A ruling this month by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals which holds it is unconstitutional to ban homeless people from sleeping on the streets is likely to complicate the attempts to crack down on homelessness problems by local governments in California.

While the ruling involved a 2009 law adopted by Boise, Idaho, it is binding on California, which is one of the states under the 9th appellate court, which is based in San Francisco.

“[J]ust as the state may not criminalize the state of being ‘homeless in public places,’ the state may not ‘criminalize conduct that is an unavoidable consequence of being homeless — namely sitting, lying, or sleeping on the streets,’” Judge Marsha Berzon wrote for a three-judge panel.

The finding that the law is a cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment was welcomed by activists who have long argued that such restrictions make being poor a crime.

Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, told the Idaho Statesman that “criminally punishing homeless people for sleeping on the street when they have nowhere else to go is inhumane, and we applaud the court for holding that it is also unconstitutional.” Her group provided an attorney to the handful of Boise homeless men and women who sued over the city’s law.

If Boise does not appeal the ruling, the 9th Circuit will have expanded on the protections for the homeless that it created in 2007. The appellate panel ruled then that Los Angeles could not ban people from sleeping outside when shelters were full.

Legality of living in cars is next battleground

Meanwhile, the next fight over homeless rights in California has already emerged. It involves regulations in many cities that have the de facto effect of banning people from sleeping in their vehicles, even if the practice is not specifically singled out.

In Los Angeles, for example, a city ordinance that bans overnight parking in residential areas and a growing number of such restrictions in commercial areas have made it increasingly difficult for vehicle dwellers to find anywhere to sleep. This has made life difficult for the estimated 15,000 people who live in their cars, trucks or recreational vehicles in the city. The policy prompted sharp criticism from some quarters this spring over a perception that City Hall was insufficiently sympathetic to those without shelter.

City officials in San Diego and Santa Barbara are going in the opposite direction, starting trial programs in which car dwellers are allowed to use a handful of designated parking lots overnight – so long as they meet a handful of rules meant to preserve public safety and to minimize littering and public defecation and urination.

But San Diego may have to expand its program or develop other new policies as well. Last month, federal Judge Anthony Battaglia issued an injunction banning the city from ticketing people for living in their vehicles.

Unlike in the other high-profile federal cases involving city laws and homelessness, Battaglia’s argument wasn’t based on the idea that penalties which appeared to single out the homeless were cruel and unusual.

Instead, he concluded that “plaintiffs have shown a likelihood of success on the merits of their claim that the ordinance is vague because it fails to alert the public what behavior is lawful and what behavior is prohibited.” He noted that some people were given tickets merely for reading books in their cars.

The injunction is not permanent, but Battaglia indicated he is likely to make it so in coming months.

On June 30, 2004, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom won national headlines when he

Newsom said he wanted a “dramatic shift” from reactive policies used to deal with those without shelter who often suffer from addiction, mental illness or both. He promised that the aggressive transients seen in downtown areas harassing storekeepers, residents and tourists would get indoor housing; that the newly homeless would have access to immediate help to prevent them from going on downward spirals; and, perhaps most remarkably, that emergency homeless shelters eventually would have to close because they would have no transients left to serve.

Fourteen years later, Newsom’s promises seem like fantasies – or cruel jokes – in a city where the quality of life and the tourism industry feel under siege from 7,500 or more homeless people. Despite spending more than $2 billion on the problem since 2004 – vastly more than big cities with similar homeless issues – San Francisco officials sometimes convey the sense of feeling overwhelmed.

The notion that the problem is out of control is frequently illustrated by visiting journalists who make parts of the city seem like obstacle courses covered by feces, used needles and surly, erratic individuals ready to intimidate passers-by into giving them money.

Yet San Francisco’s problem is actually in some ways both better and worse than in similar cities. Despite a brutal housing crisis that makes paying rent difficult even for those making $100,000 or more, the total number of homeless has been flat in recent years, unlike other large California cities. San Francisco has also managed to avoid the emergence of mass encampments of transients seen in neighboring Oakland and elsewhere in urban areas.

