County should not join homeless appeal

It doesn’t take mad math skills to figure out that if your community has more homeless people sleeping on the streets than it has open shelter beds, then there’s nowhere for them to go. So jailing people for breaking rules against sleeping on the street ends up being cruel and, frankly, ludicrous.

That’s the rationale behind the settlement the city of Los Angeles struck in 2007 that allows homeless people to sleep on LA’s sidewalks at night. And that’s the basis for an important 9th Circuit Court decision last year in the case of Martin vs. the city of Boise, which states the obvious: whether sitting, lying, and sleeping are defined as acts or conditions, ‘‘they are universal and unavoidable consequences of being human’’. But lawyers for the city of Boise want the US Supreme Court to hear an appeal of that decision, and other cities are eagerly lining up to file friendof-the-court briefs urging the high court to overturn it. Now, the LA County Board of Supervisors is planning to vote on a motion to join the appeal. And the LA city attorney is also filing a brief asking the court to take up Boise’s appeal.

If the Martin decision is overturned, that could allow local jurisdictions to criminalise sleeping outside whenever and wherever they choose.

The Board of Supervisors should not be filing an amicus brief. The Martin decision is not what’s stopping the county or the city from doing what it needs to do to help get homeless people off the streets.