The county and the city of Los Angeles are making a determined effort to step up efforts to assist homeless people in downtown’s Skid Row. County and city officials are launching “Project 50” to immediately assist 50 of the most chronically homeless people who have been living on the streets of Skid Row with supportive housing. The Los Angeles Police Department has already made a determined effort to clean up Skid Row by assigning an additional 50 officers to that area. At the same time, the city has agreed to secure an additional 1,250 supportive housing units for homeless persons.
Although increasing police presence in Skid Row has reduced crime, it does not provide a comprehensive solution to the more intractable homeless problem facing Skid Row.
In order to tackle the homelessness problem in a more comprehensive fashion, the establishment of a Community Court should be considered for Skid Row. This is what New York City did in 1993 to help stop the deterioration of Times Square and the theater district in midtown Manhattan. Such a Community Court would deal with quality of life crimes public intoxication, illegal panhandling, public nuisance committed in that area, and would link the people committing those crimes to needed services and housing and/or offer alternative sentences like community service to improve the area.
This unique problem-solving court was developed by the Center for Court Innovation as a new and more effective way to deal with the special problems in New York. It has been highly successful for a number of reasons. First, it is located within the area where the quality of life crimes are committed and is accessible to the defendants so they can respond to their citations. A single judge plays a critical role in ensuring the success of the court, so there is a more meaningful outcome from the criminal justice system and more individual accountability and responsibility by the defendant. The typical revolving door does not exist. The city or district attorney, public defender and court coordinator work as team to determine what is in the best interests of the defendant and the community. Justice is swift and alternative sentencing or referral to service and treatment is made to fit the needs of the individual person.
Early intervention
The city of Santa Monica and the Los County Superior Court have established such a court in Santa Monica thanks to the help of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. In its first 10 months, the Santa Monica Homeless Community Court has achieved the following outcomes for 70 participants: 31 (44 percent) received an emergency shelter bed; 25 (36 percent) engaged in drug/alcohol treatment; seven (10 percent) placed in permanent housing; 13 (19 percent) accessed mental health treatment; 34 (48 percent) had citations or warrants dismissed upon program completion.
Early intervention, like that offered by Community Courts, can reduce the likelihood that someone becomes chronically homeless. Research shows that chronically homeless people, on a per-person basis, cost society greatly. There are the hard costs of repeated interactions with the health, social service, criminal and judicial systems. There are the also the societal costs of having people living in public spaces, sleeping in doorways, aggressively panhandling, or being publicly intoxicated, which create urban blight. As Malcolm Gladwell reported in his 2006 New Yorker article “Million Dollar Murray,” in the early 1990s Dennis Culhane, who is now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the foremost researchers in the field, found that New York was spending at least $62 million dollars annually to shelter 2,500 chronically homeless people.
Boston Health Care for the Homeless, a leading service group for the homeless in Boston, has tracked the medical expenses of 119 chronically homeless people. Over five years the group, minus a few who died or were sent to nursing homes, accounted for 18,834 emergency-room visits at a minimum of $3,000 per visit.
Researchers at the University of California-San Diego Medical Center followed 15 chronically homeless inebriates and found that over 18 months those 15 people ran up bills that averaged $100,000 per person. The 10 years that Murray, a chronically homeless man from Reno, Nev., spent on the streets cost $1 million. Chronically homeless people have repeated and costly interactions with paramedics, emergency rooms, police, and the courts while they continue to live on the streets. It’s more cost effective and humane to help homeless people who are at the beginning of their contact with the judicial system through a Community Court program than to wait until they have cost society dearly in taxpayers’ dollars and urban blight.
Edmund D. Edelman recently finished a stint as special representative for homeless initiatives for the city of Santa Monica. He is a former Los Angeles County Supervisor.
