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.

By Steven Greenhut

SACRAMENTO — After Tom Tait was sworn in as mayor of Anaheim in November 2010, he issued a statement announcing the city’s commitment to “kindness and freedom.” One reader — knowing this to be the type of governmental hubris that’s almost too easy to lampoon — urged me to reach for the poison pen. I declined. Although the statement struck me as naïve, I cut Tait some slack because of his apparent sincerity.

Two years later, as Anaheim makes national news because of riots sparked by police shootings, Tait is in an unexpected situation of having to put his well-intentioned rhetoric into practice. How he and his city resolve the conflict — whether officials can maintain civic order and dispel violent, chaotic images that seem out of place in the home of the “Happiest Place on Earth” — might offer lessons for cities throughout the country.

As Tait told me in an interview Wednesday, his original intent was to spark a cultural change within city government that encouraged employees to help residents navigate the bureaucracy. He sees kindness and freedom as closely related — i.e., a government that kindly serves the people also is one that creates the broadest latitude for its citizens to live their lives as they choose.

He offered examples of where the two concepts intersect. Shortly after taking over as mayor, Tait learned of a plan by residents in the Colony District to host a Fourth of July parade that included not just the wealthier historic neighborhoods but also a nearby apartment complex. It was a nice idea to bring people together even though they are divided by economic and ethnic differences.

“Someone calls the city, and the official there said they needed a permit, and that’s a fee and a certificate of insurance and approvals,” Tait said. “The parade didn’t happen. … On the other end of the phone, there’s a guy who works for the city, and he has a check list. He goes into government probably to help people, but he has a tight fence put around him.”

Tait also told of how a city security guard gave an elderly man a ride home from City Hall after seeing him struggling in the heat. Tait learned about it because the employee’s supervisor wrote him up — the guard was being punished for doing something outside of procedure. Tait was appalled and was thankful that a department head recognized that the guard should be praised, not punished.

Bureaucratic culture

Changing a bureaucratic culture sounds naïve, perhaps, but, beginning in 2002, Anaheim had gained national attention for putting into place some unusually kind and freedom-friendly public policies that no other major U.S. city had embraced.

Like many older cities, Anaheim wanted to encourage new tax-generating developments. Most cities adopted the government-driven redevelopment approach, in which politically favored businesses are subsidized, and others are driven off their property by eminent domain.

Instead of taking the heavy-handed “hatched in City Hall” redevelopment approach, Anaheim officials banned the use of eminent domain for economic development purposes and then “upzoned” targeted areas, meaning zoning rules were relaxed so that owners had more latitude on what they could do with their land. As a result, the Platinum Triangle area near Angel Stadium boomed as property owners found great value in selling their low-rise warehouses to condo and office developers. It was a market-friendly approach that did not violate anybody’s property rights.

The city also reduced regulations on businesses, issued a business-tax holiday, stopped prosecuting minor code violations as crimes, reduced some misdemeanors to infractions and worked on fostering a more helpful attitude among city workers. Tait, then a councilman, helped build a bipartisan council agenda to advance the reforms.

2000s Motels

In the early 2000s, I wrote for the Orange County Register about Anaheim’s nonsensical rules that forced people who lived in low-cost motels to move out every 30 days.

Officials didn’t like that these old motels were turning into low-income apartments and were making life difficult for some of the city’s poorest residents, even forcing some of them into homelessness. The then-new freedom-friendly city administration took a different approach by working with the motels to assure safe and sanitary conditions and bringing in the Rescue Mission to administer services.

That’s an example of how a changed governmental approach can expand freedom and kindness, Mayor Tait argues.

“I don’t think people are free to be kind in the city because of all the rules, because of the culture and the bureaucracy,” he said. “It’s not about changing the rules, but about changing the culture.” He wants to allow city employees to “use their brains” and not just follow the rules.

Unfortunately, in my view, the city’s Police Department has embraced the wrong kind of policing methods — ones that are unkind and tend to undermine people’s freedom. I don’t see police officials there using their brains to handle a situation resulting, in part, from overly aggressive policing tactics and insufficient police accountability and transparency.

Clearly, the cultural changes the mayor is trying to implement in the city bureaucracy need to filter into the police department — a point Tait also makes. Cops need to get out of their cars and get to know members of the communities where they patrol. They need to put down the riot gear and recognize that, in a free society, police are supposed to protect and serve the public — and must respect the inherent rights of all residents.

I never thought that Tait’s seemingly naïve statement upon becoming mayor would have taken on such significance, but life is funny that way. Despite my cynicism, I agree that reforming a rigid governmental and policing culture is exactly what’s needed in Anaheim, and elsewhere. Fortunately, I can’t think of a more sincere mayor to advance those ideas.

