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by Jim Holman.
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Not In My Neighborhood

The Clean-Up of Skid Row

By Christopher Zehnder

I would have preferred to have sued them out of existence," said Catholic Worker Jeff Dietrich, speaking about a lawsuit that the Los Angeles Catholic Worker has joined against four business improvement districts (BIDs) in downtown Los Angeles. The lawsuit, spearheaded by Alice Callahan, director of Las Familias del Pueblo, a community service for garment workers and their children, and joined by the ACLU, alleges that private security personnel hired by business improvement districts periodically harass the poor and homeless on public thoroughfares, driving them from sections of the city.

The lawsuit, served last November, said Callahan, is the first of its kind in the nation. Business improvement districts, now found nationwide, aim to improve the business climate in particular neighborhoods by beautifying them and by providing security for business owners, their clients and customers. When a simple majority of business owners in an area vote to constitute themselves as an improvement district, the new entity can levy from all business owners in an area a fee, which county or city taxing agencies collect. The money, which is spent on improvements, funds the private security forces that have been accused recently of violating the civil rights of the poor and homeless.

This lawsuit, being a first, has no case law to govern it. This is why, said Dietrich, that the lawyers representing the lawsuit thought it better to agree to an interim agreement proposed by the improvement districts. "Where they've [security] detained people," said Dietrich, "where they've searched people illegally; where they've taken their medication away from them, thinking that they were drugged; where they've poured out canteens of water, thinking that is was alcohol; where they've moved people that weren't doing anything along on the public property; where we've seen them arrest people, put them in their cars and detain them -- from a judge's perspective these are just individual cases, but overall they [security] have the same right as any other citizen to enforce the laws."

Alice Callahan, whose Las Familias del Pueblo is located in the Fashion District, told me that, for "well over a year or two," she had been hearing complaints about the Fashion District's security personnel from the homeless in her area. "They pushed all the homeless out of there," said Callahan, a former Sister of the Holy Child Jesus and now an Episcopalian minister. "We're on the other side of Seventh Street from them. [Late last Winter], they decided to claim this end of Seventh Street, and they began by harassing the homeless guy that sleeps in front of our place, woke him up at two in the morning, shined lights in his eyes, demanded he get up -- even though he was actually on our property, with our permission. When they crossed Seventh Street, that was it, that's when I came out of my corner. I began to gather information on the business improvement districts, went to Dan Marmalefky, a lawyer at the Morrison and Forster law firm. We spent a long time collecting affidavits, at first a lot of stuff from people we couldn't find again. We figured out we needed to collect them from people we knew better and had seen around forever. We collected tons more than we used."

Kent Smith, executive director of the Fashion District, told me he found out about the lawsuit from a call from a Los Angeles Times reporter -- before even being served with papers. The lawsuit, which Smith said was launched principally by the ACLU, was "the first time that we'd heard there was a problem or an issue. Our immediate reaction, after looking at the allegations in the lawsuit, was to call the ACLU and say, why don't we sit down and discuss this around a board room table rather than the court house. There were four business improvement districts that were involved, with their respective security companies; the Fashion District had four allegations that involved us. We were accused of doing things which it isn't our policy to do."

Tracey Lovejoy, executive director of the Central City East Association business improvement district, said, she, too, first heard of the lawsuit from a Times reporter. Were there prior complaints? "We have a formal complaint procedure," said Lovejoy. "Anybody can fill out a complaint procedure. We never received a complaint from anyone, Alice or anyone else. I called the police department -- they had never received a complaint."

"You know, they all say that," said Callahan, "and remember, Kent's new in town, he was hired from Canada, and so he hasn't been around -- but we've actually been complaining about them for a very long time, constantly going out, yelling at them, stopping them, phoning -- we have complained a lot!"

In the first week of February, Callahan, Dietrich and the ACLU agreed to put the case on hold and signed a temporary agreement with the business improvement districts. An independent monitor, the Legal City Law Center, will monitor the agreement, documenting any breaches of agreement that might occur. By April 15, said Callahan, when the interim is up, "we'll make a decision if we re happy with things as they've gone during the temporary agreement, and then come up with a permanent agreement -- or we will go to court."

The agreement centers on four issues: first, the improvement districts agreed that security personnel would not tell people on public property to leave. Secondly, security officers agreed not to search people, unless they were placing them under citizen's arrest -- in which case they would only perform a pat down to see if someone had a gun. Thirdly, security will not demand to see anyone's idenfication, though they can still request to see it. Finally, according to the agreement, security may not photograph people on public sidewalks, though they may still use photographs, said Kent Smith, "to document criminal activities and to document the activities" of security officers.