Disturbed, disruptive homeless more common in city

So what is driving the perception that the homeless problem is worse than ever in the city? An article in the June 1 issue of The Economist made the case that San Francisco had an intense concentration of the most disturbed, disruptive homeless – individuals who generally make up a relative handful of the homeless in much of Southern California.

“[The] rates of mental illness and addiction among the homeless have increased. Use of more potent mind-bending drugs, like fentanyl and methamphetamine, has risen, too. Nearly 70 percent of psychiatric emergency-room visits by the homeless are the result of methamphetamine-induced psychosis,” The Economist wrote.

This psychosis may be driving a public health crisis spurred by open defecation in the streets. Complaints about human feces in the city nearly tripled from 2009 to 2017, reaching 21,000 last year.

Tourists are noticing. On July 2, the city’s convention and visitor bureau announced that it had lost one of its biggest accounts – an unnamed medical group which had a long tradition of regularly bringing 15,000 free-spending conventioneers to the Bay Area. Given tourism – not tech – remains San Francisco’s biggest industry, city officials were alarmed.

Long before that announcement, London Breed – the Willie Brown protege who took over as mayor on July 11 – said reducing homelessness’ impact on the city was her top priority. So far a key focus has been on giving the city new authority to use conservatorship laws to allow interventions into the lives of the most troubled individuals.

Newsom plans ‘granular’ approach to issue if elected

As for Newsom, the lieutenant governor is now the heavy favorite to succeed Gov. Jerry Brown. Undaunted by what’s happened in San Francisco since his 2004 pledge, he’s touting the most aggressive efforts yet by the state government to reduce homelessness.

If he defeats Republican John Cox in November, Newsom told the Sacramento Bee that he’d “get deeply involved at a granular level where most governors haven’t in the past.”

“I want to be held accountable on this issue, and I want to be disruptive of the status quo,” Newsom said. “I’m willing to take risks. I’m not here to be loved. What’s going on is unacceptable, and it is inhumane.”

“We have to revisit the numbers we’re reporting and what they mean,” Commander Dominic Choi told Southern California Public Radio. “We’re not caseworkers, so we can’t follow up.” In other words, they don’t know what those contacts mean. Police aren’t allowed to say anything given confidentiality requirements. And they are law-enforcement officers – not social workers – so it’s unreasonable for them to act like caseworkers even when they engage in something that resembles casework.

Supporters of the plan say it could provide needed aid to homeless people, but opponents argue that social workers rather than police are best able to offer needed assistance.

Basically, the officers go to the homeless encampments a few days before city workers come by to demolish the structures, clean up the mess and shoo people away. The officers give them warning and referrals to receive help with food, medical care or housing. The LAPD says that more than 3,500 of the homeless accepted some referral. But the news report says that it’s “unclear” how many of them then received services. And homeless advocates note that accepting referral isn’t a big deal. Who isn’t going to accept the information from a police officer?

The LAPD wants the public to believe that this is about helping the homeless. But Choi, who heads the effort for the agency, told the radio network that the main mission of the program is to protect city workers and enforce health regulations. That’s a reasonable point. But too often police give fines and citations to homeless people. Given homeless people’s lack of resources and myriad problems, that might not be the most helpful approach, given that the referrals may seem like an afterthought.

Then there was the case last year where Los Angeles police officers shot to death a homeless man on Skid Row. Even though the DA and police commission found the shooting to be justified, it’s not unusual for homeless people to distrust police visits. Given the rampant mental illness and drug-abuse problems among the homeless population, if the city increases police interactions this could realistically lead to more deadly encounters.

“We have to do something,” Choi was quoted as saying. Indeed. But the main question is whether that something should come from the police department or from social workers.

Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.

The rush is on to find a way to amp up available housing in California. Amid new reports claiming that housing has become unaffordable across the state, legislators, officials and activists have begun a rush for solutions. 

“In its first comprehensive analysis since the year 2000, California’s Department of Housing and Community Development paints a bleak picture of the state’s housing landscape,” KQED reported. “While it points to some hopeful developments, the report suggests lawmakers will need to consider serious policy changes if California is going to build the projected 1.8 million new homes needed by 2025.”