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

By Steven Greenhut

While sitting in a restaurant in Philadelphia’s Chinatown during my first visit here in more than a decade, I watched TV news reports of violent protests erupting in normally placid Anaheim after two fatal police shootings the prior weekend. It was shocking. The footage of riot-clad police tussling with and firing nonlethal weapons at protesters brought back bad memories of growing up in the Philly area in the 1960s and 1970s.

These days, Philadelphia is a surprisingly calm place, but back then, when tough-guy Mayor (and former police commissioner) Frank Rizzo ruled the roost, there were frequent confrontations. The worst incident actually came in 1985, after Rizzo had left office, when city cops dropped a bomb on a row house occupied by a black liberation group. Eleven people died, including five children. Those were dark times, but it seems Philly has learned some lessons that have eluded many California police forces.

While Anaheim Mayor Tom Tait (pictured above) thankfully is no Frank Rizzo, he tried his hand at tough-guy rhetoric at a news conference after Tuesday’s violence: “Vandalism, arson and other forms of violent protest will simply not be tolerated in our city. We don’t expect last night’s situation to be repeated but if it should be, the police response will be the same: swift and appropriate.”

Of course, we all are against violence, vandalism and arson. Indeed, the mother of one of the men killed by police poignantly called for calm. But I can’t agree that the police response was appropriate.

Tait, who rightly called for an outside investigation of the police shootings, over the objections of other council members, needs to work harder to live up to the promises he made when became mayor. Tait promised to foster a culture of “kindness” in the city. I know he means it, and he told me he is deeply concerned about some police actions.

Police culture

Anaheim’s police culture echoes the old Los Angeles Police Department culture that valued aggressiveness over community policing, and the city administration has shown no willingness to confront it. City police have shot six people this year, five fatally, under varying circumstances.

Sunday, an Anaheim gang officer shot and killed Joel Acevedo, 21. Police said Acevedo fired at the officer during a foot chase. A handgun was found lying between the man’s legs.

But it was the shooting July 21 of Manuel Diaz that brought people out on the streets.

Diaz, 25, reportedly ran from police, possibly from plainclothes officers. He was unarmed. According both to a lawsuit filed by his family and witnesses quoted in the media, one officer shot him near his buttocks; another officer then shot him in the head.

Police reportedly left the mortally wounded man on the ground without calling an ambulance. It’s not hard to understand the resulting outrage.

Fullerton death

After Fullerton police beat to death an unarmed homeless man last July, hundreds of people took to the streets in protest, and there were no violent encounters. Fullerton authorities just left the protesters alone. In Anaheim, the police — bolstered by reinforcements from other police agencies — cordoned off downtown streets, stood in riot gear and fired nonlethal projectiles at the crowd, including at journalists.

I covered one police shooting in Anaheim in 2008. A 20-year-old newlywed stepped outside his house with a wooden rod in his hand after hearing a ruckus nearby. Police had been chasing a robbery suspect, and when the young man came out of his house, they shot him to death. Even Police Chief John Welter, who still leads the department, said the man “was innocent of anything that the officer thought was going on in that neighborhood.” Yet, apparently, nothing has changed since then.

Powerful police unions

While Anaheim has a greater need than some other cities to re-evaluate its policing policies, problems with police use-of-force problem are endemic throughout the country and, especially, in California, where police union priorities — i.e., what’s best for officers, not the citizenry — have dominated policy decisions for decades.

Recent news reports show a significant increase in police-involved shootings in many areas of California. Police shootings account for one of every 10 shooting deaths in Los Angeles County, according to a Los Angeles Times report. Videotapes of the encounters often show that the official version of the story is at odds with what really happened. No wonder police agencies spend so much time confiscating video cameras from bystanders, something that should chill every freedom-loving American, whether on the political Left or Right.

The California Supreme Court’s Copley Press vs. San Diego decision in 2006 allows allegations of police misconduct to remain shrouded in secrecy. The public can access complaints against doctors, lawyers and other professionals but, in California, misbehavior by public employees who have the legal right to use deadly force often is off-limits to scrutiny. Because of an exemption in the public-records act, police agencies need not release most details of their reports of officer-involved shootings.

Furthermore, the Peace Officers Procedural Bill of Rights in California’s Government Code gives accused officers such strong protections that officers can rarely be disciplined or fired. The “code of silence” is alive and well in police agencies.

Most police department citizen-review panels are toothless. We should never condone violent protests, but it’s not hard to understand the recent frustration in central Anaheim. What if it were your child or your neighbor’s child?

It’s time for a real discussion about how police should deal with the community and under what conditions they should use deadly force. It’s time to bring California in line with other states and open records to greater public oversight. If Mayor Tait is serious about creating a safer and kinder city, he will need to insist on this debate, regardless of the expected pushback from the police unions.