Critics deride the sidewalk sleeping ban as overzealous, but Police Chief William Bratton insisted it is a way to salvation for Skid Row. He used a similar approach to control crime more than a decade ago in New York City, where he went after serving as Boston's police commissioner.
Enforcing the sidewalk-sleeping ordinance is a stark change for a neighborhood where Los Angeles police traditionally have tried to keep crime from spreading, not stop it. The ordinance is considered one of the most restrictive in the nation and has drawn fire from homeless advocates and their allies.
"LA remains the only city in the US whose answer to homelessness is to criminalize being poor," said Mark Rosenbaum, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, which has sued to stop the city from enforcing the ordinance. "A program that relies on criminalization isn't going to solve any of the social problems."
More than 200 of the nation's 250 largest cities have ordinances prohibiting sleeping, sitting, and loitering on sidewalks, according to a study by the National Coalition for the Homeless. How much these ordinances are enforced vary day to day, and the group's acting executive director, Michael Stoops, said he has not heard of another city enforcing a no-camping ordinance during the day but not at night.
The Los Angeles policy highlights intractable issues within the city's largest concentration of drug addicts and mentally ill and homeless people -- a population that needs but does not always want specialized care.
With 50 new foot patrol officers redeployed to Skid Row, Bratton's Safer City Initiative attempts to improve an area the police chief calls the worst open-air drug market in the country. By enforcing minor crimes, police will erode a long-accepted feeling of lawlessness, he said. Police arrested about 600 people for selling drugs in the first week of the initiative.