Widespread burdens

Findings suggested that, until then, Californians could continue to face extraordinary pressure in matching their budgets to homes in the places they earn their living. “The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development defines people as ‘cost burdened’ when they spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing,” ABC Sacramento noted. “Statewide, more than 3 million households exceed the 30 percent guideline when it comes to paying rent. And more than 1.5 million households see more than half of their income going towards rent. Every county mentioned in the report — from San Francisco to San Diego — is housing burdened.”

His own initial housing plans rebuffed by the state Legislature, Gov. Jerry Brown has focused his attention around plans that don’t rely on bigger allocations of funds from Sacramento. “The governor’s office will seek approval of policies to streamline housing construction, lower the cost of homebuilding through reduced local government fees, and to create incentives for local governments to approve more housing,” according to the Orange County Register.

“The governor’s office is pursuing court certification of the ‘No Place Like Home’ program, which will use $2 billion in bond money to create affordable-housing programs for mentally ill homeless people. The budget plan, however, eliminates $400 million for affordable housing since the Legislature failed last year to approve the governor’s plan to streamline the homebuilding approval process.”

Brown laid out the logic behind his initial approach at the news conference where he unveiled his budget plan. “We’ve got to bring down the cost structure of housing and not just find ways to subsidize it,” he said, the Los Angeles Times reported. “What we can do is cut the red tape, cut the delays, cut whatever expenses we can afford to do without to make housing more affordable and therefore increase the stock and therefore hopefully bring down the costs.” The governor’s office has claimed that California suffers a deficit of 100,000 housing units a year based on current population growth projections, the Times added, with residents at the bottom of the income scale facing the most daunting challenges. 

Reshuffling the deck

In Sacramento, lawmakers have advanced a series of bills aimed at reducing the problem by other means. State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, has proposed to “free affordable housing projects from compliance with certain local development-related regulations,” Construction Dive noted. “Meanwhile, another state senate bill proposes garnering funding for affordable housing through a $75 tax on real-estate transactions,” while another “would end a tax break on second homes in the state to fund an existing affordable housing program there.”

In the private sector, familiar patterns of construction and opposition have been disrupted by the extent of California’s housing crunch. The crisis has prompted a surprising shift among advocates typically arrayed against the Golden State’s big players in housing, whose heft and risk tolerance are needed assets in any swift and substantial expansion of residential options. “Environmental lawyer Marco Gonzalez spent more than a decade suing real-estate developers in California,” the Wall Street Journal recently noted in a report on the phenomenon. “Now he is on the opposite side, among a growing group of advocates who are taking a once unthinkable approach to development in their backyards: They are trying to force cities to allow more of it.”

By spending a week down and out in Fresno, Neel Kashkari has made the state’s sky-high poverty rate a central issue in the governor’s race, and in the process, debunked Gov. Jerry Brown’s myth of a “California Comeback.”

Last week, the Republican gubernatorial nominee hopped on a Greyhound bus headed for Fresno with just $40 in his pocket and the goal of drawing attention to the other California, where nearly 9 million people live in poverty.

“I wanted to see firsthand what that comeback looks like for many Californians,” Kashkari writes in a powerful opinion piece featured in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal. “With only $40 in my pocket (and no credit cards), a backpack, a change of clothes and a toothbrush, I planned to find a job and earn enough money to get by.”

“I am an able-bodied 41-year-old,” the former Treasury official wrote. “Surely I could find some work.”

But Kashkari, who has an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, was unable to find work and, after five days, turned to a local homeless shelter for food.

“I offered to do anything: wash dishes, sweep floors, pack boxes, cook meals, anything,” Kashkari said of his experience. “In seven days, I didn’t see a single ‘Help Wanted’ sign, but I did see plenty of signs that fast-food outlets now accept food stamps.”

Jerry Brown’s myth of the California Comeback

The unconventional campaign move, which was documented by two videographers, debunks the central theme of Brown’s re-election campaign: that he’s led a remarkable comeback of the eighth largest economy in the world.

