A human rights group has criticized the city of Los Angeles for its approach to handling the homeless crisis.
In a report, the Human Rights Watch said the city is pursuing an expensive and ineffective policy of criminalizing people who are homeless. It also found that the homeless community made up 38% of all citations and arrests from 2016 to 2022.
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“The police department is devoting a great deal of their resources to ticketing and arresting unhoused people,” John Raphling, a senior researcher on criminal justice for the US program, told CBS Radio.
He added that the sanitation department’s “thousands of sweeps of encampments” are also costing a great deal of money.
The report also says that Mayor Karen Bass’ Inside Safe Program has fallen short and that it prioritizes publicly visible encampments, rather than setting aside rooms for people in the most need. The group also cites the lack of permanent housing as an issue, something that in the report the group said Mayor Bass has acknowledged.
“Without permanent housing, people remain stuck in interim shelters, including the hotels—creating a “bottleneck” that prevents others from getting off the streets—or they leave the shelters and hotels to return to the streets,” the group wrote in the report.
Raphling noted that there are better ways to address homelessness.
“The city, the state, the federal government should be not just investing in developing more affordable and accessible housing for people but also in working to help keep people in their existing housing,” he said.
KNX News has reached out to Mayor Bass for comment.
You can view the report in its entirety HERE.
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