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Published: April 20, 2008

“Stop harassing the poor!”

Catholic Worker among homeless advocates giving LA’s tactics to clean up downtown an unfavorable review

Although Los Angeles police and city government claim they have made Skid Row a safer place, their efforts continue to meet with criticism from some homeless advocates, including from the Los Angeles Catholic Worker.

Over the past year, arrests on Skid Row – known as a bazaar for street drugs -- have risen and crime on the whole has declined, said the April 14 Los Angeles Times. At least violent crime has leveled off, but property crime has risen 60%. Both residents of downtown and city officials say the rise in property crime can be explained by the opening of upscale loft apartments, posh restaurants and bars, and galleries, attracting well-heeled shoppers and clubbers.

A year-and-a-half ago, LA police chief William Bratton instituted the “Safer City Initiative,” placing 50 additional police officers on Skid Row. Like similar initiatives elsewhere in the city, this initiative targeted “the criminal element, which preys upon the homeless and mentally ill,” said Bratton. The initiative is based on the “broken windows” theory that, by targeting minor crimes, police can have an impact on major crime, such as drug dealing and prostitution.

These minor, “quality of life crimes” include urinating in public, having milk crates or shopping carts, jay walking, or simply standing or sitting on the streets. Targeting them has resulted in a decrease in homeless encampments. It also resulted in the decrease of homeless who, as the Times reported in February 2007, have gone to other communities, straining resources of service providers elsewhere. A January 2007 police count found the homeless population downtown had dropped 46% from September 2006.

Dissatisfaction with the Safer City Initiative erupted on April 1 when Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa came to Skid Row to give a press conference praising the initiative’s progress. As the mayor began his address, five protesters from the Catholic Worker soup kitchen across the street appeared with signs and, standing behind Villaraigosa, began shouting, “Stop harassing the poor!” “The poor need housing, not jails!” “Three thousand people arrested for jay walking in one year!”

Villaraigosa continued with his prepared remarks, speaking of the streetlights placed on Skid Row and the hundred more that the city soon will add. He spoke of the need for housing and services. When he noted that, at the initiative’s inception, conditions on Skid Row were out of control, the protesters erupted again, drowning the mayor out, one shouting, “Put ‘em in jail, that’s really good.” Villaraigosa said, “The homeless were preyed upon on a daily basis” -- at which a protester shouted, “Being preyed upon by the police!”

When Villaraigosa mentioned a basketball program for children at Gladys Park on Skid Row, a protester shouted, “The children don’t live on Skid Row!” To which Villaraigosa responded, “and neither do you.”

A Times article noted that two of the protesters live in Boyle Heights and one in West Covina. The article did not mention that the remaining protesters, Jeff Dietrich and Katherine Morris, both live at the Catholic Worker house on Skid Row and have done so since the 1970s.

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