By Mark Shepherd Santa Monica
The executive director of OPCC certainly has important insights into our vagrancy crisis (“OPCC didn’t create the homeless,” letters, Aug. 30), but the head spender of this social-service empire will only drone on with one mantra: More money, more services, more money, more services.
Last night, we walked to 18th Street and Wilshire Boulevard to get some ice cream — my infant son, pregnant wife and me. It was a zombie movie and a drunken frat party rolled into one long gauntlet of homeless — taunting, demanding money, drinking from a shared bottle — all on private property. Around the corner, going home, a man was masturbating in his doorway campsite. Where are the police? Why do we tolerate this?
The problem also is that our city leaders treat the homeless like a special class of children. They get a pass for all types of illegal behavior, because they’re homeless. Most of our vagrants made conscious, rational adult decisions to travel to Santa Monica from Lord knows where. And they make rational, adult decisions to trespass, or piss in public, or drink, or panhandle or camp in cars, and on and on.
If Santa Monica can require a computerized photo registry of illegally tall plants, the city ought to be able to find the political will to tell the police to enforce laws that most of us would never think of violating, like sleeping in someone else’s property or jerking off in public.
I don’t think the homeless have flocked here in record numbers only because of the free food and job counseling services. It’s also because they know Santa Monica will let them get away with breaking the law. And for that, blame falls squarely on the shoulders of the renter “rights” majority on the City Council. You know who they are. They’ve been in office a long, long time.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on September 1, 2007. Read the original PDF.