LOS ANGELES HAS CLEANUP PLAN FOR SKID ROW

50-Block Area Would Get Dozens More Cops

LOS ANGELES -- Civil rights leaders, business interests and the city
have a new plan for cleaning up Skid Row that involves a crackdown on
crime without sweeping homeless people off the streets.

At its heart is the theory that the city must reduce crime on Skid Row
before it can tackle the underlying social and medical causes of
homelessness.

Dozens of additional police officers would be assigned to patrol the
roughly 50-block area under the plan, with an emphasis on experienced
beat officers rather than rookies. More undercover officers also would
be assigned to target drug dealers, prostitutes and other criminals.

For now, the area's estimated 8,000 to 10,000 homeless people would be
allowed to remain.

Los Angeles police allow homeless people to set up street dwellings of
cardboard boxes and tents as long as they remove them by 6 a.m. That
stretch of downtown has several homeless shelters and low-rent hotels.

It also has a growing community of small stores. Downtown business
owners had favored aggressive sweeps to remove the homeless, but they
now endorse the plan proposed by criminologist George Kelling and
endorsed by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Police Chief William Bratton
is still considering Kelling's plan, as well as more aggressive sweeps
to move homeless off the streets.

"We've come to the sad conclusion that most of it is a drug problem,"
Central City Association President Carol Schatz told the Los Angeles
Times. "You may be getting a huge number of people off the street by
simply enforcing the law."

The ACLU of Southern California, which has been critical of aggressive
police sweeps of Skid Row, also agrees with the Kelling approach.

Ramona Ripston, the organization's executive director, said she
believes that Skid Row needs more police.

"Sometimes you reach a moment where we have to do something," Ripston
said. "We can't let that continue to go on down there. ... One of the
steps we need to take is to try to purge that neighborhood of the
criminal element."