POINTS WEST - Here's a jaywalking ticket that's nonsense
I bumped into my pal Mr. Ayers on the street the other day and asked what was new.
"This," he said, handing me a jaywalking ticket he'd been issued that morning on skid row.
To be more specific, the ticket said he had walked "against red don't walk signal."
At the time, Mr. Ayers was pushing his shopping cart, which is loaded with musical instruments and lots of other stuff. Sometimes it's hard for him to cross a street before the light stops flashing.
Without breaking a sweat, I could name roughly 1,000 better things a cop could do with his time on skid row than write a ticket to a man who calls a mental health agency home.
But I'm not surprised Mr. Ayers got a ticket. Since September of last year, when Los Angeles began its Safer City Initiative, roughly 11,000 citations have been written in the skid row area. Many of the recipients can't afford the fines or don't have the wherewithal to make court appearances, so arrests on warrants for outstanding tickets are common.
Why should anyone care?
Because this isn't just bad public policy; it's expensive public policy. Time and resources are being wasted attacking symptoms rather than problems. There's no shortage of things that should be addressed before jaywalking on skid row, such as supportive housing and more mental health and drug rehab services, which are far more cost effective than churning clients through courts, jails and hospitals.
Philip Mangano, President Bush's homeless czar, called the city's efforts "shameful" and quickly named a host of cities that have done far better, including Denver, Portland, Ore., Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis and New York.
"The punitive approach has never worked anywhere in our country," said Mangano, who talks policy on occasion with L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and other local officials. Mangano plans to travel to Denver this month with L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky to show him how that city's smart planning, political will and the involvement of business leaders have produced dramatic results.
Gary Blasi, a UCLA professor who studies skid row and has been crunching numbers on the recent police crackdown, said residents who get cited often are handcuffed while police run background checks on them.
"By far the most common ticket is for jaywalking," Blasi says. "The tickets are also for dropping an ash on the street, inappropriate use of a milk crate -- things that, if they were written in any other part of the city, would be considered ridiculous."
