By the Los Angeles Housing and Homeless Committee
California has a sordid history of criminalizing poor and homeless people with laws against sitting, lying, or sleeping/camping that date back to the 1870s. Just after the abolition of slavery in 1865, Penal Code 647e declared that “No person shall sit, lie, camp on public or private property without the owner’s permission.” PC 647e took effect in 1872 and is still on the books. Counties and municipalities use it as a yardstick for local laws against sitting, sleeping and camping.
Los Angeles municipal code 41.18 was born out of PC 647e in the early 1930s, during the Great Depression. The Los Angeles Police Department used it as a social control tool in communities of color, regulating who and what can be upon public property. Shortly after the Civil Rights Movement won the abolition of Jim Crow segregation, Section D was added to give LAPD even more power to regulate who and what can and cannot be in public spaces.
In 2005, a federal court found the city of Los Angeles guilty of violating the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment in the case Jones vs. the City of Los Angeles. Because the city lacked enough housing for people to go to, it was forced to let people sleep on the streets between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. until the city built 1,200 units of permanent housing. With fewer than 180 tents on Skid Row, this was the perfect time for the city to start investing in housing for the homeless. Instead, city officials did the worst thing ever. They decided to attempt to police themselves out of homelessness.
Police chief Bill Bratton, with his broken windows theory of policing, was given the green light to launch the “safer cities initiative.” It soon made Skid Row the most policed community in the world. Cops averaged 1,300 citations and 750 arrests per month. In the first three years of the initiative, they wrote 36,000 citations and made 27,000 arrests – all within a 15-block area of only 13,000 residents, at an annual cost of more than $100 million. Over the next 10 years, 85% of the city’s homeless budget would also go to LAPD as well as 54% of the city’s general fund budget.
The most arrested person on Skid Row is a middle-aged Black woman named Ann Moody, who has been arrested 108 times for violating 41.18d. For policing Skid Row’s homeless with such an iron fist, activists said Los Angeles deserved “the meanest city award.” The National Law Center conducted its own report on how many people were arrested; the Central Division became known as “the worst police station in America” with the most arrests, the worst record of arrests, the highest number of tickets and the highest number of incidents of brutality.
Even after the Jones case, Los Angeles would be found guilty five more times in federal court for violating First, Fourth, Fifth, Eighth, Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments in these five cases:
Fitzgerald vs. the city; Tony Laven vs. the city; Carl Mitchell vs. the city; Garcia vs. the city and the L.A. Alliance for Human Rights vs. the city.
In every case, Los Angeles would be found guilty. City officials would “bounce tactics,” that is targeting homeless individuals, then targeting homeless people’s property and then attacking homeless encampments.
Capitalism’s same old soup
At a time when housing is not being built fairly for everyone; when five homeless people in Los Angeles die daily, we see the “same old soup” being warmed up all over again! Just as racist and selective laws were used to divide and socially control our ancestors, the same kinds of laws attack the poor and homeless today. The city raids homeless people, their property and their encampments, issuing “stay away” orders that banish residents. This often displaces them from the community they grew up in, where their neighbors and relatives live. Stay-away orders also banish them from parks, schools, libraries, shelters, freeways, ramps, tunnels, bridges, subways, and railroads. They involve a total of 2,000 sites and more than 88 square miles in the city.
Meanwhile, developers attack and erase cultures and communities; police harass and displace the youth; street vendors are cited and their food carts taken away. It’s all one fight, with homeless people being third- and fourth-class citizens. It is like a whole new different class of citizenship, when you look at the language the city uses, what they say and how they treat people. When the homeless go into their hotels they want to take the television out – people say, “shit is removed from where we live!”
They bring in the police. We’re the untrusted class. We’re triple-policed. We’re not treated like we’re regular citizens. Economically, they treat us like we have no investments. You are more a liability rather than someone who supports and builds the community and economy, not like someone who is putting in. How do we unite all this with other fights across the city?
One of the ideas we introduce is new ideas about land and property. For example, they always say, “go here, go there,” but there is no place to go. The capitalists have taken all the land. How do we get back? We need to start demanding land rights. Mother Nature left land for everybody to live on.
It started with private property; it started with colonization. We need to cancel that. We cannot allow capitalization and colonization to destroy and divide up everything and hand it over to people who have money. And they say, “Oh, you’re homeless.” Yes, because you stole everything. That’s the reason I’m homeless. You give back the land and then I won’t be homeless.
Published on August 28, 2023
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