“‘California Comeback!’ is the favorite slogan of Gov. Jerry Brown and other Sacramento politicians cheering a temporary budget surplus provided by a roaring stock market,” Kashkari said. “But California also has the highest poverty rate in America at 24 percent and I wanted to see first-hand what life is really like for many of our friends and neighbors.”

In March 2013, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman admonished the rest of the country to follow Brown’s “Lessons From a Comeback,” which included a round of tax increases approved by voters in 2012. Brown formally picked up that theme in this year’s State of the State address, in which he officially declared the state’s “comeback” — a message quickly repeated by the state’s mainstream media.

“Jerry Brown, California’s comeback king,” the Los Angeles Times proclaimed, following the governor’s speech. “California is back. And like it or not, that’s in no small measure because of Jerry Brown.”

24 percent poverty rate – worst in nation

The Republican candidate’s homeless challenge mirrors similar efforts by Democratic politicians to highlight the problems facing working families. United States Senator Cory Booker, D-New Jersey, kicked off his political career by living in “some of Newark’s roughest neighborhoods.”  Earlier this month, Ted Strickland, the former Democratic Governor of Ohio, spent a week living on minimum wage.

“I know I’ll never be able to truly walk in the shoes of a minimum wage worker,” the Democrat wrote in Politico Magazine, “but experiencing just some of the decisions this income requires on a daily basis is enough to understand that we need to do better for these hardworking families.

With a 20-point lead in the latest opinion polls, Brown has largely ignored Kashkari — most recently telling reporters that he might not bother to debate his opponent.

“I haven’t made up my mind,” Brown told reporters accompanying him on his trip to Mexico.

By borrowing a page from Democrats’ playbook, Kashkari elevates the issue of poverty to a major topic in the gubernatorial campaign.

“Jerry Brown is ducking,” Kashkari said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” saying that the most recent campaign move was intended to “force a conversation” about the state’s 24 percent poverty rate — the worst in the nation.

Not first time Kashkari has raised issue of poverty

This isn’t the first time that Kashkari has pressed Brown on poverty. During the exploratory phase of his campaign, Kashkari spent a night in a homeless shelter and worked the fields picking produce. In January, Kashkari attempted to raise the issue, but struggled to capture the media’s attention.

“Gov. Brown may claim a California comeback, but the truth is that he has forgotten the millions of California families who are struggling,” Kashkari said in response to the governor’s State of the State address. “Twenty-four percent of our fellow Californians live in poverty. Yet how many times did the governor mention poverty in his 17-minute address? Not once. That is outrageous.”

But don’t expect the Capitol establishment to recognize Kashkari’s repeated attempts to change the image of the California Republican Party.

“Kashkari has not for one minute shown an interest in re-branding his party,” CalBuzz bloggers Phil Trounstine and Jerry Roberts wrote on Monday.

The ordinance, Section 85.02 of the Los Angeles Municipal Code, declared, “No person shall use a vehicle parked on or standing upon any City street or upon any parking lot owned by the City of Los Angeles or under control of the Los Angeles County Department of Beaches and Harbors as living quarters either overnight, day-by-day, or otherwise.”

In the case, Desertrain vs. City of Los Angeles, three judges on the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously overturned a lower court ruling that upheld the ban. Dating back to 1983, the ban wasn’t enforced until 2010, when an LAPD task force was created in response to complaints centered in Venice neighborhoods. According to the city, Section 85.02 was employed in response to “the illegal dumping of trash and human waste on city streets that was endangering public health” in the area. 

That didn’t fly with the court. One plaintiff, Patricia Warivonchik, lived in an RV located in a church parking lot, which raised little prospect of public trash; another, Steve Jacobs-Elstein, was arrested as a result of being cited on a Venice street waiting in his car to volunteer at a church’s soup kitchen.

Aware of the selective and unpredictable enforcement of the ordinance, the court slammed the ordinance for its unconstitutionally vague language. Historically, language of that kind has raised substantial questions as to whether citizens’ Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment due process rights were being violated.

