Proposal would eliminate old bench warrants for homeless

this year showed that the LAPD made 14,000 arrests of homeless people in the city in 2016, a 31 percent increase over 2011. The rise came as LAPD arrests overall fell 15 percent. The data sparked new calls for officials to better address how the homeless cycle through the criminal justice system.

The bench warrants have been the subject of much debate among homeless advocates and others, with critics arguing that homeless people are not in a position to pay the warrants or show up for regular court appearances.

City and county courts have experimented with small programs to wipe homeless people’s records clean of minor citations if they accept job training, drug and alcohol treatment or other social services and perform community service.

In San Francisco three years ago, judges stopped issuing bench warrants for no-show defendants, ultimately removing nearly 65,000 outstanding warrants issued since 2011.

There are probably hundreds of thousands of such warrants in Los Angeles, said Gita O’neill, assistant city attorney for homeless issues.

Moore said he was not proposing anything as sweeping as what San Francisco did, but he sees the need for some reforms.

“With newer offenses we need consequences and some restorative justicetype mitigation,” he said. “We can’t (and) shouldn’t simply just do a wholesale wipe” of warrants.

An examination of fourth-quarter 2017 citations showed that 90 percent of the homeless people who received them failed to appear in court, according to LAPD Cmdr. Dominic Choi. He said such citations, on average, resulted in $445 in fines for the accused. Much of that total charge comes from a plethora of state court fees on top of the initial fine.