Los Angeles police officers face significant restrictions on how they search and detain people under a settlement announced Thursday in a long-running case involving the rights of the homeless on skid row.
The agreement comes 18 months after a federal judge found that the Los Angeles Police Department was unconstitutionally searching homeless people in the skid row area as part of Chief William J. Bratton's crackdown on downtown crime.
Although the LAPD has strongly disputed the judge's findings, officials agreed to more than a dozen conditions under which officers would be prohibited from searching people they encounter on the street.
Officers will no longer be allowed to search people caught jaywalking, sleeping on the street or cited and released in the field for minor offenses. Officers also are prohibited from handcuffing subjects unless there is reasonable suspicion that "a subject poses a physical threat to officers or others, may destroy evidence, flee, or otherwise interfere with the officers' legitimate investigation."
Officers are also limited on when they can do warrant checks on people they encounter in the street. Such checks are only allowed if they can be done in "reasonable time," so that the person is not unduly detained.
Also included in the settlement is a mandate that officers assigned to skid row undergo special training regarding the constitutional requirements for searching and detaining people.
Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson said the settlement is significant because of the specific rules it sets out, which give officers little wiggle room.
"This settlement to some degree is more like a handbook for police behavior in this scenario," Levenson said. "It is unusual in a settlement to get into such details. But the details here put more teeth in the settlement than we ordinarily see."
LAPD officials said that they don't think their officers have violated the rights of homeless people and that they don't believe the restriction will affect their ability to patrol the city.
American Civil Liberties Union officials said the agreement marks an important check on aggressive policing. "The Constitution protects every Angeleno against unlawful stops and searches, from those living in Hollywood Hills to those sleeping on the streets of downtown," said Peter Bibring, an ACLU of Southern California staff attorney who represented plaintiffs in the case against the city.
