ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE HEAD The Sweep That Backfired on Santa Ana

The Municipal Court judge who dismissed charges against a group of homeless people caught up last summer in the Santa Ana Civic Center police sweep was eloquently clear: The sweep was illegal. Instead of appealing, as one city councilman says he wants to do, the city would be wise to put homeless sweeps on the shelf forever.

The case before Judge B. Tam Nomoto has been a cause celebre in Orange County’s law community, which provided lawyers from top law firms free of charge to represent 22 people in a pretrial hearing. None of the lawyers disputed that the city has a problem with homeless people in the Civic Center area, but they forcefully argued that the law does not allow violation of individual rights, or discriminatory enforcement of the law, as a means of handling it. Nomoto agreed.

During three weeks of testimony, there was ample evidence that police had planned the sweep for several weeks. Using “spotters,” they focused only on the homeless, who were cited for minor infractions such as littering, jaywalking or plucking leaves from a tree. The more than 60 people arrested were taken to Santa Ana Stadium, where they were shackled to benches, numbered on their forearms with ink and held for several hours before they were released. Two of the arrestees who could prove they had a residence were released.

Nomoto said singling out the homeless and subjecting them to such treatment was discriminatory. She saw through the Police Department’s denials that this was in fact a “sweep,” saying the department “deliberately and intentionally implemented a program which targeted” the homeless. “The law has been vigilant against such cold indifference toward discrimination and the evils that it could engender,” she said.

The police are in a difficult spot, because Civic Center workers feel intimidated by the homeless who gather on the lawns and benches of county and municipal buildings. By conducting the sweep, police probably were trying to show they at least were doing something to protect them. But it was a grave miscalculation that has backfired on the city.

Unfortunately, after Nomoto’s ruling, Councilman John Acosta fumed that the homeless were “bums by choice” and “want to be” in their unfortunate situation. He wants the city to appeal. That is the attitude that brought on the sweeps in the first place, one that must be routed out before the community can begin to deal with the Civic Center situation in a responsible way.