, known for his authorship of the city’s landmark rent-control law and his willingness to be arrested protesting nuclear arms testing. He declined interview requests and issued a statement accusing Dutton of a campaign that “has degenerated into a series of lies and distortions. . . .”

His statement went on: “The criminal justice system simply doesn’t have the ability to deal with the homeless problem. Moreover, there would be no justice in the system if it could be used to herd people off to jail merely because they had no home.”

Myers emphasized that most people arrested by Santa Monica police, whether homeless or not, are prosecuted by the county district attorney’s office, not by the city attorney’s office. Moreover, Myers maintained that his office prosecutes many misdemeanor offenses committed by homeless persons, including cases of overly aggressive panhandling.

James Tillman, facing a potential life sentence for attempted murder of Finnen and other felonies, is a case in point.

One month before that incident, Tillman was arrested by Santa Monica police for theft involving the use of force. The county district attorney’s office declined to prosecute the case as a felony, so Myers’ office pressed misdemeanor charges. Tillman pleaded guilty, was placed on probation and fined $100--a fee waived by the court because of the three days Tillman spent in custody.

Dutton overlooks this when she proclaims: “Why was Mr. Tillman in Santa Monica? The answer is Mr. Myers and his policy not to prosecute.”

Dutton, a leader of the arch-conservative Assn. of American Women, is no less controversial than Myers as an advocate of far-right views on pornography and AIDS policy.

Councilwoman Christine Reed, a member of the council’s conservative minority, said she seldom agrees with Dutton, whom she described as “a political loose cannon.” But Reed believes that Myers has been too lenient.

Reed said the homeless problem is made worse by “young vagrants who are committed to a life of chemical dependency, either drugs or alcohol. . . . They’ve found a place where they can sleep in the park and not get harassed too much.”

But many people--including officials in the Santa Monica Police Department, the Chamber of Commerce and social service agencies--said it’s absurd to blame Myers. The criminal justice system, they said, is simply too overwhelmed to handle minor offenses of the homeless, and even the toughest, meanest prosecutor wouldn’t have more success than Myers.

“I can’t fault him for his prosecution policies,” said Sgt. John Miehle, adjutant to Police Chief James Keane, “seeing how the sheriff doesn’t have any room in the jail to put people.”

According to public records filed in connection with the Finnen case, a doctor who examined Tillman after his arrest judged him to be borderline retarded and probably suffering from an organic mental disorder, possibly the result of a childhood brain infection.

Tillman had been in Santa Monica a few months, usually sleeping in an alley carport, his public defender said. In court testimony, Tillman said he visited Vons to steal food. He portrayed the stabbing of Finnen as an accident, saying she quickly turned into the scissors as he tried to steal her purse.

The jury began deliberations Monday.

A block from the courthouse last week, as the trial was winding down, the usual queue had convened at 4 p.m. on the City Hall lawn for the daily handout.

Several said they had come to Santa Monica to escape the meaner streets of L.A.’s Skid Row. Said 40-year-old Bill Butler, a newcomer: “There’s something about the beach. If you’re going to choose to sleep behind a bush, it seems safe.”

Transients said they were grateful for the free food. “It’s not like a soup line,” one said. A few did complain that the food was a day old.