Skid Row Streets Are Home No Longer

Take a trip around a lot of Los Angeles’ skid row these days and there’s something missing: the homeless.

A captain in the Los Angeles Police Department’s Central Division has decided to do something that for years simply was not done: strictly enforce the laws.

During the last few weeks, Capt. Stuart Maislin’s officers have been ticketing the homeless for blocking the sidewalk and jaywalking.

Officers have also been rousing the homeless early in the morning, asking for identification and taking those with outstanding warrants to jail. They have been making more drug busts. In parts of skid row, entire streets have been cleared.

Skid row is a 50-block area east of downtown bordered by 3rd and 7th streets and Alameda and Main streets. The heart of skid row is 5th Street, sometimes called “the nickel.”

Maislin acknowledged that he had changed the policy in recent weeks but said the new tactics were implemented because violent crime had increased in the area. His strategy appears to be working, he said, with violent crime down 2% in the last month in his district. The streets are cleaner and business owners are happier.

But advocates for the homeless are outraged.

For decades, the homeless have lived, although contentiously, among the toy, fish and produce companies that inhabit skid row.

Now, advocates complain that one man has taken it upon himself to break a decades-old, albeit uneasy, truce, declaring war on the city’s homeless.

“The row has never looked like this,” said Alice Callaghan, an Episcopal priest and director of Las Familias del Pueblo, pointing to vacant sidewalks on 5th Street. “They just plain and simply are running everybody out of town.”

That’s all everyone is talking about at the missions and soup kitchens around skid row, such as Hippie Kitchen and Gravy Joe’s.

Some homeless people have as many as three citations stuffed in their pockets.

“Normally, this wall would be filled with people,” said Sharon Dempsey, 48, leaning against the wall at Gravy Joe’s.

She said some officers are telling people to go east of Alameda.

But, she said, that is too far from the missions, social service agencies and portable toilets, which were put out for the homeless.

“To go all the way there, and then you have to come back here for the missions--it’s too hard to carry all your stuff,” she said. “And if you leave it, they take it.”

Sharon Gibbs leaned on a shopping cart on Industrial Way. She moved there, she said, after getting a ticket for blocking the sidewalk near 5th Street.

“It’s ID, ID, ID,” she said of the police who have stopped her several times. “They are constantly stopping you.”

Jerry, 50, who would not give his last name, said he had been awakened twice in the last three days by officers asking for his identification.

“Anymore, you don’t have to be doing something to be stopped by police,” he said. “You just have to be.”

Another woman pulled out a ticket she had just gotten from a police officer for “lying or sleeping on the sidewalk.” She was afraid to have her name published for fear of harassment.

Police came about 9 a.m. on Wednesday while she was sleeping on a mat the size of a bath towel. She had two small bags beside her.

An officer “woke me up and told me to move,” she said. “Then, he told me he was going to have to ticket me. I wasn’t blocking anything. A lot of people have a lot more stuff than me.”

11,000 People Live in Skid Row Area

These are the latest residents of a skid row that has been around since the turn of the century, at first the destination of vagabonds who rode the rails and checked into cheap hotels. “It’s always been a working man’s neighborhood,” Callaghan said. “It was the one place people could find a place to sleep.”

The area has about 11,000 living in hotels and on the street. In the early days, it was primarily home to the down and out, many of them alcoholics. It was not particularly violent. But that changed with the onset of crack cocaine, and the arrival, beginning in the 1970s, of thousands of mentally ill people who had no place to go after the closing of many state hospitals.

To survive, businesses have hired private security guards and installed sprinklers to keep vagrants away.

Some business owners have complained that it is unfair for them to be saddled with the homeless when they would not be tolerated elsewhere.

“There is no reason in the world why the toy district merchants should be expected to live with it,” said Tracey Lovejoy of the Central City East Assn.

“It is difficult to do business with people camping in front of your business. It intimidates customers and your employees.”

But advocates for the homeless, including Callaghan and Catherine Morris, a Catholic volunteer who has worked on skid row since 1971, say the homeless were on skid row first.

It is unconscionable, they contend, for business to come in, take advantage of the low property values because of the homeless and then turn around and try to chase the homeless away.

Leonard Schneiderman, professor emeritus in the School of Public Policy at UCLA, said he empathizes with both arguments.

“You have to be sympathetic to the fact that there is a public nuisance. You don’t want to be harassed. There is a legitimate public interest here,” he said.

But he does not believe jailing the homeless, many of whom are convicted felons, mentally ill or drug addicted, is the solution.

“The way we are approaching it, giving citations or locking them up, is nonsense,” he said.

“What we need is local officials making great demands on state government to correct those who are in correctional institutions and treat people who are mentally ill and substance abusers.”

Until recently, the police tried to deal with the situation with a heavy police presence and by insisting that the homeless pack up their camps during the day.

But Maislin, who has been captain of the Central Division for two years, said violent crime has been increasing. He said he was told by Police Chief Bernard C. Parks recently to try to bring the rate down.

He said the most dangerous area is the 5th Street corridor.

“We have tried to do it by not arresting, by keeping officers on the streets more,” he said. “We are taking a different approach.”

Maislin said getting violent criminals off the street helps everyone, including the homeless.

“Essentially [violent criminals] tend to camouflage themselves among the homeless, and that’s also who they prey on,” Maislin said. “We’re also trying to reduce the number of victims too.”

Callaghan has been passing out fliers in recent days advising the homeless of their rights, which she thinks are being violated in some cases. She is considering having lawyers go to court to get a restraining order against the police.

She said police are counting on the fact that many of the homeless who are ticketed will not make it to court. That means warrants will be issued for their arrests. Then, when police come back asking for their identifications, they will be taken to jail.

She said what upsets her most is not the crackdown but that it seems to be a decision made by police without consulting a variety of community and political leaders and experts on the homeless.

“We would at least like to get the rest of the city into the conversation,” Callaghan said. “It shouldn’t be just one captain who decides on his own to move thousands of homeless.”