Judge Harry Pregerson, writing the opinion, thrilled social justice-minded legal activists with his emphasis on the legal history of laws and regulations “designed to prevent the physical movement and economic ascension of the lower class.”

Ambiguous laws

Nevertheless, Pregerson’s legal reasoning did not hinge on class analysis. “Plaintiffs are left guessing as to what behavior would subject them to citation and arrest by an officer,” he wrote in the opinion’s key passage. “Is it impermissible to eat food in a vehicle? Is it illegal to keep a sleeping bag? Canned food? Books? What about speaking on a cell phone? Or staying in the car to get out of the rain? These are all actions Plaintiffs were taking when arrested for violation of the ordinance, all of which are otherwise perfectly legal.” 

The ordinance clearly stacked the odds against homeless Angelenos, who spend relatively more time in their cars because they reside in them. But as Angelenos of all classes are aware, idling in a car while eating or using a smartphone is commonplace.

Although Pregerson focused specifically on the illegitimacy of the ordinance’s discriminatory enforcement, the court’s ruling underscored a broad, venerable principle of law: vague rules compel selective enforcement. Without a rational basis for punishing some but not other possible infractions, officers will be required to enforce a law arbitrarily, relying on hunches, quotas, or more capricious and selective means. Otherwise, vague laws will simply go unenforced — as did Section 85.02 until four years ago.

A local fight ends

The ruling follows on the heels of another legal action ended earlier this year. In January, Venice residents abandoned efforts to impose overnight parking restrictions, another attempt to address the presence of homeless living in RVs and cars.

Although the city of Los Angeles enforced regulations against parking “oversized” vehicles overnight, California Coastal Commission opposition to the Venice Stakeholders Association plan drove the group to sue for permitted parking in Los Angeles County Superior Court. With that suit now dropped, no obstacles remain to homeless Angelenos living in their vehicles.

By Steven Greenhut

SACRAMENTO — The Homeless Bill of Rights, the name applied to a bill that recently soared through the California Assembly’s Judiciary Committee on a 7-2 vote, is the latest in a long line of legislation that has grabbed national attention for its sheer outlandishness. It’s not too far-fetched to fear that, eventually, California’s “differently sheltered” will be the only residents left with any rights.

AB 5’s worst provisions have been stripped away, and I doubt the governor would sign something that so thoroughly offends municipal officials, but the proposal does epitomize so much of the thinking that dominates this state’s government. Legislators in all states introduce unorthodox stuff to make a point. But in California, strange bills can actually make it to the governor’s desk.

The homeless bill’s author, Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, deserves credit for at least identifying a real problem, noteworthy in a Legislature that too often avoids reality. Homelessness is rampant in much of California, and the troubled people who wander our streets often have nowhere to go as they get chased from one location to the next.

Homelessness is a vexing problem, but the solution is not to make the homeless a protected class, with a constitutional right to urinate on sidewalks and accumulate piles of vermin-infested belongings in city parks. Instead of giving the homeless a place to live, the state government wants to give them taxpayer-subsidized lawyers.

The bill features overwrought civil-rights-inspired language. It notes that California has “a long history of discriminatory laws and ordinances that have disproportionately affected people with low incomes.” The language refers to Jim Crow laws and Depression-era anti-Okie laws.

Cities here struggle — sometimes clumsily and unfairly – with throngs of people who camp out in city parks and sleep on sidewalks and in public doorways. There is a legitimate public issue here.

When I worked in a downtown Sacramento office building, my colleagues and I joked about seeming to be in a scene from a zombie movie. As we walked down the street, homeless people would shuffle toward us, hands out, appealing for money. One of my reporters was assaulted by a homeless person.

And in a well-publicized incident near my old office, a homeless woman shot a man in a wheelchair after he told her to get a job. It’s not always unreasonable to try to shoo them away.

Just pawns in their game

The homeless — many of whom are mentally ill or have substance-abuse issues — need compassion and social services (preferably ones provided by nonprofits, rather than by government bureaucracies, too often focused more on their own employees). Instead, they are used as pawns in a politician’s posturing.

