Thread by @mikebonin

No one should live on our streets. Period.

But laws like 41.18(d), which criminalize being unhoused, don’t lead to more people in housing.

How do I know this? Because we’ve been enacting them for over 100 years in LA — and the situation has only gotten worse. (thread)

As the saying goes, insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

And yet, as last year’s report from the UCLA Luskin Center makes clear, criminalizing homelessnesss has been LA’s primary approach for over a century.
luskincenter.history.ucla.edu/2021/02/10/lch…

In the 1880s, as the area that would become Skid Row filled with transient, mostly male laborers, LA responded with a barrage of anti-vagrancy laws, arrests, and forced labor camps.

In the 1910s, the city deemed the many clusters of shanties built by recent immigrants a threat to public health, and demolished or vacated nearly 200 separate locations.

In the 1930s, LA enacted a “work test,” in which unemployment was grounds for being issued a three-day ID card, after which police could arrest those who did not leave the city.

In 1936, the LAPD established an extrajudicial border patrol that deployed 136 officers to 16 major points of entry to California to turn back migrants with “no visible means of support.”
latimes.com/archives/la-xp…

In 1940, the city ordered the destruction of all informal encampments, then known as Hoovervilles, across the city.

In 1968, LA first ratified Municipal Code 41.18(d) to outlaw sitting, lying down or sleeping in public rights of way.

In 1987, police and sanitation began dismantling street encampments on Skid Row.

Unhoused residents were displaced, and many ended up in Venice, creating a situation uncanny in its similarity to that which occurred during the pandemic.
latimes.com/visuals/photog…

In 1988, LA passed an ordinance banning overnight camping on beaches, and unhoused people were yet again pushed inland.

In the 2000s, the LAPD instituted its “Safer Cities” initiative, which deployed 50 additional police officers to Skid Row to enforce a zero-tolerance policy on crime.

Nearly every decade, arrests have substituted for services and cycling unhoused people through our extensive jail system has taken the place of housing -- costing far more, accomplishing far less.

Nearly every decade, our city’s unhoused population has grown.

As recently as 2014, my colleague @nithyavraman (before she was elected) wrote a report for CAO that indicated that of the ~$100 million our city was spending annually to address homelessness, as much as $87 million was spent on policing unhoused people.
latimes.com/local/lanow/la…

Since the passage of Measure HHH in 2016, those numbers have gradually improved, and LA has started to focus on housing and services.

But it’s going to take more than a few years to undo over a century of focusing primarily on enforcement

Many people – including my political opponents – are demanding I support and implement laws that criminalize sitting and lying down in ever larger portions of our city.

But these laws take us backwards, make us less safe, and make homelessness worse.

Unhoused people are disproportionately the *victims* of crime – and no official has the power (or desire) to prevent police from investigating criminal acts.

But statutes like 41.18 criminalize not so much an act as the very *state* of being unhoused.
latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/…

People regularly complain that LAPD do not devote sufficient time to investigating property crimes, drug use, and other low-level offenses.

And yet they imagine tasking the department with keeping ~60k people from sitting down in broad swaths of LA will somehow improve this.

At best, an unhoused person on your block might be more easily compelled to move along to the next one.

And someone on a different block will be more easily compelled to move along to yours.

We should not perpetuate a policy that amounts to rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic.

Only more housing and services will make us safer -- and peddling fantasies that criminalization will solve our problems is what’s truly dangerous for our city.