A Homeless Anecdote

Last week, I went out for a haircut appointment.  It was a three-block walk in the pouring rain.  On the way I passed a homeless guy sitting in a wheelchair, his wheelie suitcase nearby, under the eave of a commercial building.

 When I walked home, the guy still was sitting there and the rain had calmed down a bit, but the weather was still wet and cold.  

I don't give money to homeless people anymore, but I try not to be a complete jerk. 

So I went into a liquor store and bought a pre-made turkey sandwich.  Then I went across the street to the library branch and located its entrance ramp.  I went inside the library and told a clerk I was going to bring a wet homeless guy in his wheelchair inside.  I said that I hoped there would be no objection if the poor guy quietly consumed his sandwich in the food-free zone.  She snarled a little, but finally  nodded.

Then I took the sandwich to the homeless guy and offered to push him to the library. No, he said, he wasn't wet and preferred to sit where he was.   Then he gave me his life story, including his extensive experiences with Buddhist groups and reincarnation, his disappointments with the local Catholic charities homeless program and his participation in film productions at the local universities, UCLA and USC.  Plus a lot more.

Maybe he needed to talk for 45 minutes, but I wanted to go home and put on some dry shoes.  Finally I bade him adieu and offered my best wishes.

Update

Today I walked to the Whole Foods store to buy dinner provisions.

On my way home, I passed the same same homeless man walking the other way.  He was pushing his wheelchair with his wheelie suitcase in it, and he was wearing the same pair of oddly decorated headphones he had been wearing when I gave him the sandwich.

He didn’t recognize me, which probably was just as well.


Sometimes I feel like a sucker.

A Short Walk in Homeless Town

This afternoon I walked out on an errand in my Santa Monica/Venice neighborhood in Southern California.  It's a nice location, not far from the beach.  

Within two blocks, I saw the following.

1. A bicycle chained to a street rack.  Only the frame remained.  Thieves had taken the wheels, saddle, handlebars, brakes, chain, derailleur and pedals.

2.  Another bicycle chained to a street rack.  This was a less desirable bike, apparently, because the thieves had taken only the wheels and tires. 

3.  Yet another naked bicycle frame.

Bicycle theft is an entrepreneurial thing with certain members of the homeless communities in Southern California.  

I turned at the corner and, one block later, I came upon this:  A dozen or more bicycle wheels and tires, and other assorted parts, plus several bicycle frames.  All were chained securely to a metal traffic sign post.

My best guess was that some bicycle thief, or group of thieves, had stashed their most recent haul in plain sight to be picked up later.

In an effort to be helpful, I phoned the local police precinct. I figured the police could collect  the stray parts and, if their true owners could not be found, could discard the lot.  If this were done on a regular basis, I reasoned, it might discourage thievery.  

Alas, it was not to be.

On my first call, I was directed, in English and Spanish, to hang up and call 911 if my situation were an emergency (which it was not) or to wait to talk to a police employee.

So I waited.  The phone rang and rang and rang.  After five minutes and as my cell battery started wearing down, I hung up and continued on my errand.  

A few blocks on, I passed this.  I believe a homeless person had liberated a shopping cart and chained it to another traffic sign post in order to keep someone else from taking it.  (Other local denizens convey their goods in baby strollers, which I do not think are purchased at the Caro Bambino store on Main Street.)

But I digress.

When I got home, I phoned the precinct again.  This time the line was busy; an automated voice told me to call later and then hung up on me. 

A few minutes later I called a third time.  The phone rang and rang and rang again.  I put the line on speaker and did some household chores.  After a long time, I gave up and hung up the phone.   

This was probably just as well. 

The police here take homelessness as a given. They seem more hostile than helpful in dealings with the street population, but they don't seem concerned with misdemeanors.  Smoking methamphetamine on the sidewalk in front of a boutique, which I observed on a midday stroll last week, no longer raises an eyebrow among pedestrians, let alone the police.  

Update -- April 2: A Trip to the Grocery Store

As I drove out of the grocery store parking lot this morning, I passed this tent encampment with an interesting assemblage of disassembled bicycle parts. I took a picture with my cellphone.

When I got home I called the police, and this time I got a press relations officer on the line.  

"We can't just go take bicycles from people unless we can prove they were stolen," he said.  "It's on the people to register their bikes and then file reports when the bikes are stolen."

"How often do you return stolen bikes to their owners?" I asked.

"Well, they don't register their bikes, so not very often," he said.

"Can't you send a couple officers to walk by every once in a while and just make these guys a little nervous?"

