COVER STORY : Begging Backlash : After Years of Tolerance, Cities With ‘Compassion Fatigue’ Have Begun Getting Tough on Panhandling

Around lunchtime, Bob Colley takes up his perch near the main post office in Santa Monica. Clad in a soiled blue sweat shirt and gray dungarees, he sits on the front steps and murmurs the same question, over and over, to passersby: “Hey, excuse me . . . you got any change?”

Colley, a 49-year-old Oklahoma native who is homeless, says he’s been panhandling since 1984, ever since he finished serving a sentence in California state prison for check forgery. No steady job has ever worked out, he says, and family members have not kept up with him. So he begs for the things he needs to buy--namely “booze, cigarettes and food.”

Many people frown at or ignore him. But sometimes he makes a relatively large sum. He says that one Christmas, panhandling in Westwood, he took in $224 in less than three hours.

“I had both pockets stuffed with big bills, 10s and 20s,” he recalls.

Yet Colley and thousands of other Westside street people are on a collision course with increasingly irate city councils, businesses and even social-service organizations. Fed up with a rising number of complaints from residents and merchants, historically tolerant cities such as West Hollywood and Santa Monica have adopted or are considering get-tough measures designed to curtail or outlaw panhandling.

Some are beginning to wonder if, in the words of homelessness expert Madeleine Stoner, “compassion fatigue” has set-in among Southern Californians.

“There’s a homeless backlash nationwide,” says Stoner, a professor of social work at USC who has written extensively about homelessness. “Communities that had lenient rules are now passing anti-encampment ordinances. What’s interesting is that a lot of the backlash isn’t coming from mean-spirited citizens or right-wing fundamentalists, but rather from people who have spent a long time dealing with homelessness. They’re just frustrated by the problem.”

Some communities that have taken a relatively hard line against the homeless have gotten even tougher. In 1993,

Beverly Hills passed a law prohibiting “aggressive solicitation, drinking in public, (and) sitting or lying, or leaving personal property in the public ways.”

The frustration has focused largely on panhandling, which regularly brings homeless people into contact with other residents. Public protests have reached high tide in Santa Monica, where the combination of affluent residents and well-funded charities has made panhandlers gravitate to the Third Street Promenade and nearby areas. The city has tried various measures to alleviate panhandling, including a program that began last year in which passersby were urged to drop money into a sculpted dolphin rather than give it to beggars. The money is earmarked for homeless services.

But, with no visible relief yet, pressure is mounting on the City Council to consider far tougher proposals, some of which simply seek to get rid of panhandlers.

“It’s just getting to the point where you can’t stand it,” says council member Robert T. Holbrook, who--with colleague Asha Greenberg--is leading a drive to regulate panhandling. “You can’t walk a block (along the Promenade) without being panhandled four or five times.”

What rankles Holbrook is so-called aggressive panhandling, in which a beggar uses threatening or harassing tactics to get what he or she wants. Such behavior, the councilman says, drives customers away from local businesses. Moreover, homeless people in general require a disproportionate amount of attention from police and paramedics, Holbrook says.

He says he would like an outright ban on panhandling--or, failing that, at least some enforceable restrictions on the times and places that begging is permitted. On Tuesday, a proposal by Holbrook and colleague Asha Greenberg for “time and place” restrictions failed after the city attorney said the measure would be unconstitutional. The council did pass a local law prohibiting agressive panhandling, however, and Greenberg said she would continue to press for tougher steps.

Experts argue that it will take more than get-tough proposals to deal effectively with panhandling. Although there are no reliable statistics on the number of panhandlers on the Westside, the Los Angeles Services Authority has estimated there are about 80,000 homeless people on streets in the county.

“Panhandling and begging has had a resurgence over the last five years,” says Vivian Rothstein, executive director of the Ocean Park Community Center, a network of emergency shelters in Santa Monica. “In the Reagan era, we cut a lot of our social safety net, and now we have to deal with the consequences of that. But you can’t just outlaw panhandling and think you’ve solved the problem.”

Anyone who tries such an approach is likely to face a stiff legal challenge anyway. Marsha Moutrie, city attorney for Santa Monica, said that courts have generally held that panhandling is a protected form of speech under the 1st Amendment, although governments may carve out limited exceptions.

