Private Security Bores in on the Homeless
As the soup truck edges down Los Angeles Street, Armando waits, bedded down in a castoff cardboard box set next to hundreds of others lined row by row, block after block, as far as the heart can bear to see. Nearby, Johnny sleeps on his shoes so no one will steal them.
Armando and Johnny are two plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed this week against four downtown business improvement districts and the private security guards they employ. These guards have conducted a campaign to coerce the poor and homeless to leave the business area, fashion district and the streets of skid row. It is a campaign governed not by the checks and balances of constitutional law but by the intent to immediately and absolutely rid the area of the poor. Business improvement districts, or BIDs, are associations of property owners that agree to tax themselves to fund extra maintenance, improvements, marketing and security for their area. The tax is mandatory for all property owners in the area and is collected by the city, which then returns the money to the BID to spend as it sees fit. Much of the downtown BIDs’ budget is spent on private security guards to deter what the private businesses consider “unsuitable behavior” on public sidewalks.
This has resulted in a deliberate pattern of infringement of civil rights, including coercive detention and invasion of privacy, as well as assault and battery. Untrained and almost unregulated, this private security force has, in substance and effect, denied a class of citizens because they are poor and homeless the right of all Americans to move freely on public sidewalks.
The poor and homeless are routinely stopped, ordered to provide information about themselves, photographed against their will and forced to allow their personal belongings to be examined. Hundreds if not thousands of these “field interviews” constitute the private security’s extensive files being compiled on downtown’s poor. Field interview forms have the city seal on them.
One plaintiff in the lawsuit was detained by the security guards, accused of jaywalking, forced against a fence and patted down. The guards confiscated his diabetes medication and threatened to dump it on the street. A passing police officer stopped them. Another plaintiff was forced against a wall, handcuffed and locked in a security car because the guards decided the man had rock cocaine. Workers at a soup kitchen where the man had just eaten called police who freed him. The rock cocaine turned out to be bread crumbs.
Unlike police, who operate within set rules and oversight determined by the public and the Constitution, BID private security forces are answerable only to the private businesses that employ them, even though it is public space they patrol.
The BID members do not address the homelessness, unemployment, addiction or misery that are endemic to the poor. To them, the poor people downtown don’t have problems; they are the problem, a special breed of human beings for whom special laws are necessary.
To be sure, many are weary of stepping over and around the poor on the way to work or into a restaurant. Yet no one in Santa Monica or Pasadena would tolerate private security paid by local businesses ordering him or her to “move on” while standing on a sidewalk or demanding to see identification, taking photographs or rifling through personal belongings while out for a Sunday stroll. If it becomes acceptable to trample on the constitutional protections of any group, no group or individual is safe.
Good people and bad people, rich and poor, scholars and drunks, all are protected by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Now it will fall to the courts to decide whether the constitutional rights of the poor and homeless can be denied in order to bring a swift end to their visibility.
