DISCRIMINATION LAWSUIT AGAINST SAN FRANCISCO FOR HOMELESS SHELTER PROGRAM THAT EXCLUDES DISABLED PEOPLE

NEWS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 27, 2008

Contacts:
Disability Rights Advocates:
Sid Wolinsky (510) 665-8644
Julia Pinover (510) 665-8644
Western Regional Advocacy Project:
Paul Boden (415) 621-2533
Zelle, Hofmann, Voelbel, Mason & Gette LLP:
Daniel Mason (415) 693-0700

DISCRIMINATION LAWSUIT AGAINST SAN FRANCISCO FOR HOMELESS SHELTER PROGRAM THAT EXCLUDES DISABLED PEOPLE

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — A landmark suit filed in federal court in San Francisco today charges that San Francisco’s homeless shelter program “blatantly discriminates” against disabled homeless people. Although the majority of all homeless people are men, women, and children with disabilities, the suit is the first in the country to broadly challenge the homeless shelter program of a city as a violation of civil rights statutes that protect people with disabilities.

The suit alleges that the cornerstone of San Francisco’s approach to homelessness — the embattled “Care Not Cash” program that is the brain child of Mayor Gavin Newsom systematically excludes homeless men and women with disabilities.

Care Not Cash gives participants priority shelter reservations and case management services. Homeless disabled persons who receive social security or veterans benefits cannot participate in the program, even if they desperately need shelter. People with disabilities are thus denied any opportunity to use a major portion of the resources in the shelter system and are denied access to the hundreds of reserved Care Not Cash beds.

Disabled persons are also denied any opportunity to make a 45-day shelter bed reservation, a privilege that Care Not Cash gives to eligible participants. In addition, these disabled men and women must compete with thousands of others each night for a chance to occupy one of the scarce shelter beds available. As a result, homeless people who need shelter the most are the ones who are least able to gain access to the services they so desperately need.

The class action suit, seeking relief on behalf of disabled homeless persons in San Francisco, was filed by Disability Rights Advocates (DRA), a Berkeley-based nonprofit law center, and Zelle, Hofmann, Voelbel, Mason & Gette LLP, a major national litigation law firm. The suit seeks to end discrimination against disabled people and does not request money damages.

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit are Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP), a non profit coalition protecting the interests of homeless people, and an individual with disabilities who is homeless in San Francisco.

Sid Wolinsky, Litigation Director for Disability Rights Advocates, commented:
“San Francisco’s homeless ‘program’ is a bureaucratic mess. Under Mayor Newsom’s system, disabled people are more likely to be forced onto the streets and alleys of San Francisco. No amount of smooth talking can hide the fact that there are only 1,300 shelter beds for some 3,800 single adult homeless people. No wonder the last report of the National Coalition for the Homeless named San Francisco the ‘eleventh meanest city in the United States.’ The City has created a cruel shell game in which everyone is a loser.”

San Francisco has a very serious shortage of shelter beds. The City guarantees to anyone enrolled in Care Not Cash that they can obtain one of over three hundred beds specifically set aside for them. Because disabled men and women cannot participate in Care Not Cash, however, men and women in wheelchairs or with mental disabilities must attempt on their own to locate some other available bed, travel to that location carrying everything they have, endure lengthy waits until late at night, and often be told that no bed is available. Even if they find a bed, they cannot keep it. They are forced to repeat the process each day. Because homeless persons with disabilities often lack the mental and physical fortitude to overcome the obstacles which San Francisco imposes, they are often left unsheltered.

Dan Mason, an attorney with Zelle Hofmann commented: “It is shameful for a city with the civil rights history of San Francisco to treat people with disabilities so unfairly. People denied shelter beds are the most fragile shelter seekers — those with disabilities.”

People with disabilities, both mental and physical, make up a very high percentage of the homeless population in San Francisco. In a 2007 survey conducted by the Coalition on Homelessness, 50% of individuals in the shelter system self-identified as having a disability. Homeless advocates estimate that a far larger percentage of homeless people are disabled.


Paul Boden, Director of WRAP added, “Homelessness is an emergency. It is a crisis. For San Francisco to programmatically discriminate and to make this vital life sustaining service unavailable to people with mental health disabilities is unconscionable.”

The full text of the complaint is posted at the Disability Rights Advocates website: www.dralegal.org.