The most objectionable language in the Ammiano bill has been removed. Critics pointed to the now-deleted provision that guaranteed homeless people “the right to engage in life-sustaining activities that must be carried out in public spaces.” That includes eating, congregating, collecting personal property and urinating. I’ve known nonhomeless people who have received a citation for peeing in public, but a homeless person would have been exempt had the original language remained intact.

Legislators also stripped away a provision that would have banned private businesses from discriminating against homeless people, which would have resulted in restaurants and hotels becoming a haven for these folks. And forget about private-property rights.

The current version still includes the right to panhandle, the right to occupy public spaces, the right to fish through trash receptacles in search of recyclables, the right to sleep in a car and the right to taxpayer-funded legal counsel if a municipality issues a citation to a homeless person for any of the protected activities. The legislation also requires the state to fund homeless shelters and “hygiene centers.”

Harmful regulation

Unfortunately, Ammiano’s legitimate points — i.e., how local governments make it difficult at times for nonprofits and churches to hand out food and operate homeless shelters — are lost in the outrage.

It would be nice if homeless advocates recognized the degree to which governmental regulations such as rent control, excessive building regulations, union wage requirements, governmental red tape and restrictive land-use policies drive up the cost of housing and punish organizations that want to help out.

Years ago, I wrote about the way some cities had harassed poor people who lived in cheap motels, forcing them to move every 30 days to keep the motels from becoming permanent homes for the poor. No one wants to live in a crummy motel, but such shelter is better than living outside, near the train tracks. Ammiano ought to contact Anaheim’s Mayor Tom Tait, who worked out fair-minded rules to help these people.

By taking a trial lawyer’s approach to homelessness, activists fail to make distinctions between those who are on the streets due to mental and social problems and those who simply lack shelter. That approach does a disservice to everyone.

But I wonder if the activists’ goal is to help these troubled people or to posture, litigate and give grandiose speeches. In my view, the Homeless Bill of Rights is a microcosm of California’s political problem, and a reminder that the only real solutions to any real problem often are found outside the Legislature’s strange, insulated world.

Steven Greenhut is vice president of journalism at the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. Write to him at: steven.greenhut@franklincenterhq.org.

Editor’s note: This is the second part of a three-part series on how the homeless and mentally ill are treated in California. Part One was about the Kelly Thomas beating and death.

July 9, 2012

By Tori Richards

Welcome to 450 Bauchet St., a 10-acre compound in the heart of downtown Los Angeles that is the world’s biggest jail.

Known as Twin Towers, it has a population greater than many small towns, with 3,911 inmates, 900 staff, and even its own hospital.

But it also has another distinction: the world’s largest mental institution.

Housed in one wing and encompassing four floors, the mental health ward tends to approximately 1,200 inmates with psychiatric problems. Several hundred more of the most severe cases are located in the hospital.

California is now a state where the police — not doctors or counselors — are the front lines to millions of mentally ill who have no other recourse than to end up in the jails.

“Sheriff Baca has frequently commented that the mentally ill belong in a mental institution,” said Capt. Mike Parker. “In law enforcement we deal with things because other aspects of society have failed. You have a system not addressing the need. “In the end, law enforcement is the last stop. We’re not looking for that responsibility; it was given to us.”

A breakdown in the system has led to a large population of the mentally ill who turn to crime or simply wander the streets homeless, a recipe for disaster.

Just look at the case of Kelly Thomas, a 37-year-old schizophrenic homeless man who belonged in a mental care facility rather than on the streets.

His run-in with Fullerton police one year ago resulted in his beating death at the hands of officers ill equipped to deal with a person who had a mental disability.

In California, the severely mentally ill are four times more likely to be in jail than a hospital or clinic, a recent report found.

A task force comprised of doctors, lawyers and mental health organizations completed the 30-month study and released their report in March. It criticized the state for its failures, mentioning Thomas as an example where little has been done to safeguard rights, protect the mentally ill and provide prompt treatment.

The study found that mental illness accounts for 33 percent of the homeless, 20 percent of incarcerated inmates and death comes 25 years earlier than the general population.

