Neighborhood’s patience wears thin for progress on homelessness
Raman was elected with a plan; acting on it proves problematic
For the last year or so, the growing homeless encampments near the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Berendo Street have served as an example of how local government is failing two groups of people:
Those living in the tents, and those living in nearby houses and apartments.
The situation in this neighborhood along the East Hollywood-Los Feliz border is not unique, of course. Multiply it by hundreds of times across Los Angeles County, with its staggering homeless population of more than 66,000, according to the 2020 count.
What is a little different, though, is that the people who live indoors on Berendo were hoping things would get better after Nithya Raman was elected to the Los Angeles City Council last fall, ousting David Ryu in the district that serves the area.
Raman, running as a progressive candidate, accused city officials of being asleep at the wheel, and she had one plan for affordable housing and
another for addressing homelessness. And she wasn’t new to the conversation, having co-founded a neighborhood coalition called SELAH, which works to serve the needs of the unhoused and treat them as full-fledged members of the community.
So how’s it going so far? Not so good, say the housed residents of Berendo.
And Raman? “I understand people’s frustrations,” she said. “This has been going on a long time, and we are new to it and putting in a lot of time” to understand the challenges and solutions.
Certainly, a lot of this is complicated, and Raman told me that’s more clear to her now that she’s on the inside. But I’m still hoping that she, Kevin de León and Mark Ridley-Thomas — the newest members of the City
Council, all of whom campaigned in part on solutions — will bring new ideas and greater urgency to the subject.
I’ve been in touch with a group of Berendo residents since July, and they have repeatedly told me they are not without compassion for their less fortunate neighbors. But they are exhausted by frequent criminal activity on their block — much of it targeting the homeless people themselves — and by the empty promises they’ve heard again and again from city officials.
They do give credit to Raman’s staff for hosting meetings every two weeks, hearing them out and updating them on efforts to work with various city agencies and nonprofits in search of solutions. But given that Raman’s experience meant she knew service providers, community leaders and public officials, they were expecting more than meetings.
“It’s all talk, talk, talk,” said one neighbor. “It’s a joke. Ryu passed the buck, and I don’t see what actual plans Nithya’s office has.”
The neighbors aren’t callous. They have sympathy for the many homeless people living in Hollywood who are truly down on their luck. But some of those living under blue tarps on Berendo have intimidated neighbors, they say, exploiting other homeless people and drawing the attention of police.
One neighbor called it the Wild West, with “no accountability, no enforcement of laws.” If you speak up about this, said the neighbor, you’re vilified by some homeless advocates — a big part of Raman’s progressive base — for lacking understanding or compassion.
“There are none of us who don’t want the best for anyone who’s having hard times and is homeless, but we also want safety restored for everybody, the homeless included,” he said, adding that many elderly residents no longer walk down Berendo — which is blocked by tents on one side — to go to nearby stores.
Some of the homeless people from Hollywood Boulevard have been “enslaved into prostitution and given drugs by criminals who are taking advantage of them,” he said. (I’m withholding names at the request of Berendo residents who fear retaliation for their remarks).
Housed residents say that for a year or more, a drug operation has thrived on the south end of Berendo, cars and properties have been vandalized, bikes have been stolen, heavy machinery is operated at night — residents suspect there is a chop shop handling stolen auto parts — and shots were fired
recently in what police described as an apparent dispute over ownership of a vehicle.
“Neither the mayor nor most of the City Council can differentiate homelessness from criminal activity operating under the pretense of homelessness,” said one neighbor.
It goes without saying that if you’re destitute enough to be living on the streets, it’s not likely you’re pretending. Homelessness is what happens when the divide between the haves and have-nots keeps widening, when the cost of housing soars while pay remains flatter than a dollar bill, when there’s never enough mental health care and when a drug epidemic keeps digging the hole deeper.
Have some people given up hope, and resorted to whatever means necessary to survive? No doubt, especially when, as we all know, the growing homeless population has swamped the number of new beds available to them. One woman I talked to at the intersection of Berendo and Hollywood this month told me she’s been homeless since losing a job as a security guard four years ago, doesn’t have a social worker and isn’t on any list for future housing.
But I understand the frustration of people like those on Berendo, and I hear from them often. In January, I sat in on one of
the virtual meetings hosted by Raman’s staff, with a deputy city attorney and an LAPD officer joining the conversation.
It’s good that these meetings are happening, so neighbors can air complaints and get responses. But residents have seen little evidence that much progress has been made to date, partly because the city has focused on outreach and housing for those most vulnerable during the pandemic.
When a Raman staffer said the council office is developing a homelessness plan that involves multiple stakeholders, and hopes to establish a model that can be used throughout the city, I couldn’t suppress a yawn. It’s the kind of thing we’ve all heard for years.
The councilwoman’s staff did send residents a follow-up summary of specific plans to look into parking restrictions that might limit drug deals, to investigate utility theft, to bring in some gang intervention specialists, to address nuisance issues around a vacant lot and to develop a system for protecting residents against retaliation by allowing anonymous police reports.
