L.A. POLICE INITIATIVE THINS OUT SKID ROW

Crime Is Down and Businesses Are Hopeful, But Some Complain Policy
Harms Homeless

LOS ANGELES -- Drug addicts called it "The Show." Every day and
night, with no freezing weather to slow it down, a circus of
prostitution, crack-smoking and schizophrenic collapse played out on
the streets on Los Angeles's Skid Row.

Four thousand homeless people thronged 50 blocks in easy view of the
city's proud civic institutions -- the banks, the Los Angeles Times,
City Hall. Often desperately drug addicted, mentally ill or both,
they slept in homeless shelters or under tarps tied to shopping carts
that lined the sidewalks. Some just lay down on the urine-soaked
ground when they got tired.

Hospital vans dumped the indigent from gurneys to the gutter, causing
scandals periodically when they were caught on videotape. The local
fire station's paramedic team was the busiest in the country. Skid
Row, Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton has said, was "the
worst situation in America."

Things are changing. Last year, a combination of police strategy,
newspaper exposés, political will and loft-building developers pushed
Skid Row to the top of the city's agenda. The result is a
controversial -- but unquestionably effective -- crackdown.

In the latest application of the "broken windows" approach Bratton
famously applied to New York, police are targeting petty crimes to
discourage violent crime and other serious violations.

"The behavior on Skid Row was 'anything goes,' " said Capt. Andrew J.
Smith of the area's police station. "Personally, I think we need to
have the same standards of behavior as they do in Brentwood or West
L.A.," well-heeled parts of the city.

Since the police department's Safer City Initiative began in
September, an extra 50 police officers have worked Skid Row. Trees
are trimmed for better lighting. Police write tickets for jaywalking
and public urination and have made more than 1,400 drug arrests.
During the daytime, they enforce an ordinance against sleeping on the sidewalk.

Now a dark smudge about five feet high stains the buildings like a
bathtub ring, showing where tents and tarps used to be. Violent crime
in the first week of March is down 36 percent from last year;
property crime is down 38 percent. Half as many people now sleep on
the streets there as did five months ago, a police census found.

A pair of social workers staff the police station, urging drug
addicts to enroll in rehab programs instead of going to jail. The
city attorney's office is investigating patient-dumping cases with an
eye to prosecuting hospitals that leave patients on the street.

Whether the crackdown is a blessed relief or a harsh attempt to
criminalize homelessness depends on who is talking.

Business owners love it. Skid Row is home to processing plants and
storage facilities that supply seafood to major retailers and fine
restaurants. Workers there must spray their shoes with alcohol when
they come to work because of excrement on the ground outside.
Conditions in the area have cultured tuberculosis and drug-resistant
staph infections.

"This first step has given us hope," Estela Lopez, executive director
of the Central City East Association, a business group, said of the
Safer City Initiative.

As Smith took a walk through the neighborhood recently, longtime
residents of subsidized hotels approached him to thank him for making
the area more livable.

But some who run shelters and programs for the homeless in the area
say police harassment is chasing away people who need help. Those
advocates say Skid Row became so troubled because of a decades-long
policy to concentrate the region's homeless services in one area.

Mark Casanova, executive director of Homeless Health Care Los
Angeles, said the new policy is only dispersing the homeless.

"We're doing nothing but cutting off access to services," he said at
a recent Los Angeles Police Commission meeting.

There are also complaints of police harassment. The American Civil
Liberties Union is asking a court to extend an injunction that bars
police from stopping and questioning Skid Row residents without cause
for suspicion.

"The police just say, 'You can't be here anymore,' " Shannon Snyder
said as she sat on a curb last week. Snyder and her boyfriend and
their cats have lived on Skid Row's streets for 10 months. "They say,
'You have to move.' When we say, 'Where do we go?' they say, 'We don't know.' "

Public defenders are upset because drug arrests that once would have
sent an addict to a rehab program are now being charged as dealing.
"It seems that the goal is to send these people to state prison,"
said Rigoberto J. Arrechiga, a public defender who handles Skid Row felonies.

Arrechiga and others point to new housing developments along the
edges of Skid Row as a motivation for the crackdown. "Who wants to
pay a million dollars for a loft and see homeless people sleeping on
the street?" he asked.

Civil liberties complaints are not unusual with the "broken windows"
approach, but Los Angeles police are well trained, said George
Kelling, a criminologist at Rutgers University who developed the
theory with social scientist James Q. Wilson of Pepperdine
University. Kelling, a consultant to Bratton, said an influx of
middle-class residents would not necessarily be bad for the area's poor.

"You want to make sure gentrification isn't driving people out and
the missions aren't driven out," Kelling said. But "when people are
moving in and grocery stores are moving in, that means jobs. Economic
development is not something you want to sneer at."

Some observers believe the changes on Skid Row will be short-lived as
long as homeless services are concentrated there. Michael Dear, a
professor of geography at the University of Southern California,
points out that one-third of the city's shelter beds are on Skid Row.

He said only 25 of 88 cities in Los Angeles County spend money on
homeless services. The rest, Dear said, offer "Greyhound therapy": a
bus ticket to Skid Row.