Homeless Assistance

The death of Margaret LaVerne Mitchell, the homeless woman shot by the LAPD, is a tragedy. Especially when our Homeless Access Center is just blocks away from her place of death. Three Department of Mental Health social workers work at our center to help mentally ill homeless people access much-needed services. Our street outreach teams are on call to serve any homeless person on the street at any time. Just blocks away--Mitchell’s life could have been saved.

Ironically, we’re trying to save our center’s current home from a developer who is forcing our center to move. I hope our community’s response to Mitchell’s death is to support homeless services rather than force them out.

JOEL JOHN ROBERTS

Executive Director

People Assisting the Homeless

Los Angeles

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To answer Earl Ofari Hutchinson’s question (Commentary, May 27) on why so many homeless people are roaming the street: because too many people are giving them spare change and paying them to pump gas at service stations, as Hutchinson admits to doing. The vast majority of such handouts to street people wind up financing the very dysfunctions that put most of them on the streets--and keep them there.

Hutchinson admits that many homeless suffer from drug or alcohol disorders. Aren’t these self-made conditions? But this is what we increasingly get in a society that treats anything unpleasant in one’s life as the result necessarily of victimization by others rather than as the bitter fruits of one’s own ill-advised choices.

HOWARD GOODMAN

Glendale