Until this year, skid row presented a scene of squalor and depravity that had no equal across the country. Sidewalks were impassable, covered with bodies, human waste and infectious bacteria. Makeshift tents and cardboard-box encampments lined the streets. Prostitution and drug use and trafficking were open and shameless.
Even addicts were amazed at the scene. Fifty-year-old Vicki Williams arrived from Las Vegas in December 2005 with a heavy habit. "I couldn't believe what I was seeing," she said. "People getting high on the streets like it was legal. Anything you can imagine, I've observed: Women walking down the street buck naked; people stabbed in front of me."
Employees of the area's export-import businesses and food-processing plants often had to step around feces, discarded hypodermic needles and hostile encampment residents in order to enter their workplaces.
Yet for 25 years, homeless advocates and civil liberties groups fought every effort to restore sanity to the 50-square-block area. Any time the police embarked on a law enforcement campaign, anti-police litigators hauled the LAPD into court. In 1999, the doyenne of downtown homeless agitators, Alice Callaghan, picketed the opening of a skid row drop-in center intended to provide the homeless a path to rehabilitation. Callaghan likened the facility to an internment camp. Officers who tried to get mentally ill, diseased addicts into treatment were accused of harassing the homeless. It was hard not to conclude that the advocates wanted the homeless to stay maximally visible.
Now, the situation has changed. The Los Angeles Police Department's Safer City Initiative -- under which 50 additional police officers were assigned to the neighborhood to reduce crime, fight drug dealing and crack down on quality-of-life offenses -- has begun to bring safety and assistance to people living on the streets and in the SROs and missions. The number of people sleeping on downtown streets declined from a peak of 1,876 in mid-September 2006 to just over 700 in recent months, according to police. "We've broken the back of the problem," says LAPD Chief William J. Bratton.
Yet the homeless industry and lawyers who specialize in taking on the LAPD continue to attack the initiative as a cruel effort to punish the poor. This charge is a grotesque misrepresentation of what is really happening, a mythology that is utterly unsupported by the facts.
