Sheriff Social Worker

For years, Kevin Lamar Evans pushed a shopping cart brimming with his possessions through the streets of Lancaster and Palmdale, bedroom communities that were supposed to be immune to such notorious signs of urban blight. His death in 1999, while clutching a baloney sandwich in the Twin Towers jail downtown, helped spur Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca to radically rethink law enforcement’s approach to the seemingly intractable problem of mentally ill and addicted people living on public streets.

Evans had been born with cerebral palsy, in South-Central Los Angeles. At age 18, he hissed at his sister. His mother and godmother thought he’d been possessed by Satan. The schizophrenia only got worse. By 23, he had drifted to the high desert, where he often stayed in shelters at night and wandered the streets by day, talking to his voices. His death, while he was strapped down in jail, stemmed from his 13th run-in with the law in two years. Suddenly the newly elected sheriff found himself trying to understand the other role thrust upon him: warden of a jail that is, in fact, “the world’s largest mental institution.”

Los Angeles has public and private organizations to help people down on their luck and without a place to stay. But most of the people who wind up living on the streets have mental illness, addictions or both. Now Baca and his staff are spearheading a plan to start breaking the jail-to-streets cycle that continues to ensnare thousands of people like Kevin Evans, while exacting an unacceptably high price on civic pride and public services.

In part because of federal pressure, the jail has already begun screening inmates for mental illness and referring them to services once they get out. Next, Baca hopes to give these people a place to sleep and wash and take advantage of services from job training to counseling that will help them move toward more productive lives. His Public Safety Center for the Homeless would put 150 tent-like living spaces in an area close enough to downtown that many of the 500 people released from Twin Towers each day would choose the camp over the filthy, drug-rich encampments on skid row or in nearby industrial areas.

Baca has done his homework, learning from the county’s handful of successful nonprofit shelters and drop-in centers. He knows that even if there were enough shelter beds in the county--which there are not--many of the people camped out on the city’s sidewalks would remain outside, because their delusions and paranoia make the rules and confinement of shelters and missions a form of torture. An open center, with guaranteed safety measures, would appeal to some of these people. In the 1980s, then-Mayor Tom Bradley’s “urban campground for the homeless” became a magnet for crime. But Baca makes a persuasive case that with law enforcement at the core of the effort that problem won’t arise.

Now the state should come up with the $8 million the sheriff has requested to build the center, and the Board of Supervisors should direct the county Department of Mental Health to oversee it as a pilot program, while working toward better coordination of services countywide.

Sound expensive? Consider: The Sheriff’s Department spends $10 million a year just on psychiatric medicine for the sick people who cycle incessantly though the Twin Towers. California shells out $1.8 billion a year arresting, trying and imprisoning the mentally ill.

There are critics who think “Sheriff Moonbeam” is unrealistic--and on plenty of issues he is. On this one, though, Baca has shown solid leadership, attacking a problem that most elected officials dodge or pass on to others. Jail cells should be used to lock up serious criminals, not to house trespassers with mental illness. And letting people live and die on the sidewalks ought to be a crime.

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Wednesday: From working class to crack encampment, and the tough climb back to stability.

a jail that is, in fact, “the world’s largest mental institution.”