"Well, that encampment has been getting bigger, so maybe it's time to check and make sure it's not blocking foot traffic on the sidewalk," he said.

"Foot traffic? Don't normal people cross the street to avoid tent camps of homeless bicycle thieves?" I asked.  Yes, it was a rhetorical question.

Meanwhile, outside the grocery store a young man was sitting on the sidewalk yelling and waving his arms.  He was at it when I walked in and still was at it when I walked out.  There was no point calling the police because it couldn't be proved that the guy was dangerous -- he had rights.  If he stabbed someone, then the police would come.  So the grocery shoppers did the prudent thing and went out of their way to walk around him.

On the other side of the store, when I had entered the lot, another homeless guy was scrabbling around in a wheelchair near another tent encampment.  He was using his feet to propel himself along the ground, not his arms to push the chair's back wheels, which would seem to obviate the need for a wheelchair.  Wheelchairs are prized props for panhandlers seeking spare change.

But of course the police could not prove that the wheelchair had been stolen.  Are wheelchair-bound persons required to register their vehicles, as bicycle owners are supposed to do?  The likelihood is that a disabled person is now immobile or stuck with the cost of buying a new wheelchair.

Homelessness 

There have been homeless people near the beach for 40 years or more, but locals seem convinced that the numbers have increased in recent years. 

The face of homelessness in this neighborhood is young, able-bodied white guys.  On occasions when I have talked with them, they have seemed reasonably well educated.  Yes, they want cash or your doggie bag from the restaurant, but they are mostly rational when they are not drunk or high.  

Honestly, this seems anomalous at a time when national unemployment is at its lowest level in 18 years, a situation that economists describe as full employment.  

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Below is a much-watched 2017 video tour of homeless encampments along an Orange County bike path.  The bicyclist who comments on the tour said recently that he regretted what he said -- at least the tone of what he said -- but his observations are distressing: bicycle chop shops, people tweaking (using meth) in the open air, children living in tents.   

The camp was cleared a few weeks ago for an infrastructure project, and a judge ordered the city to house all the campers in motels for some period.  Newspaper reports quoted one woman who had lived there for 12 years, and clearly many other people were long-time residents as well.

This puzzles me.  Twelve years is a long time.  It's long enough to enroll in college and to earn a BA, an MA and a PhD.  If you aren't paying rent, it's long enough to get a job and save enough money to move someplace where rents are lower than in Southern California.  

This tent city is not the only one.  There are others along streets in downtown Los Angeles and under freeway bridges across the area. Tent hamlets spring up overnight in various neighborhoods and then relocate, sometimes after weeks and other times after years (a topic for a future post.)  As many as 75,000 people are believed to be living rough in Los Angeles and Orange counties. 

After the camp's homeless population, numbering in the hundreds, was relocated, cleanup crews collected mounds of garbage, more than two tons of excrement and 14,000 syringes.

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The term "homelessness" is singularly unhelpful because it encompasses a variety of situations and individual people with problems that are unique to each one of them.  Governments here address homelessness with "services" that may be well-intentioned but which treat the homeless as an undifferentiated mass.  Not surprisingly, these programs have almost no effect. 

More about this later. 

Crazy on the Streets: What Do You Want Us to Do?

Recently I passed a crazy woman as I walked past the Starbucks in my neighborhood.

She was old, or at least she looked old, and she most likely was homeless.  She wore a black knit hat and a dirty sweater, and she had a green blanket wrapped around her knees.  

She was yelling in a furious tone, "fuck them" and "fuckin that," apparently to a person who existed only in her head.  Everybody in the area was pretending to ignore her. 

After I had crossed the street, I called the non-emergency desk at the police department and described the woman and her bizarre behavior.  

"Is she a danger to herself or to others?" asked the desk sergeant.

"I don't think so," I said, "but she's having a psychotic episode."

"What do you want us do?" asked the sergeant.

The Legal Situation

In 1975, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Donaldson v. O'Connor that Americans cannot be detained for psychiatric reasons without due process and unless they present a danger to themselves or to others.

The complainant's case reads like something out of Kafka.  In 1956, he was sent to a Florida mental institution after a single hearing, over his objections and without legal representation. Yes, he had delusions, but he also had 48 years of life experience and had never been in trouble.

It took him 15 years to get out.  His first 18 appeals were denied based on his initial diagnosis -- paranoid schizophrenia --  but he received no treatment and effectively was imprisoned along with 1,000 other men, many of them criminals, whose needs were addressed by a single doctor (a gynecologist!) and one nurse.  