For instance, courts have allowed cities to regulate where, when or how panhandling can take place, Moutrie says.

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Police and merchants complain that panhandlers take unfair advantage of their free speech rights, demanding money in a threatening manner that sometimes borders on extortion. They also say that too many beggars use the money for criminal or self-destructive ends, rather than for basic necessities.

Commander Keith Bushey of the Los Angeles Police Department says that under recent court decisions police have “lost the power to arrest” all but the most aggressive panhandlers. Those arrested are usually found to be involved in criminal activity, he says.

“It’s not unusual for us to take a panhandler into custody who has a decent sum in his pocket, $30 or $50,” Bushey says. “In that case, (people who give money are) just paying for somebody’s drug trade.”

On any given day, dozens of panhandlers and homeless people can be seen on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood pushing shopping carts brimming with empty bottles. Carlos Gonzalez, a private security guard who patrols a strip mall near Sunset and Poinsettia, confirms that panhandlers have adopted increasingly aggressive tactics, including waylaying drive-through customers at fast-food restaurants.

“The customers don’t like it,” says Gonzalez, who often shoos away the same 10 or so panhandlers every day.

Yet hiring a security guard is not enough for the merchants of West Hollywood, who in recent years have grown increasingly weary of panhandlers roaming Santa Monica Boulevard.

“There are people who are really homeless and need help, and then there are panhandlers doing it as a scam,” says Donny Cacy, franchise owner of a 7-Eleven in West Hollywood. “Those are the kind of people we need to get rid of, people who don’t want to work.”

Late last year, Cacy, along with other merchants and community leaders, helped develop “Give the Right Thing,” a program designed to discourage panhandling through the distribution of cards listing city services for the homeless. Moreover, the West Hollywood City Council last year passed an ordinance banning “coercive or intimidating” panhandling. A similar statute is on the books in Los Angeles.

“For some homeless people, panhandling is a way of survival,” says Dan Fisher, program director of the West Hollywood Homeless Organization, a nonprofit relief agency partly financed through city funds. “Unfortunately, for a large percentage of (homeless) people, it’s just a tax-free form of business.”

Fisher discourages people from giving money to panhandlers, who he says often engage in “defeating” behavior such as drug abuse.

The issue may yet spread to other communities. Mark Lorimer, assistant city manager of Malibu, says there are “hot pockets” of panhandling in his city. “It’s an issue we’ve been trying to keep a handle on with basic (police) enforcement.”

Panhandlers say that police enforcement has often been excessive.

The police will “take me down to the station for being drunk in public, even when I’m not,” said Robert Price Alexander, a 35-year-old homeless man who grew up in Australia and now lives on the streets of Santa Monica. “Even when I’m stone-cold sober.”

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Some say panhandling makes people uncomfortable because it calls attention to society’s failings, moral and otherwise.

“There hasn’t been enough done” to end homelessness, Stoner, the USC professor, says. “All we’ve done so far is try to offer emergency help. Now we’re beginning to have to address longer-term solutions.” Stoner says she sometimes gives money to panhandlers herself, but it’s “a judgment call.”

“If you want to get rid of panhandling, you have to address the circumstances that are forcing people out into the streets, (like) unemployment and recession,” says Marguerite Waller, a UC-Riverside English professor who lives in Santa Monica and has spoken out on behalf of homeless people at City Council meetings.

“These people are desperate,” Waller says. Panhandling “isn’t a scam. Real criminals have homes.”

Such distinctions carry little weight with leaders such as Holbrook, the Santa Monica councilman. He intends to push vigorously for a city law banning panhandling, even if it means an eventual showdown in court.

“I want a City Council that has the guts to try and see if this can pass the Constitutional test,” Holbrook says. “We have to have the courage to do what we think is right.”

Meanwhile, back on the streets, Alexander joins Bob Colley on the steps of the Santa Monica post office. Alexander, who has walked with a teak cane since being hit by a car about five years ago, offers to recite an original poem for a dollar. After finishing the recitation, he reports that he makes $10 on a typical day, “$20 if I’m lucky.”

He is asked what he and his homeless friends will do if a law is passed against panhandling.

He considers the question for a moment and then responds: “We’ll keep doing it. Of course.”