LA Police Chief: In an Effort to Fight the City's Homeless Crisis, Warrants for Homeless People Will Be Canceled

A city worker uses a power washer to clean the sidewalk by a tent city along Division Street Friday, Feb. 26, 2016, in San Francisco. Homeless people have until the end of Friday to vacate a rambling tent city along a busy San Francisco street declared a health hazard by city officials earlier this week. The mayor's office says about 40 tents remain, down from a high of 140 tents this winter. The tents have lined both sides of a street under a freeway overpass for months, drawing complaints from residents and businesses. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)

A city worker uses a power washer to clean the sidewalk by a tent city along Division Street Friday, Feb. 26, 2016, in San Francisco. Homeless people have until the end of Friday to vacate a rambling tent city along a busy San Francisco street declared a health hazard by city officials earlier this week. The mayor’s office says about 40 tents remain, down from a high of 140 tents this winter. The tents have lined both sides of a street under a freeway overpass for months, drawing complaints from residents and businesses. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)
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At present time, tons and tons of people are sleeping on LA’s sidewalks and defecating in public.

What’s the solution?

In part, it’s to give them a break concerning warrants for their arrest.

So thinks LA Police Chief Michel Moore, who Wednesday told The Associated Press it’s part of the cure for a major malady of the humanitarian kind:

“This is a humanitarian crisis of our generation. This matches any other calamity that this city or this region or this country has seen. It is, I believe, a social emergency.”

He’s not wrong about it being an emergency; but it’s a problem the city itself created: Allowance is encouragement.

And now, as asserted by Victor Hansen Davis, California is the country’s first Third World state.

Nicely done.

Like a delicious hotcake, in some sectors — notably San Francisco — the Golden State has become golden brown. Just fancy a look at the city’s Poop Map (here). Breakfast, anyone?

Is Michel further feeding the problem by forgiving warrants? What does that accomplish?

As for stats, take a ganders, as reported by the AP:

Homelessness rose 16% in LA over the past year , to more than 36,000 people, according to a June report by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. Across LA County, the count increased 12%, to nearly 59,000 people.

California’s homeless crisis came under fire this month after President Donald Trump threatened to intervene and “get that whole thing cleaned up.”

“They can’t be looking at scenes like you see in Los Angeles and San Francisco,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti responded that he would welcome federal involvement to solve the issue.

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Garcetti’s an interesting player in the plot of people plopping on public property: There’s currently a petition for a recall to send him’ packin’ (see here).

The leader of that brigade recently sent an S.O.S. message to Trump (here).

Indeed, as voiced to Tucker Carlson, Los Angeles activist Alexandra Datig doesn’t think much of Eric:

“I think we are living in third world conditions that are a threat to public health here in Los Angeles, and we have a mayor who is completely ignorant of that and he is an abysmal failure. … We have this position in the city of Los Angeles where our leaders seem to think that it’s okay to leave people on the street to die, just whistling past the graveyard. We have had over 3600 people dying on the streets of Los Angeles in the past five years.”

Police Chief Michel’s plan — which has been in the works since he assumed his post last year — is to eliminate all bench warrants for offenses such as drinking in public, blocking a sidewalk, and failure to appear in court.

So…permissiveness exacerbated the problem, and now permissiveness will help fix it, it seems.

Whatever the case, Michel needs to wipe clean the docket:

“We have hundreds of thousands of bench warrants that haven’t been served in years. We need to clear the docket.”

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And anyway, he prefers “outreach”:

“Where’s our outreach workers, where’s our mental health workers?. I would love to see outreach workers wearing a vest. I would love for the public to be able to drive up and down the street and see outreach workers readily identifiable conducting outreach and engagement to people experiencing homelessness.”

Apparently, if you’ve committed public drunkenness, you’re in trouble. But if you’ve done so and then taken a slam by the curb, the government’s willing to forgive and forget.

And that’s called California.

-ALEX

 

Relevant RedState links in this article: herehere, and here.

Find all my RedState work here.

And please follow Alex Parker on Twitter and Facebook.

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