Homelessness Is Your Problem, Too

A week and a half ago, my friend from Skid Row, James Brown, was arrested for not paying a $200 jaywalking ticket. His sentence is 60 days. About the same time, another friend, AJ, was arrested for sleeping on the sidewalk outside the Hippie Kitchen at 6:20am (the homeless are allowed to sleep on the sidewalk from 9pm to 6am). He got out of jail two days later and retrieved his carts that had been put in storage; the next day, someone set one of his carts on fire.

The life on Skid Row has become so much more hectic and brutal since last summer. Not only do the men and women have to be wary of each other, but there has been an extremely heightened presence of security and police officers in the area. There have been amazing consequences.

The guys who come to the Hippie Kitchen have been harassed by private security guards hired by companies in the downtown area. These officers are commonly known in the area as "shirts" because of the different colored uniforms they wear for the different districts in town. The Red Shirts often bike by the Hippie Kitchen, looking for men and women who are jaywalking, dealing drugs, sleeping on the sidewalk, storing their things in supermarket (aka: stolen) carts, and other crimes. The Red Shirts do either or possibly both of the following: (1) address the individual directly, search through personal belongings, take pictures of the individual, put the individual against the wall to pat down, and miscellaneous harassment; (2) contact the LAPD with the information they can receive from the individual, give the location and the police address the situation.

While it may seem that the Shirts are providing a service to protect the gentrified area, they are acting illegally. They have no rights outside the private property they are hired to secure. Outside the bounds of the company, they may wear a uniform but have only the rights as a common citizen. The Shirts are abusing their rights and are harassing the men and women on Skid Row.

If you spend just 15 minutes in the garden at the Hippie Kitchen, you will hear stories about Shirt and LAPD brutality. Two ACLU attorneys came to the kitchen last week to talk with our patrons about their experiences simply with police searching through belongings without probable cause or reasonable suspicion. Last year, they would have stayed for an hour maximum. Last week, they stayed from 9:30am to noon, speaking with as many people as they could. Everyone has a story, whether it is their own, friend's, neighbor's or something they witnessed. This doesn't even cover the arrests that are made for jaywalking just so the individual can be given a citation at the police station, or the tents and bags that are torn (not searched) apart, or the woman who was beaten outside our kitchen two months ago by four police officers, or all the unspoken and unknown crimes the victims are too afraid to speak about.

The men and women in Skid Row live day to day not only in poverty but in fear. They are being pushed out of Skid Row and into different districts of the city of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County. The downtown area has developed into a loft-city. New high-rises are popping up all over. Ads are seen throughout the media. The city is making a point to clean the city up a little, and have an "art walk" every month to help display the fun and exuberant aspects of the area.

But the city has seen that the area needs protecting. The abundance of police and security force only helps to prove that the city is preparing to help the men and women who plan to move into these lofts and eradicate homelessness at the same time... or at least make the homeless someone else's problem.