Policy essay on “Policing the homeless…”

Abstract

in the fall of 2005, the City of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) pilot tested a place-based enforcement effort—the Main Street Project—to deal with home-lessness in a downtown section known as Skid Row through the use of fines and citations. After anecdotal evidence of its success, the LAPD instituted a large-scale version—the Safer Cities Initiative (SCI)—in September 2006, which placed 50 full-time officers on the street in downtown Los Angeles who were charged with breaking up homeless encampments, issuing citations, and making arrests. After clearing out specific areas, the officers maintained their presence for 7 days and then moved to other parts of downtown. The LAPD’s intervention was limited to the Central Police Division, which is located in downtown Los Angeles close to Dodger Stadium, the Staples Center, and the Los Angeles Convention Center, whereas four other adjacent divisions (Northeast, Rampart, Hollenbeck, and Newton) formed the comparison sites that received no official police intervention. The findings showed that (a) the intervention was associated with reductions in nuisance, property, and violent crimes; (b) there was no evidence that crime was displaced to (and thus increased in) the other four police divisions; and (c) there was some spillover effect such that comparable reductions for all three crimes were observed in the nonexperimental divisions ad-jacent to the Central Division, which had no apparent concerted police effort. In all, the results of this carefully executed study demonstrate once again that it is what the police do that matters in targeting places for crime treatment and eventual crime reduction (Sherman, 1995).