But except for some credit to police for their efforts so far, residents told me they were losing patience that any significant changes will happen anytime
soon.
“Each meeting they say they are still working on it,” one resident said after the meeting last week. And in the encampments, it’s business as usual.
It’s because things are a mess, Raman said. Aside from the specifics of Berendo, she said she has been surprised by a lack of service coordination and continuity across public agencies and nonprofit contractors, and she’s asked the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority for improvements.
“I’m not seeing accountability,” she said.
She’s glad to see progress on moving people into motels and hotels, but she wants to know more about mental health and substance abuse services and how they fit a larger strategy.
Raman said too many barriers, like code restrictions, stand in the way of building cheaper housing faster. Permanent supportive housing is important, she said, but it’s expensive and takes too long to build, and more options are needed, like shared housing.
I’m on board with all that, and Raman deserves some time in office to begin making her mark.
But as both the housed and the unhoused would say, let’s get it going.
Los Angeles Police Department detectives investigating crimes that occurred during last summer’s large protests over police abuses asked business and home owners to hand over video footage recorded by their Amazon Ring security cameras, LAPD records show.
In a message from LAPD Det. Gerry Chamberlain that Ring relayed to customers in June, the detective said an LAPD task force was investigating incidents during the summer protests in which people were injured and property was “looted, damaged and destroyed.” Chamberlain said in the message that he was seeking videos recorded during the protests in hopes that they could aid in the investigations.
Los Angeles saw weeks of protests in late May and early June over the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and other abuses of Black people at the hands of police. The protests were largely peaceful,
but in some police clashed with protesters and stores were raided and fires were set.
The detective’s solicitation for videos raised concerns at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy nonprofit that obtained a copy of the email sent to Ring customers and other documents from the LAPD through a public records request, as well as other civil liberties groups. The groups are troubled by what they say is Ring’s willingness to cooperate with law enforcement agencies and viewed LAPD’s efforts to collect footage of the protests
as potentially violating people’s right to protest without police harassment.
The refusal of the LAPD and Ring representatives to provide details on which days and areas of the city detectives sought video footage raised further concerns, the EFF said.
“Police could use any instance in the area — of a car break-in, a window being smashed, a trash can being turned over — in order to request 12 hours of protest footage,” said Matthew Guariglia, an EFF policy analyst who obtained the LAPD records. “Those cameras are aimed at protected activity.”
The LAPD on Tuesday said it could not answer questions about the parameters of the video request or how much video it received in response. In an interview, Police Chief Michel Moore said working with private camera owners to gather video of crimes is “an important and lawful tactic” that helps police catch offenders.
Moore said the department has “no interest in identifying or tracking or warehousing imagery” of protesters expressing their 1st Amendment rights.
Ring officials said police agencies can submit requests for footage to the company, which then sends the requests to camera owners who might have footage helpful to the police. Requests from police must be related to a specific criminal investigation and are limited to 12-hour periods and to half-square-mile areas or smaller, the company said. Ring would not provide the specific parameters of the LAPD request.
A Ring spokesperson said the company’s policy “expressly prohibits” police from making requests for video of lawful activity such as protests.
Still, advocates said hours of video shot in areas of the city where tens of thousands of people gathered last summer to protest the killing of Floyd and other incidents of police abuse would almost certainly have captured activity protected by the 1st Amendment.
Guariglia, who has tracked Ring’s growing popularity and efforts by police across the U.S. to take advantage of the expansive camera network, said the LAPD emails document the first known example of law enforcement using Ring to investigate incidents related to the mass demonstrations that followed Floyd’s death. Knowing where and when the LAPD wanted video would help activists “ascertain just how tailored those requests are,” he said.
The ability to request footage from large numbers of Ring users at once has made efforts to collect surveillance on a large scale far easier for police agencies in recent years. What once took hours of door knocking by police officers can now be achieved through a single email blast sent to Ring customers through Ring’s Neighbors app. It is generally up to the owner of a camera to decide whether to hand over the footage.
As a result, Guariglia said Ring’s camera networks have “kind of become de facto CCTV networks for police departments,” without the public oversight typically required of city-owned closed circuit TV systems.
“Police don’t have to go through the checks and balances and hurdles of putting up their own cameras if they know there are reliable Ring cameras 10 to a block that they know they can request video from,” he said.
In a statement sent to the EFF, the LAPD said it was “not uncommon for investigators to ask businesses or residents if they will voluntarily share their footage with them.”
During the height of the summer protests, the LAPD received some criticism for using hundreds of officers clad in riot gear to aggressively push back protesters while organized criminals were left mostly unchecked to ransack nearby commercial corridors.
The SAFE LA Task Force has touted arrests of a number of individuals alleged to have been responsible for burglaries and arsons, but details about those cases remain limited.
The LAPD denied a public records request by The Times for a full list of cases brought by the task force, saying such information represented investigative work exempt from disclosure.