This month’s attack of a librarian should serve as a wake-up call to city officials that Santa Monica’s growing homeless population of mentally ill people and criminals has become a very serious issue that needs attention immediately.
It was only a matter of time before someone like Celia Carroll got hurt. As the head librarian of the Ocean Park Library, Carroll is charged with keeping things orderly at the public facility. That’s a tall task when deranged, unstable and aggressive transients are lurking around corners waiting to pounce. Melvin Winston Hardy, a 39-year-old transient, was one of them. After tearing up the men’s room at the library, Carroll confronted Hardy and told him to stay away from the library. Apparently not liking what she had to say, he punched her from behind and she fell face first onto the pavement. She sustained serious injuries. Hardy will stay in jail for 60 days at the most.
While it’s never a good idea to make such a confrontation on your own and it’s better to get the police involved, the reality is that there are far too many instances occurring throughout the city in which people find themselves in situations with aggressive transients. More times than not, people can’t or won’t wait for the police to show up. (See letter to the editor, this page.) Libraries are magnets for transients, yet city officials choose only to hire “inspectors” to keep the peace. In response to Carroll’s attack, city officials plan to have these inspectors patrol the library branches more frequently. That’s nowhere near good enough. We agree with Carroll’s husband, Larry, in his letter to the editor on this page, that there needs to be security officers at each library during their normal operating hours.
Libraries should be safe havens for children to study and to learn. They are supposed to be places for the community to gather and grow, and for individuals to expand their minds and stay connected to the rest of the world. They are public assets and need to be protected, as do the people who visit them.
Head city librarian Greg Mullen is absolutely correct when he said that maintaining security is paramount and if librarians don’t feel safe, then the public doesn’t feel safe. We’re going to go out on a limb here and speak for the majority of residents by saying that, at some point in a day, residents don’t feel safe as a result of transients. It has been lodged as the No. 1 concern among residents for at least the past five years, according to City Hall’s own surveys.
We, like most residents, are sick of it. We’re tired of putting up with city officials’ half-hearted approach to dealing with the homeless population. If City Hall is going to engage itself in humane efforts to help the down and out, it needs to be prepared to deal with the consequences. But it isn’t. Basic laws go unenforced everyday.
People shouldn’t feel intimidated by walking up the steps to the Main Library in the early morning to return a book because there are aggressive transients sleeping there. Residents shouldn’t have to feel unsafe walking from the alley to the Third Street Promenade because mentally unstable vagrants are lying in the middle of their path. Citizens shouldn’t have to walk by a group of street kids smoking dope in the middle of the morning on the Promenade. It’s as if the transients have the run of the place.
The City Council must invest more resources into public safety — either through a clear mandate that all laws targeting anti-social behavior be enforced or by putting more cops on the street. We understand that police are already overwhelmed with the amount of service calls they get related to the homeless, but there is no reason why officers can’t make these people move when they are sleeping on the steps of public buildings or on a public street. And put a cop on each block of the Promenade to prevent it from becoming any more of a seedy place than it already is.
Many of the homeless who are served by City Hall’s programs and other city-supported services are doing what they are supposed to be doing: following the rules of society and helping themselves by seeking assistance. The others, who often seem to represent the majority due to their visibility, are criminals or mentally unstable. Those are the ones who need the most help and the ones that are scaring us.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 31, 2006. Read the original PDF.