Several California mayors (including SF’s own) cheered a June Supreme Court decision that allowed cities to arrest or prosecute those camping on the street. But a new proposed California law could bring that practice to a complete halt.
It seems a distant memory now, but last summer, San Francisco was ratcheting up homeless encampment sweeps in the wake of the Supreme Court’s June Grants Pass v. Johnson decision that allowed cities to arrest or prosecute people camping on the streets, even if the city could not provide them with an alternative shelter bed. Then-mayor London Breed enthusiastically pursued the new crackdown powers, as did other California cities, and Governor Gavin Newsom was jawing at cities that they’d better start sweeping encampments en masse or else.
These encampment-sweeping tactics are still being hotly debated in cities across California. But one SoCal state Senator is looking to push the pendulum back against that Supreme Court decision, here within the state at least. Southern California News Group reports that Los Angeles-area state Senator Sasha Renée Pérez has proposed a bill in the legislature to prevent cities and counties from prosecuting people camping on the street, whether that be arresting them or fining them.
The bill called SB-634 is still only a just-introduced proposal in its very early stages. And it would still allow any municipality to clear encampments however they choose, it just wouldn’t allow them to arrest people or issue any penalties for camping on the street.
“What we’re trying to get at here is [to] prevent people from getting fined or being put in jail for being homeless,” Pérez told the News Group. “If you cannot afford to live anywhere — if you can’t afford housing, a hotel — you still need to sleep.”
She adds that arrests and fines just make it harder for people to find stable housing, either because of the time spent incarcerated, the money diverted to the legal consequences, and the stain of an arrest on one’s record.
Mayor Breed’s summer and fall encampment sweep crusade was probably a lot more about her reelection campaign than it was about getting people into shelter. But then-candidate Daniel Lurie was all for the sweeps, and blamed Breed for not going at it earlier. “She should have built the shelter beds and cleared the sidewalks years ago,” he said in the wake of the Supreme Court decision. “Every day that the encampments remain on our sidewalks is another reminder of her failed leadership."
So is Lurie going to be against this bill? As for Oakland, well, there is no permanent mayor at the moment, and there won’t be until next week’s special mayoral election, so who knows how that next mayor will feel about encampment sweep enforcement.
There is an open question about whether this bill would run afoul of the Supreme Court's ruling — though that ruling primarily pertained to cities' ability to enforce anti-camping laws, and not to the idea of imposing fines or making arrests.
And because the bill doesn't stop cities from performing encampment sweeps and enforcing those anti-camping ordinances, it may not change the situation for homeless people — who by and large aren't being otherwise prosecuted over these ordinances in California — very much at all.
SB 634 is scheduled to have its first committee meeting on April 23.
Image: Joe Kukura, SFist
