Suit Challenges Private Security Patrols

Claiming they’ve been harassed and assaulted by private security guards patrolling public streets in downtown Los Angeles, 12 homeless residents on Tuesday filed suit against three security companies and the local property owners that employ them.

The class-action lawsuit, the first of its kind in the nation, challenges a fast-growing economic development movement that has put brightly uniformed private security forces on the streets of Los Angeles and other major U.S. cities. The civil complaint alleges that organizers of four of these local “Business Improvement Districts,” or BIDs, have bankrolled a “systematic, concerted campaign” to chase homeless residents off public property in violation of their civil liberties.

According to the complaint filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, skid row indigents have been roughed up, interrogated and falsely imprisoned by private security guards trying to intimidate them into moving to other areas. Representatives of the local BIDs strongly deny that their security forces have done anything wrong. Still, the plaintiffs are seeking an injunction to force the private guards to stop their alleged illegal behavior.

“This is about rogue security guards breaking the law in an effort to sweep the streets clean of people they don’t like,” said Michael Small, chief counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Southern California, one of the attorneys representing the homeless plaintiffs. “Just because they don’t like homeless people doesn’t give them license to break the law.”

The lawsuit also raises questions about just how far the private sector can go in reclaiming crumbling public spaces. Privately funded BIDs have flourished in an era of shrinking government spending, as merchants and business owners in older urban areas have ponied up funds on top of their existing tax assessments to pay for extra security, sanitation and other services. But the proliferation of private guards in public spaces alarms some observers, who worry that these security forces are beholden only to the business groups that employ them.

“There is a question of accountability,” said Douglas Lasdon, executive director of the Urban Justice Center, a nonprofit advocacy group that has tangled with New York City BIDs over a variety of issues. “BIDs don’t have the same kind of democratic controls that government does. They have an incentive to just push social problems out of their areas.”

Representatives of L.A.’s Fashion District, Toytown, Downtown Industrial District and Historic Core BIDs said they hadn’t seen copies of the lawsuit and so could not respond to specific allegations. But Kent Smith, executive director of the Fashion District BID, denied that his organization has ever encouraged its yellow-shirted security forces to cleanse its territory of homeless residents. He said the group has worked hard to make downtown cleaner and safer for everyone, including the hundreds of indigent men and women that call the streets their home.

“In many cases, our safety teams have assisted homeless people who have been victimized by crimes,” Smith said. “Our role is to make sure that community standards are enforced for everyone, whether you’re homeless or a white-collar worker.”

The Fashion District BID is operated by the Downtown Property Owners Assn., which represents landlords in an 82-block area bounded roughly by 7th Street, the Harbor Freeway, Main and San Pedro streets. Other organizations named in the lawsuit include the Central City East Assn., which operates the Toytown and Downtown Industrial District BIDs; the Historic Core Business Improvement District Property Owners Assn., which operates the Historic Core BID; and security firms Burns International Security Services Corp., Totally Secured Inc. and International Services Inc.

Created in Canada in the 1960s and copied in the United States a decade later, BIDs provide a means for business owners to harness the taxing arm of government to spruce up their business districts. Essentially, merchants or property owners agree to tax themselves extra to pay for additional services. The city collects the revenue and returns it to the business district, which decides how to spend it. More than 1,200 BIDs are operating in North America, an estimated 150 to 200 of them in California.

Los Angeles didn’t form its first BID until the mid-1990s, when Mayor Richard Riordan made the private-sector funded initiatives a centerpiece of his economic development strategy. Local merchants and property owners quickly embraced the concept. Now, with 25 active BIDs and 20 more on the drawing board, Los Angeles is on pace to supplant New York City as the nation’s BID capital.

BIDs are credited with helping restore the luster to a slew of once-faded business districts, including Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade and Old Town Pasadena.

Longtime downtown businessman Robert Clinton, whose family’s Clifton’s Cafeteria lies within the Historic Core BID, said the area has changed for the better in recent years thanks to the network of special zones now blanketing downtown Los Angeles. Brightly dressed private security and maintenance patrols now can be spotted throughout the downtown area, tidying streets, giving directions and keeping an eye out for disturbances.

“It’s cleaner, more pedestrian-friendly, it’s less smelly, there’s less graffiti,” Clinton said. “They are filling in where the city leaves off. . . . Just like shopping centers have mall managers, [urban] business districts have BIDs.”

But the special zones also have generated controversy about who has control of public spaces. In New York, former employees of one of that city’s largest BIDs went public in 1995 with allegations that the group organized “goon squads” to roust homeless people from its territory. No lawsuit was filed in that incident, but fallout from the accusations resulted in that BID’s loss of a federal grant later that year.

Tuesday’s class action was filed on behalf of “predominantly homeless individuals in the downtown Los Angeles area.” In their complaint, the 12 homeless plaintiffs described a number of alleged abuses at the hands of private security guards employed by the four named BIDs.

Those allegations include:

* Guards in the Historic Core BID reportedly rousted plaintiff Jerry Nave from where he was sleeping near 9th Street, then used pepper spray on him when he returned to the area.

* Guards in the Downtown Industrial District BID are alleged to have searched the pockets of Armando Cervantes without consent, removing the pain medication he was taking for his broken leg. Cervantes was handcuffed and forced to walk without his crutches for 30 yards to a private patrol car, where he was detained for nearly half an hour. Cervantes was released after Los Angeles police officers arrived.

* Guards in the Downtown Industrial District BID are said to have kicked plaintiff Joe Trotter in the leg, then to have struck him with a stick when he refused to get up from the sidewalk where he was lying.

Other allegations depict a pattern of harassment in which homeless people are routinely asked for identification, searched without permission and told to move along.

“Poor people don’t have any less right to walk the streets of skid row than those fortunate enough to frequent Melrose Avenue and trendier parts of town,” said Dan Marmalefsky, co-counsel for the homeless plaintiffs. “Bottom line, these BIDs appear to have made the decision that the homeless are bad for business.”

Marmalefsky likewise contends that the BIDs have compiled extensive written and photographic records of the homeless residents in their districts.

Tracey Lovejoy, executive director for the Central City East Assn., said security patrols for the Toytown and Downtown Industrial District BIDs only make written field reports and take photographs to document potential crime scenes. She “categorically” denied allegations that her BID’s security team is running roughshod over anyone’s rights. On the contrary, she says, the private guards routinely advise homeless residents where they can obtain help and social services. In addition, Lovejoy said her association established a system this summer to follow up on any complaints about its private security. To date, she says the group hasn’t received a single formal complaint.