Housing, Homelessness, and the Butt End of the City Budget
By Peggy Lee
Kennedy
If you follow the news you know
that the Mayor came out strongly in favor of “Public Safety,” in the
city’s 2008-09 budget, which includes increasing the LAPD by 1,000 police
and decreasing other needed services.
Unfortunately, nested within this Public
Safety budget is a police budget of over $1.3 billion (around one third of the
City’s total budget) that is using so-called scarce city recourses to
criminalize poor and homeless people – resources that could be used for
real solutions to homelessness and affordable housing. This involves something
called Quality of Life Policing; a policy that evolved partially out of a
right-wing theory of zero tolerance policing called “Broken Windows”
(Atlantic Monthly 1982, by James Q Wilson and George Kelling). It was made
popular in New York in the 1990s by William Bratton, now Chief of the Los
Angeles Police Department. This zero tolerance/quality of life policing is a
form of proactive law enforcement that focuses on a business-like “bottom
line” of reducing crime. The basic theory is if police address smaller
offenses of “disorder,” such as panhandling or loitering, then
violent crime will diminish.
In
addition, our law-makers are now calling certain laws Quality of Life, such as
anti-homeless laws that make it a crime to live in a vehicle or sleep in a park
even though these acts may be unavoidable - done through necessity due to
poverty, lack of social services, an extreme shortage of affordable housing, or
other social-economic reasons. These Quality of Life laws are specifically used
to remove poor people, youth of color, or homeless people (people viewed as
inferior) from a neighborhood. Other Quality of Life anti-homeless laws include
making oversized camper vehicles illegal to park on city streets between 2-6AM,
Overnight [Permit] Parking Districts, and a law that says no vehicles should be
parking on a city street for more 72-hours is mostly used to target the poorest
people. One example of an anti-poor Quality of Life law is the law that makes it
a crime to live in a converted
garage.
Quality of Life Policing and
Quality of Life Laws are especially popular in neighborhoods experiencing
gentrification - like Venice, downtown Los Angeles, or Echo Park. This form of
policing and law making or law application distinctively does not protect or
serve the people who most need to have a better quality of life. They do the
opposite and should be re-named Inequality of Life.
[Ine]Quality of Life Policing uses
considerable Police resources dedicated to giving tickets to people who cannot
pay the fines, who cannot make it to court, or who have done no other crime
except to be poor and living homeless.
Tickets turn into warrants and
homeless people get arrested – often in sweeps, which is another elaborate
use of police resources and horrible for the people being arrested. The people
arrested regularly plead “no contest” instead of “not
guilty” to get off with time served, due to lack of legal representation
and a lack of knowledge of their rights (National Coalition for the Homeless
(NCH), 2002), and they end up with a criminal record, probation, and stay-away
orders for areas with the only social services – like the Venice Family
Clinic and Saint Joseph’s Bread and Roses Café on Rose Ave. in
Venice.
It is a fact that ticketing,
arresting, and incarcerating homeless people costs more than actually housing
people. Our elected officials know this, but do not appear to care. They do
nothing to stop the propaganda campaign of fear that justifies these laws (sound
familiar?) and even cater to the civilian hate mongers who are calling them over
and over. While we, the taxpayers, are all paying for a system that does not
work. [Ine]Quality of Life Policing simply does not work to solve homelessness.
It very often violates people’s civil rights and can lead to costly
litigation. It is helping to erode our Constitution. The “bottom
line” is that it is very expensive.
Also, when a homeless person has a
criminal record, it increases the barriers to finding housing and shelter.
Section 8 housing applications, including the Section 8 buildings in Venice
owned by Coldwater Management, require a credit check and a background check. If
a person has a bankruptcy, a prior eviction, or a misdemeanor – they can
virtually forget it.
Now where are
these people supposed to go when there is no affordable housing or proper
shelter system, when these laws are citywide laws and people have been given a
criminal record using Inequality of Life Policing? Should they live in jail or
just die? As a matter of fact they do. People are dying homeless on our streets
more often than we know and increasingly poor people are being housed in jails
and prisons while we are paying to build more. It is a vicious cycle of a
growing fascist police state that we are funding. Except some of us actually do
not want to live in a fascist police
state.
OK, I know there are people
reading this that do not recognize all the signs that say “No Poor People
Allowed” as being part of a fascist state. Maybe we all just need to turn
off the TV more, care for each other more, pray more, and find peace within.
Maybe the chem trails really are turning us all into robots. I don’t know,
but I believe people have to struggle beyond the petty fear and intolerance we
are being conditioned with. I wish more of us would try to remember that all
human beings deserve the basic rights of healthy food and decent shelter. These
basic rights should not just belong to the chosen few. That is why we call it
Human Rights and not Rights for the Few who have property, power, and privilege.
Posted: Thu - May 1, 2008 at 07:10 PM