Community Organizers Opposed to Downtown Gentrification Arrested for the 2nd Time in Two Months

Just minutes after intervening in an unlawful search of an African American woman, three African American organizers are detained at gunpoint;
Two are assaulted and injured; One is incarcerated

On Thursday April 10, 2008 at approximately 9:30 PM, community organizers responding to a report of police abuse in downtown Los Angeles find themselves victims of police brutality and illegal arrest.

LA CAN community organizers received a call Thursday evening reporting that an unidentified African-American woman was handcuffed and being searched on 5th and Los Angeles streets. LA CAN operates a CommunityWatch program that monitors police abuse and compliance with court injunctions against LAPD in downtown Los Angeles. Joe Thomas and Steve Richardson took cameras to the scene and Herman Jones arrived in his vehicle. The woman was released and she explained that LAPD had just jacked her up for nothing, saying they were looking for drugs.

Thomas, Richardson and Jones then left the scene by car to investigate and monitor police activities because historically poor, Black residents have been mistreated by police in an attempt to keep them away from Downtown’s trendy ArtWalk, which was happening that evening. LAPD officers followed them and conducted a "felony stop" while the car was simply stopped at a red light - meaning guns were drawn and all three were cuffed and searched, although no crime had been committed. After the three were handcuffed, Thomas was dragged down the street and hit by officers and Richardson was brutally choked and held down by multiple officers. When witnesses with cameras arrived on the scene, the officers stopped the illegal behavior and uncuffed Jones and Thomas, instructing them that they were free to go. Richardson was arrested on the charge of "resisting arrest" and was incarcerated. The arresting officer stated that he grabbed two fingers of one of the officers while he was being held down in handcuffs and that was the basis of their charge. Both Richardson and Thomas sustained injuries to their fingers, wrists and necks and received medical treatment for these injuries.
There were 10 to 15 officers on the scene when additional witnesses arrived, the majority in plain clothes without badge identification. Officers were asked for their names, badge and serial numbers, which they are obligated to provide pursuant to Federal Consent Decree, on multiple occasions and all but two officers refused to give witnesses their information. The ranking officer was asked to provide information for identification purposes later at Central Division Headquarters and he again refused. This refusal was recorded via camera phone.
This incident underscores an alarming and ongoing trend of police officers illegally arresting LA CAN organizers performing perfectly legal police monitoring duties. Just two months ago, Pete White of LA CAN was also arrested by Central Division officers while documenting a raid in a Skid Row residential hotel. The charges against him were later dismissed in the "interest of justice" and a federal civil rights lawsuit was subsequently filed. Community organizers have not been exempt from the widespread abuses under the Mayor’s Safer City Initiative, but the impacts reach much further to the thousands of poor and mostly Black residents targeted by the Initiative. The Inspector General has assigned a special team of investigators to monitor the large number of complaints.

we are asking you to send emails to the Mayor’s office and the Police Commission this week to express your opposition to the targeting of LA CAN during police monitoring, your opposition to the aggressive and often illegal tactics of LAPD under the Safer Cities Initiative, and your demand for a response to the community to stop these abuses. The emails can be very short and direct – we know you are all very busy. We just want them to hear from a wide range of people again. The contact info is below.

Larry.frank@lacity.org
Rafael.gonzalez@lacity.org
Leonard.jackson@lacity.org

Police Commissioners: V8834@lapd.lacity.org
Anthony Pacheco, John Mack, Andrea Ordin, Robert Saltzman, and Alan Skobin

L.A.P.D. Detains W.R.A.P. members for crossing street

Under Safer Cities, LAPD has been using parole status – both legally and illegally – to increase harassment and arrests of downtown residents and to incite fear of low-income community residents. On Friday, LAPD planned a parole raid on a hotel near 5th and Towne. There were at least 30 LAPD officers and 10 parole agents on site. Someone called our office and Pete and Gerald went to document the raid. Pete had the camera and within minutes of being there and taking pictures, was cuffed and against the wall, and was publicly detained for more than 20 minutes. He repeatedly asked for a supervisor and for officers’ cards and got none. Dogon arrived with a second camera and began documenting the illegal detention. Within minutes of him filming, he was also cuffed and up against the wall. They ran him for warrants and claimed they found a felony warrant – one officer told Dogon – “we really got you now.” Of course later, they claimed it was a “mistake” – it was a different Richardson. When they released Dogon, still on the sidewalk, they also gave him a ticket stating, “observed pedestrian cross street against don’t walk sign,” although Dogon had arrived on a bicycle. Instead of releasing Pete on-site, they transported him to Central Station. When he got there, followed by 6 additional officers, they told him he was being charged with “walking in the roadway” and he needed to sign the citation to leave. Needless to say, he didn’t sign, since he didn’t commit that offense and that was not why they detained and transported him. They booked him and he spent the day at 77th Street jail.