How It Got This Way

In 1968, the California Legislature passed a law that required a judge’s order to involuntarily commit mental patients as an end to the earlier horrors where people were thrown into institutions against their will, never to emerge.

The law also ordered counties to open treatment centers and promised matching state funds of 90 percent to assist in paying for a host of new drugs that tamed psychoses, effectively keeping many would-be patients out of institutions.

In keeping with this mandate, Gov. Ronald Reagan started closing state-run mental hospitals and vetoed measures that would pass that funding on to the counties so they could deal with the issue locally.

Then Reagan became president and he slashed aid to mental health programs effectively ending any federally sponsored clinics. The burden was almost entirely on local jurisdictions.

But most counties lacked the resources to start their own programs. More and more people decided to live on the streets when they weren’t getting regular medication.

Voters approved Proposition 63 in 2004, the Mental Health Services Act, which raised taxes 1 percentage point on those making $1 million or more a year; and earmarks $1 billion a year for services. Gov. Jerry Brown also promised to overhaul the mental health system when he was elected, but the state continues to operate in the red.

A current law that expires this year may be extended, allowing judges to order the mentally ill to take medication and to receive outpatient recovery.

A Novel Approach

As the burden of caring for psychiatric patients began shifting to local communities, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department took notice. A leader in law enforcement, it became the first agency in the nation to dedicate police officers to specifically help the mentally ill.

“We receive training regarding dealing with the mentally ill; there is the unpredictability factor,” Parker said. “This is a very complex issue; it’s not quickly solved even with money or resources. It has to do with human rights vs. the right to not be forced to go into a mental institution. That’s the way the law is right now.”

Law enforcement straddles the line between a) helping people who are deemed unfit under Section 5150 of the state Welfare and Institutions Code — a danger to themselves, others, or gravely disabled; and b) and someone who is mentally ill but has committed a crime.

Both segments can be detained, the former for up to 72 hours at a mental facility and the latter in a jail cell awaiting a decision by the district attorney whether to file charges.

“Psychiatrists and psychologists work years to where they get a doctorate to deal with this issue in a controlled setting,” Parker said. “What does law enforcement get?”

The mental ward at Twin Towers is comprised of inmates who have committed felonies. An average length of stay is 50 days, so, “It’s not a lot of time to heal something,” Parker said.

About 20 years ago, the Sheriff’s Department initiated the Mental Evaluation Team, which has deputies assigned to handle calls involving people exhibiting psychological problems. It was the first such program in the nation.

Five deputies are partnered with clinicians from the county health department to get the mentally ill the help they need.

Deputy Greg Plamondon has been assigned to the unit for 17 years. He has won his department’s Humanitarian Award for going beyond the scope of his job. Most notably:

* An elderly woman who was living in filth and couldn’t deal with reality when her dog died was taken to a mental hospital by Plamondon. He brought her valuables with her and visited her there until she died six months later.

* A homeless man with a long history of mental illness had severe leg infections, so Plamondon had him committed to a psychiatric hold so that he could get care. Sometime later Plamondon saw him again and the wounds were worse, so the deputy spent months trying to learn his identity and Social Security number so the man could get benefits. The man later moved into a nursing facility.

* Plamondon was asked to locate a woman’s brother who was living on the streets. He was found on a curb in the pouring rain, unable to care for himself and suffering from hypothermia. Plamondon placed him on an involuntary hold so he could get medical and psychological help. The man ended up staying 30 days.

It takes longer

“A lot of officers don’t want to deal with this; it takes a little bit longer than a regular call and you need patience,” said Plamondon one afternoon after he had spent the entire day dealing with a man who had been making terrorist threats. “It’s a good fit for me; I like talking to people.”

He said he has a rapport with the mentally ill that he meets on the streets and often runs into the same people.

“About 75 percent of the homeless have some sort of diagnosis of mental illness,” he said. “It’s rare to convince them to get off the street. On several occasions, we’ve been able to get them into a board and care where they have food and shelter provided for them instead of shagging cans at risk of getting beaten up or worse by someone who doesn’t want them around.”

Part Three Coming Soon: A government review organization issues its use of force report on the Kelly Thomas death.