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# Actions against homeless speak louder than words
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/actions-against-homeless-speak-louder-than-words/
- Published: 2004-03-15T16:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T04:01:56.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Opinion, Pacific Palisades, #archive-import, Homeless, Homelessness

*FROM THE STREET*

*By Janet Phelan*

We are sitting in a small group under the trees at Palisades Park, at Paul Grymkowski’s picnic. We are feasting on the best food available for the Santa Monica homeless. A few yards away, one of Santa Monica’s finest is talking with a woman who has been walking her dog. The subject is the anti-feeding ordinance, which makes it illegal to distribute food in public areas in Santa Monica without a highly restrictive permit. I hear the officer say, “It’s a bad law. I didn’t write it. I’m just enforcing it.” He sounds apologetic.

What an interesting take on personal responsibility, I thought.

“Officer,” I call out. “You have a choice of what job you take. You are responsible for your job choice.”

“Thank you for reminding me of that,” he shot back.

The phenomenon of blind obedience to authority was studied by Stanley Milgram. He was attempting to better understand and explain “national characteristics” which could have contributed to the “blind eye” so many gave to the Holocaust. His infamous experiment consisted of an authority figure wearing a white lab coat, a “subject” strapped to a machine which purportedly delivered shocks and were to be administered by the actual subject. This subject was directed to deliver the “shocks” by the white-coated authority figure. These shocks were explained to be of increasing magnitude and danger.

The results of the experiment gave a black eye to humanity. In Milgram’s words: “Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.”

I have had cause to reflect on Milgram’s words quite a bit in the last year. Having been reared by two profoundly moral people, I simply assumed the ethics I learned were shared by everyone.

Police abuse and homelessness have taught me otherwise. Compassion and empathy do not appear to be widely distributed characteristics in the general U.S. populace.

Having seen the “Passion of the Christ” last weekend, I must quibble with the portrayal of the guards who so dreadfully flogged Mel Gibson’s Jesus. Considering what time and history has revealed of human nature, a more accurate portrayal would have been a perfunctory, even lackadaisical beating. I doubt that the guards had true hatred for Christ. Like the police officer in Palisades Park, I imagine they were simply “following orders.”

A final, truly personal note to the Santa Monica Police Department. After chemicals were dumped at our campsite, I called both the Santa Monica police and fire departments, and entreated them to clean up the mess. The toxins had seeped into our backpacks and, unbeknownst to us, had rendered inedible all of our food, beverages, and even our medicine. Both Joann Nelson and I became quite ill.

As a personal entreaty to Police Chief Jim Butts, please clean up the area surrounding the court building on Main Street. After all, it is city property. We have also twice observed an individual sneaking into camp under the cloak of darkness to further deposit unidentified chemicals on the very forms of sleeping homeless.

It is difficult enough to deal with abject poverty and the streets. Coping with chemical “warfare” on the homeless adds a nearly Herculean aspect to our daily struggle.

Would it be possible to better police the Civic Center in order to apprehend the miscreants? I assume I am directing the request to the “proper authority.” (Janet Phelan is a university graduate and a freelance writer who has appeared in several publications including the Los Angeles Times. She has been homeless in Santa Monica for more than a year).

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 15, 2004.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/031504.pdf?ref=smdp.com)