No Place in Their Hearts for the Homeless : Judges, lawyers who tired of sharing Santa Ana Civic Center with ‘campers’ don’t care about them as long as they’re gone.
“I’ll tell you what campin’ is,” the guy said. “Campin’ is when your daddy gets the fishin’ gear and you and him gets in the car and goes out to the lake and fish awhile and have lunch and go home. That’s what campin’ is!”
The person held in his hand a police citation for illegal camping in the Civic Center of Santa Ana. He feigned puzzlement, knowing as well as you do that Santa Ana’s “anti-camping” ordinance was the city’s latest effort to deal with its 3,000 homeless people by somehow making them vanish.
Santa Ana has resolutely ignored what a thousand cities had learned: When you have homeless you shelter them or step around them. It embarked on a number of disastrous alternatives.
In 1988 city park workers started throwing out homeless people’s belongings as trash and ended up paying $3,300 per bundle in damages. Two years later, in a scene reminiscent of Kristallnacht, the city tried to corral and transport the homeless of Civic Center, paid heavy civil penalties but avoided charges of kidnaping.
Failing that, the city resorted to the etymological approach, or word games. In a misuse of the word camping obvious to anyone but an idiot or a lawyer, Santa Ana decided its homeless were a bunch of fun-loving outdoorsmen invading a serious workplace and befouling the rectilinear beauty of the County Seat.
Q: Why do you live in the mall?
A: Well, the cops run us out of 3rd and Garfield, and then they run us out of Center Park and this was the only place left.
So the concentration of homeless in Civic Center was not entirely by choice. It brought the nature-lovers within sight of the Central Courthouse and under the feet of those who use it. A handful of aggressive panhandlers became daily companions to the jurors, lawyers and judges who would directly influence their fate. One of these was Superior Court Judge James L. Smith.
Earlier this month the kindly looking, white-thatched jurist heard arguments on the validity of Santa Ana’s anti-camping ordinance. Judge Smith took the time to explain that he and other judges had held a meeting to examine the homeless--quote--”situation,” and had determined that it was a--quote--”problem.”
On determining that, he said, judges then “interfaced” with police. (No homeless had been interfaced with, and it would have been frightfully bad manners to mention that you don’t interface with police to solve a “problem” but to remove it.)
Thus warned that the homeless were walking dead men, their attorneys argued that the anti-camping ordinance violated at least three of the first 10 Amendments, would make “camping paraphernalia” of such things as a toothbrush, medicine and a fresh change of socks, punished people for the status of homelessness, vacated their right to exist on private property or public, and criminalized activities like sleeping.
Judge Smith ordered the sleeping clause changed but left the ordinance intact. He would be unlikely to strike down a law that matched so closely the drift of his mind. (“They were taking up parking places,” he said at one point, letting us measure the relative importance of a shelter for humans and space for cars.)
Santa Ana’s city attorney left the courtroom flushed with glee and armed with a large-bore weapon against people City Hall doesn’t like. By August the city will have completed a prefabricated 48-cell jail in which to warehouse the enemies of society, which by an ordinance strengthened by the court’s confirmation will include the homeless.
Many of the happy campers at Civic Center left in the last six months and then came back because they didn’t know where else to go.
They have survived the wettest winter in 10 years, are racked with discomfort and undiagnosed illnesses, suffer public disapproval and the hostile attention of Santa Ana police. With considerable assurance, patrolmen may now wake them, move them, flash Polaroids at them, ticket them, arrest them and seize their toiletries as “camping paraphernalia.”
Dozens of homeless have taken refuge in construction zones above the Orange Crush, in Santiago Creek and under bridges along the Santa Ana River. Their fortunes in the January flash floods are something we prefer not to think about.
One fellow I know whose limbs are so shaken by spasms he can no longer control his body lives with two other people under a door slanted against a fence in west Santa Ana. It is in the corner of a parking lot which is private property, making them criminals. If it were public property, they would still be criminals.
And a bag lady named Bernadette, who enriched herself picking up cans around Civic Center, must have seen all this coming. About a month ago she dragged her swollen legs onto a Greyhound bus and set out to where she came from, West Virginia, Marion County, near to Catawba. Back there they let you camp anywhere you want. But that’s an enlightened community. The folks there are nice.