Removing homeless from sight doesn't make them go away

Paul Boden,Jennifer Friedenbach

Friday, December 7, 2007

The insatiable appetite to see homeless people disappear from our parks, streets, business districts and tourist areas requires us all to go back to one of the very first lessons we are taught as infants. Just because you can no longer see it, doesn't mean it no longer exists. Think of this the next time you play peek-a-boo with a toddler. Now you see the homeless. Now you don't. But either way, we're still here. Peek-a-boo!! When city government talks about closing our parks at night and establishing expanded camping and cooking restrictions, and when Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius writes about the parks, we often hear the phrase, "This is not about homelessness. It's about the parks." While this phrase is a great tagline, it is also blatantly untrue.

Park sweeps, police outreach teams and the busting up of encampments in China Basin and along the freeways has EVERYTHING to do with homelessness! Our parks, our freeway underpasses and our streets have been around a lot longer than the very recent advent of closing and fencing them off has. In fact, a direct correlation can be made between the massive increases in homelessness in the early 1980s and the park closures, police programs with both old and new vagrancy laws, and the fencing off of open space. Prior to Mayor Frank Jordan's Matrix program, all of San Francisco's public parks were open 24-hours-a-day. Now, Golden Gate Park closes at 10 p.m. and other parks at dusk or midnight.

Prior to the federal cuts to affordable housing programs - from $83 billion in 1978 to $18 billion in 1983 - contemporary homelessness did not exist. Public parks were open for stargazing (and necking) and panhandling was around but not that big of a deal. After the cuts in government funding for affordable housing, Disney moves into Times Square and Union Square, million-dollar lofts are built in what was once skid row, the public parks are all closed at night, and practically every store front has a "no trespassing" sign in its window. For homeless people, the end result is almost everything other than walking and breathing can get you a ticket, which then lands you in jail.

We need to rediscover what we learned when we were infants: People still exist even if we don't see them. It's called object permanence. Maybe if we remembered this lesson, we would choose to do something about the increasing number of families and individuals living without housing in the United States and begin to fund housing programs again. Maybe we could find a unified community voice for restoring the governor's recent (in a long series of) mental health funding cuts instead of constantly reading about the potential dangers those scary crazy homeless people impose on the rest of us.

When local government is allowed to play peek-a-boo with people's lives, when it is given the authority to make people disappear from society's consciousness, the result is inevitable - incarceration. After all, removing people's presence from society pretty much requires you put them somewhere. As the federal and state governments abandoned all pretense of responsibility for the health and housing needs of people who may be poor and/or disabled, local governments increasingly turned to laws and policing programs to mitigate the damage.

In response, jails are overflowing and municipal courts have established "special courts" along social, as opposed to criminal, lines to deal with this influx. Drug courts, mental health courts and homeless or community courts are all, at their core, manifestations of a criminal justice system overwhelmed by a society that attempts rid itself of poor people rather than attempting to rid itself of poverty.

Just as sweeping dirt under the rug doesn't really clean the floor, sweeping disabled and homeless people from public view or into jail doesn't really address homelessness. They are still disabled and homeless when they are released. It is ineffective as hell, but local governments keep trying and we keep letting them.

It has been 25 years since the re-emergence of massive homelessness in America. It is time we stop trying to recreate Jim Crow and start trying to recreate the New Deal. After all, the New Deal didn't build prisons. It created jobs building Hospitals, Schools and Homes.

Paul Boden is the director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project and

Jennifer Friedenbach is the executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, San Francisco.

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Painting the wall to hide a leak doesn't repair the plumbing. In the same way, writing local plans to end homelessness without adequate funding for affordable housing will never provide people who need housing with homes.

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