What do Smith and Lovejoy think of the lawsuit's allegations? "They are not proven," said Smith. "If we were going to court, we would have a vigorous defense of the four allegations that were alleged to have taken place involving our safe team [i.e. security] personnel." "They're false!" said Lovejoy. "We just don't do that. Seven of, I guess, twelve complaints were against my security officers, and of those seven, we have records on one of them." I asked Lovejoy if security officers would necessarily record everything they did. "I would assume they would put it on their daily logs," she replied. "We have security contractors, and they have to keep track of what they're doing, whom they've spoken to, if they've had any problems. In those daily logs, we could find nothing of any of the allegations [Callahan] insinuated."

Beyond the specific allegations, both Callahan and Dietrich fear the business improvement districts having a "private vigilante company. Our concern is that they are acting like police," said Dietrich, "and they are really not beholden to anybody but the business district." "Here's the problem," said Callahan, "the police, actually, have to make sure they don't violate anyone's rights. When a private security person does something to you, your remedy is to take that individual to court, which is unworkable on the [Skid] Row. So the homeless guy has to go and find a lawyer, file a lawsuit against the security guy. And then, what does he get for damages? He's not going to get much punitive [damage], let alone anything else."

Too, Dietrich and Callahan fear that the business districts are pushing gentrification that will push out the homeless. "I fundamentally disagree with that, I strenuously disagree with that," said Kent Smith. "If you come to the fashion district, I think, the suits and ties are few and far between. The district welcomes everybody from all walks of life. People that walk around, just because their clothes might not be Saville Row, or whatever, are welcome here. We get people coming here from all over the world; there are busses that bring people up from Mexico to shop. And we get people from the Biltmore Hotel. That's the great beauty of our area, the great vibrancy of our area. I think gentrification is the last thing we are looking for, here."

"You gotta be kidding!" said Callahan of Smith's statement. "They just ran every homeless person out of their neighborhood -- but, again, when [Smith] came here, they had already done that. They've run out every encampment, every homeless person.. They will take your cart, they literally walk you out of the district. Isn't it remarkable that there is not one person sleeping on the sidewalk once you cross Seventh Street? Did it just happen that way? And it just happens to be maintained that way?"

To Lovejoy, Dietrich and Callahan "are an extreme voice" with "nobody else agreeing with them on this whole thing. Call any other provider [to the homeless] in the area, and you will not hear one complaint of us. I went out and spoke to all of them, and asked: 'have you heard anything? Are your clients or your tenants complaining?' And they said, 'oh, no!' We've gotten a lot of letters of support from a lot of other non-profit providers in the area. And, in all honesty, we've heard a lot of very positive things from a majority of the providers in the area. A lot of our businesses are in the Skid Row area, and we have providers, saying, 'yeah, my tenants can actually go cash their checks and not get mugged on the way home. They feel safer.' Or, 'our tenants feel they can come and go to the bus stop without getting mugged.'"

I called a few of the providers Lovejoy mentioned to me. One, Bob Erlenbusch, executive director of the LA Coalition to End Hunger and Homelessness, said he basically agreed with Dietrich and Callahan. "One of my staff persons did a survey, with the Community Action Network, of 173 people in the down town area." Of that 173, said Erlenbusch, 52 percent said they were favorable to the business districts' security forces, while 48 percent were not favorable. Twelve percent of those surveyed said they had been detained by security personnel, and four percent said they had been placed under arrest. Forty-two percent said they had witnessed what they perceived to be some sort of harassment or mistreatment of persons by security personnel. When asked whether they understood the role of security, 45 percent said they did not. The most vulnerable -- women and the elderly -- tended to favor the security personnel, while other groups did not.

The director of communications for the Union Rescue Mission, Liz Moorabian said she did not know at all about the lawsuit, nor had she heard any complaints about harassment of homeless by security. However, she said, the homeless tend to congregate at the mission, and not around places of business. "So, maybe we're in a different situation than where there are no missions, no places to sit."

She noted, however, in passing, that one day on her way home, "while I was in the shuttle to the train station, I noticed one place up at the corner where hoses were set up, and water was coming down the sides of the building onto the pavement. I said to someone, 'why is there water coming off the roof?' They replied, they do that to discourage the homeless from camping out there."

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