During the man's incarceration, a halfway house offered to take him in.  So did a college friend who was willing to take responsibility for him.  Those offers, like his many appeals, were denied, always based on the initial diagnosis. 

After his release in 1971, the man took and held a job, lived on his own without problems and wrote a book describing his experience.

The ACLU took his case to the Supreme Court and won.  This was a good thing.  The 20th century saw many totalitarian governments imprison dissidents as "mentally ill."  Our country, founded on individual rights, aims to be better than that.

Now psychotic people have civil rights, but there is a tension.  Being crazy on the streets can lead to any number of bad results, including victimization by non-benign others. The few who are dangerous or just scary looking often end up in jails and prisons, which are particularly stressful for people with psychosis.  If jail doesn't help people with cancer, is it reasonable to expect that it would be therapeutic for people with brain diseases?

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While I was making coffee early this morning, I heard a man yelling as he walked past our apartment.  He was chanting "Motherfuckhead!" repeatedly.  The noise grew louder as he passed our door and ebbed as he continued down the street.  

        This happened twice before in the last six months; the good thing this time, for me, was that I was already awake. 

        Last month I saw another man walking and screaming as I waited for an airport taxi;  his clothes were filthy and he knocked over garbage cans as he raged, loudly, across the street.

        I am not a diagnostician, and so I am not sure how to tell the difference between organic psychosis and a PCP- or meth-induced psychosis. My guess is these young street-walking screamers fall into the latter category.  The others, not so much.  

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I used to live in a neighborhood with many homeless people, some of them crazy.  One was a beautiful young woman whom I saw walking on the streets.  She talked to herself, never made eye contact and pretty clearly was disconnected from reality.  
        After a few months, she was obviously pregnant.  I don't believe she had the mental clarity to consent to sex.  I have no idea what happened to her and her baby, but I think about them still.

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The year after my mother died, I went to a noonday church service on her birthday.  I couldn't send her a present, and I figured she would have liked for me to do this instead.

        Shortly after the service began, an older woman, deranged, walked up and down the aisle yelling in foul words about things in her head.  Then she sat down in the back of the church for a while.  After a while, she got back up again and stormed around, yelling, for the remainder of the service.

        Everybody in the church, including the priest and including me, pretended she was not there.  By law, she had the right to be crazy.  Given religious custom, she was welcome in the church.  

        But she needed help, and we did nothing to help her.

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One day, I walked across a park on my way to a business appointment.  I passed a handsome young man who was sitting on a bench and opening a can of food with a can opener. We looked at each other briefly, and I nodded at him.
        "Lady, did you just make a threat to me?" he yelled.
       "No!" I said, and scooted away.

Conclusion

These are just a few of my stories, and I do not pretend that they are the true face of the homeless mentally ill.  There must be many other irrational people hiding in the shadows, fearful and silent, detached from reality and paranoid, perhaps sometimes with cause. 

We've seen a lot since that 1975 court ruling, including an explosion in the number of crazy people living on some pretty mean streets. This does not reflect well on us.  I sure wouldn't want a relative or friend of mine in such a vulnerable situation.

But then there's a police sergeant's question:  What do you want us to do?

I don't like the idea of a paternalistic government. I wouldn't want to be locked up "for my own good," as defined by some police officer or doctor who didn't know me.  On the other hand, I have most of my marbles, at least on my better days, and my life situation is one of relative safety.  I appreciate this.

Maybe it's time for a rethink.  If a person behaves irrationally and is in danger of being hurt by some of the bad people on the streets -- the tweakers, the thieves, the rapists, the childhood bullies grown into adult thugs --  must we assume that his impaired decision-making does not constitute a danger to himself?  

Can we not offer a brief, quiet stay in a medical facility (not a jail holding pen) where the person could be evaluated and encouraged to work toward a safer, less chaotic life?  In that space of safety, could the person's family and friends not be invited to join the effort and offer their support? 

Our scientific understanding of brain function is still primitive, but it's come a long way since 1975.  There are more medications and certainly more therapists and doctors who have worked with these people, with greater success.

The biggest failure of the de-institutionalization of the mentally ill in the last century was the failure to replace big institutions with smaller ones that offered consistency, professional backup and much more personal freedom to psychotic people.  As we reduce our prison populations, can we not build more small group homes? We need more of them.  

Put it another way:  If crazy people have rights, don't the rest of us have responsibilities?  And, if we are responsible, what should we do?