The Venice Stakeholders Association is dedicated to civic improvement. The VSA supports slow growth, protection of the limits of the Venice Local Coastal Specific Plan, neighborhood safety, better traffic circulation, increased parking for residents, neighborhood beautification projects, historic preservation and protection of coastal waters.
Deranged transient living in his car in Venice mows down 17 pedestrians on
Boardwalk with his car and kills young Italian woman in a rage over being ripped off in a drug deal gone bad.
Transient brutally
assaults resident Robert DiMassa on walk street because DiMassa's
service dog urinated on the sidewalk near where the camper was sleeping.
Five home invasions - four by wasted, mentally ill transients - in a six block area centered on Windward and Riviera.
Clabe Hartley's
fingertip bitten off by transient on Washington Blvd.
Homeless Jose Gonzalez dies April 19th after suffering a blow from transient Thomas Glover on Abbot Kinney at California.
The death of transient Brendon Glenn on May 5th in altercation with LAPD on Windward.
Transient Jason Davis shot on July 14th by LAPD at Groundworks Cafe on Rose after approaching police with a knife. He later died of his wounds.
Two transients shot on the Boardwalk at Dudley on August 30th, apparently in a fight over camping spaces. One dies at the scene and one is transported to the hospital.
Message to Mike Bonin and Eric Garcetti:
Drain the swamp: stop the camping along Venice Beach and the walk streets, stop the storage of
tons of transients' stuff on Venice Beach, bring back the City's
ordinance banning "sitting, lying, sleeping" on sidewalks and establish 300 foot buffer from residences for camping or unattended items.
Or more people - residents, visitors and transients - will be harmed in
Venice by the lawless conditions the City continues to allow to exist here.
Under amendments proposed by Councilman Bonin, city trash crews would have to sort through piles like this to separate out medications, documents and "household items" before they could cart it away, store the stuff, and free up sidewalks for public use. This would render the new ordinance unenforceable since city crews don't have the time for this nor want to take the chance of missing a protected item and being sued.
Back in the mid-80s, when I was serving as the chief deputy to the
Los Angeles County Assessor, my boss Alex Pope came to me with a
“Homeless Bill of Rights.” An ACLU attorney had given it to him over
lunch and asked him to get the Los Angeles county supervisors to adopt
it.
The attorney told Alex that it would help attorneys for the homeless
advance their lawsuits, including those against the city and county. If
my memory serves me, the document was similar to Senate Bill 608, the
“Right to Rest” bill, which recently stalled in Sacramento, but also
with a provision protecting the personal possessions of the homeless.
This latter right was later the subject of the Superior Court’s Lavan
decision, which required the city to give notice of removal of personal
items from sidewalks and to store them for 90 days.
Fast forward 30 years and we can see that the cumulative effect of
recent court decisions, including Lavan, has had the same effect as that
long ago ACLU proposal: the voiding of vagrancy laws that have for many
years protected residents from the negative effects of transient
campers. In addition to the usual hot spots for transient encampments,
we now see them throughout the city. I would suggest that this was the
real goal of the homeless advocates. It’s a form of extortion, though
residents in some areas of the city bear this burden far more than
others.
The result of the Lavan Decision (hands off homeless possessions),
Jones settlement (sleep anywhere you want), and the Desertrain Decision
(sleep in your vehicle anywhere you want), is three fold. First,
vagrancy laws are gutted and transients can live outside anywhere they
want. Second, there is no pressure at all to leave the street. Third, it
is much more attractive to live on the street in Los Angeles, with its
moderate weather (and lack of regulations), than in Detroit or Chicago
and other points east and north, with their extremes of heat, cold, and
rain.
So, it should not come as a surprise that the homeless population
here has increased, that more and more of the population is not from
L.A., and that they have spread all over the city. For example, the
Pacific Palisades has gone from almost no homeless to having them
camping on their beaches, bluffs, and parkways. And predictably the
response of some people is to start raising funds to counsel and house
those newly on their doorstep. That’s exactly the result the homeless
advocates want: to put the homeless in everyone’s face so that the
“housed” public acts to succor them and pressure their elected officials
to house them. It’s a brilliant strategy but callous in the extreme.
It attracts homeless individuals, which includes the drug addicted,
mentally ill, and criminally-inclined, to our city in large numbers, in
some instances from homes they were living in before coming to L.A. We
know this in Venice from the large number of campers for whom our
organization has provided bus fares to return home to welcoming family
members in distant states.
The loss of vagrancy laws also puts a huge burden on residents and
businesses in the popular venues – think Hollywood and Venice, for
example. It exposes some to assault; remember the transient that bit off
part of the finger of restaurateur Clabe Hartley, and others to home
invasion; we had five within six blocks of my home last year.
And it results in the tragic death of those who in their drug or mental
derangement tangle with the police; already two dead in Venice this
year, who were not from L.A.
The cry from homeless advocates to not “criminalize the poor” is
fatuous. Societies have rules to protect themselves from noxious
behavior. Certain situations – urban encampments of homeless near
residents, public defecation, urination and inebriation, frequent late
night noise, drug use and sales – all set the stage for worse: theft,
trespass, assaults, and home invasions.
Due to the misguided efforts of Mayor Eric Garcetti and Councilmen
Mike Bonin and Gil Cedillo, the potential of two new ordinances to
restore some balance to the situation is on hold and at risk.
The mayor has directed city departments to not enforce the new ban on
storage of personal items overnight in city parks. This allows the
Venice Beach Recreation Area to remain a highly desirable campground for
hundreds of “travelers” from all over the country and abroad. The
mayor’s delay on the parks ordinance is inexplicable since no council
members have proposed to amend it.
The mayor also asked city departments to not enforce the new, tighter
restrictions on storage of personal items on sidewalks and asked the
City Council to remove the misdemeanor penalty for violations. Bonin and
Cedillo’s motions to accomplish this will gut the sidewalks ordinance
by, among other measures, removing luggage, backpacks, clothing,
documents, and medication, and household items from the definition of
items that can be collected by the Department of Sanitation if not
removed after 24 hours. Neither Sanitation workers nor LAPD officers
have the time to sort through piles of “stuff” to find all the items
that would get a pass from collection by city workers.
The mayor apparently fails to understand that under the Lavan
Decision and the new ordinance, personal documents and medication will
not be disposed of; they will be stored for 90 days and a notice left at
the collection site with details of how to retrieve them.
With no possibility of a misdemeanor violation campers will not move
their stuff for city cleanups or after the 24-hour grace period.
With no ability for the city to collect luggage, backpacks, clothing,
documents, medication, and household items, the encampments in Venice on
walk streets, on Third Street, and occasionally along Venice Boulevard
will continue and spread, as we have already seen them creep into the
Oakwood neighborhood.
With a stalemate on the language of amendments at the City’s
Homelessness Committee, the mayor should get out of the way and tell
city department heads to enforce both ordinances immediately. The
pendulum has swung so far in recent years that the inmates are now
running the asylum. It’s time to return some protections to our
long-suffering residents who right now feel powerless to protect
themselves.
