Do police officers leave people lying on the sidewalk?
That was the question a member of Los Angeles City Council President Paul Krekorian's staff heard from a security guard who walked into the North Hollywood district office Thursday.
The reason for the consultation soon became clear. The guard had security camera video from a Burbank Police Department vehicle stopping on the sidewalk outside Krekorian's office on Lankershim Boulevard that same morning. In the footage, officers can be seen getting out and opening a passenger side door for a barefoot man, wearing a shirt and baggy pants, to get out. Before the patrol car leaves, the man rubs his face, kneels and rests his head on the ground. He then lies face down on the sidewalk.
So the answer, surprisingly, is yes: some police officers leave people (in this case, a homeless man) lying on the sidewalk and walk away.
This type of action (or inaction) is despicable. But it is not something unheard of. Anecdotes abound of neighboring cities leaving people homeless in Los Angeles, as Krekorian noted in a letter he wrote to Burbank Mayor Nick Schultz, calling it “inhumane and inexcusable for any neighboring jurisdiction to simply remove homeless people from their streets and throw them into ours. .” Krekorian has asked the Los Angeles city attorney, the Los Angeles County district attorney and the state attorney general to investigate.
Over the years, hospitals have been fined for abandoning homeless patients after they have been discharged.
The Burbank Police Department says it also launched an investigation, although it also released an apparent justification for the incident. The department says two officers responded to a call about the naked man at a bus stop near Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank.
They persuaded him to get dressed and offered to leave him somewhere. He asked to be taken to the Sunland/Tujunga area, but, according to the police department's statement, he “ultimately agreed to be transported to the Metro Red Line in North Hollywood.” Officers stopped a couple of blocks from the train station when the man asked to get off for coffee.
The Burbank Police Department did not say if it had a protocol for calls involving homeless people in distress. But the Los Angeles Police Department does, according to Captain Kelly Muniz. LAPD officers and dispatchers evaluate these situations on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes a SMART team is sent, which includes a police officer and a mental health clinician. Other times, an unarmed team of mental health professionals are called in as part of the CIRCLE program, which operates out of the mayor's Office of Community Safety.
Krekorian staff said they searched for the man and found him nearby that afternoon. He told them that he went to Providence St. Joseph for a leg injury but they kicked him out for being unruly. He had no money or wallet. Krekorian's staff called the Los Angeles Fire Department and he was taken to Providence St. Joseph. Since then, a Krekorian spokesman said, staff have tried to track him down.
Citing federal health care privacy laws, Providence spokeswoman Patricia Aidem would not say whether the man was ever at the hospital. However, she said, “we don't ask patients to leave the hospital.” She noted that each Providence emergency department in Southern California has a staff member assigned to help homeless patients connect with local resources and provide them with clean clothing and shoes.
So the only thing we know for sure about this man is that Burbank police officers took him to the sidewalk.
But what's truly outrageous is that while this case caught our attention because it occurred in front of the City Council President's district office, every homeless person languishing on a sidewalk, sidewalk, or park has been abandoned in some way, whether not by a police officer or a hospital, then by a system so broken that housing is out of reach and social services are insufficient.
Being homeless in Los Angeles means constantly moving from place to place, whether by a police officer or one of the many “anti-camping” signs posted around the city's parks, schools, and underpasses. .
It may have been bad luck for the Burbank Police Department that they dropped this man off in front of Krekorian's district office, but it was perhaps the best luck this man could have had. A team of city officials immediately began helping him, starting a discussion about the lack of resources available to homeless people.
If the police had dropped him off somewhere else, maybe no one would have noticed, just as they don't notice the thousands of people who live on the streets in front of them every day.
