64 Homeless Men Seized in Santa Ana Police Sweep : Crime: Officers write numbers on arms of those arrested. A civil rights proponent says the action smacks of Nazism.

Leo Boyd was watching his buddies play a leisurely game of chess in the Civic Center on Wednesday afternoon when he unexpectedly found himself handcuffed, thrown into a police car and taken to nearby Santa Ana Stadium.

Once he was there, police officers scrawled a large red number on the frightened 19-year-old transient’s forearm and chained him and 63 other homeless men to a bench for more than six hours.

For his frustrating evening in custody, Boyd was handed a ticket for littering.

“There was no way I was littering,” Boyd said. He and the other men were arrested in a police sweep that on Thursday drew criticism from immigration and legal rights advocates.

“They just wanted to make us leave ‘cause they don’t want us around,” said Boyd, as he sat in an office at the Legal Aid Society of Orange County. His arm still bore the large No. 3 that identified him during the roundup.

City and police officials said the series of arrests that began at 4 p.m. was part of a new commitment to slow a reported increase in crime around the complex of courthouses and county and city offices.

Other roundups of the hundreds of homeless men who live in the nooks and crannies around the Civic Center complex are to be expected in the future, Santa Ana Police Chief Paul Walters said.

“What we did was appropriate,” Walters said. “There are just so many things that have been happening in this area. We are getting a lot of complaints and letters.”

But legal rights and immigration advocates complained that this week’s sweep unfairly targeted the homeless and will probably cause the Latino community to distrust the police.

Nineteen of those arrested were later determined to be illegal aliens and turned over to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

All day Thursday, Legal Aid Society attorneys took statements and began preparing to fight the citations that were passed out to the men, said Robert J. Cohen, the clinic’s executive director.

The men were released at 10:30 p.m. after police officers handed each of them a ticket for one of four infractions.

Although some were ticketed for jaywalking, urinating in public and public drunkenness, the vast majority received tickets for littering.

Four of the men were held on outstanding warrants, the rest were released with orders to appear in October to answer the citations.

Legal rights activists said they are considering filing a class-action suit on behalf of the homeless men.

“We as a legal community are personally outraged by it, and professionally we are going to do what we can to fight the city on this,” said Justin Clouser, an attorney with the Poverty Law Center.

Clouser also criticized the Police Department for drawing red numbers on the men’s arms, comparing the action to the Nazi practice of tattooing numbers on concentration camp inmates.

“These type of tactics are about 50 years out of date,” Clouser said. “You cannot treat human beings like that.”

Several City Council members interviewed said that they were not informed of the police action.

Although he criticized the police administration for not calling him before launching the series of arrests, Councilman John Acosta praised the department for rounding up the homeless men.

“My constituents would just as soon wipe the slate clean of the homeless problem,” Acosta said, adding that the homeless men who occupy the area create health hazards by urinating and defecating in the complex.

“I know situations where there are truly homeless people, but these are vagrants, bums and panhandlers,” Acosta said. “They don’t truly want to help themselves. They absolutely don’t want to stop begging, stealing and bumming around.”

Santa Ana police spokeswoman Maureen Thomas said that police believe some of the homeless may be responsible for an increase in reported crime in recent months.

For instance, she said, there have been 86 thefts from cars and 22 stolen cars reported this year. She also said that reports of public drunkenness, vandalism and other crimes have risen dramatically.

“It was necessary to conduct this program because of the general rise in crime,” she said. “It was not aimed at any group or individual or not directed to the homeless or the Hispanic community.”