Officers to Arrest Aggressive Beggars : Ventura: Merchants complain that pushy panhandlers are driving shoppers away. Weekend crackdown is planned.

Ventura police and county prosecutors say they plan to crack down this weekend on aggressive beggars who are driving shoppers away from the city’s Main Street.

Authorities say they will arrest, prosecute, fine and, if necessary, jail anyone caught panhandling in a “rude or insolent” manner.

The crackdown comes in response to mounting complaints from Main Street merchants, who say business is suffering because the beggars have become pushy, and even dangerous.

“There’s a lot more new faces, and a lot more anger” among the homeless people who ask passersby for money, said Kristina Pustina, owner of Franky’s Place restaurant.

“It’s like confrontational,” she said. “It used to be somebody would say, ‘Hey, you got any spare change?’ and you’d say ‘No’ and that would be fine. Now it’s almost like it’s their right. There’s a lot of bad language and some people have been threatened.”

John Miller said beggars have worked the Vons Shopping Plaza on West Main Street for seven years, as long as he has owned a dry-cleaning business there. Lately, however, they have become more insistent, he said.

“They stop the customers going in the door and panhandle ‘em. They stop them going out the door. When they’re drunk, they beat on their cars. I had a knife pulled on me once,” Miller said.

“I know I’ve lost at least 30 customers or more. . . . We have people that call me for delivery service because they don’t want to face the panhandlers.”

But authorities say they must be careful how they prosecute the beggars who are arrested.

The law on begging traces a fine line between the shopper’s right to visit Main Street without harassment and the panhandler’s right to ask for money, Deputy Dist. Atty. Kevin DeNoce said.

“It’s not a crime for somebody to be homeless, and it’s not a crime for somebody to ask for money in a polite way,” said DeNoce, who has been assigned to prosecute those arrested in the crackdown.

“The law does not make it a crime to seek charitable contributions,” he said. “What it does is make it a crime to ask for money in a rude or insolent manner.”

Prosecutors will be using a law forbidding people to obstruct “the free movement of any person on any street, sidewalk, or other public place,” DeNoce said. The crime, a misdemeanor, carries a maximum penalty of six months, but he said prosecutors probably will seek a nominal fine for offenders. Those who fail to pay probably will spend a day or two in jail, he said.

Miller said the plan to make beggars pay fines is ironic and, ultimately, expensive to taxpayers who must support the $125 County Jail booking fee for each defendant. “It costs the taxpayers a fortune once these people get into the system, to book them and process them and try them and put them up in the jail,” he said.

Some social workers say that arresting beggars won’t solve the problem.

“My frustration is always that we seek easy solutions to complex problems,” said Richard Pearson, executive director of Project Understanding, which provides meals, showers, laundry facilities and message services for the homeless.

Homeless people are unfairly stereotyped, he said.

“Either they’re all drunks or they’re all mentally ill, or they’re all lazy, and I don’t think that’s nearly the case,” he said. “The people who are on the streets are just as varied as the people who aren’t living on the streets.”

Prosecuting beggars “is going to have very little effect in the long run,” Pearson said. “As long as it’s going on, they’re probably going to move to some other part of the city. Then those people get upset, and we’ll go through another cycle over there.” The police are stuck in the middle of the debate, Ventura Police Chief Richard Thomas said.

“There are those in the community who wish to preserve and safeguard the rights of the homeless and to do everything in their power to help them,” he said. “And there are others in the community that are offended by their presence, meaning the homeless, and by their offensive conduct, such as being drunk in public. . . . “

Thomas said both sides fail to focus on the proper group, which he said are the unemployed drug and alcohol addicts, rather than poor people who “because of some economic plight, have found themselves homeless.”

The merchants agree that most of the aggressive beggars on Main Street appear to spend what money they can muster on alcohol and return to spend the night in the hobo jungle in the Ventura River bottom.

“All of these people are supposedly homeless,” Miller said. “Well, they have a home: They live in the river bottom and they have a job, they panhandle for a living.”

Sandy Smith, president of the Downtown Business Assn., said the merchants realize that problems are caused by only a small group of the homeless, and that the majority of them need help and not prosecution.

“What we’re talking about here is a socioeconomic issue,” he said. “Law enforcement alone is not going to solve the problem. It’s going to take the city of Ventura and the downtown community and law enforcement and the social service agencies to work on a multifaceted approach to the problem.”