The Los Angeles City Council is just kicking the can down the road in its decision to enforce anti-camping laws as a way to manage the unsheltered, according to a homeless advocate.
“We have no idea what to do with them but we need a quick visible result,” said Glen Dunzweiler, who produced and directed a film about homelessness in Los Angeles called yHomeless. “There had been this push to leave homeless people alone and be kind but they're gross. They're ugly. They're dirty. They're in our streets and we don't want to see that because businesses get sad and people get sad.”
Only two council members voted against prohibiting sleeping, sitting, or camping near 58 locations that include schools, libraries, parks and daycare facilities, according to media reports, and will cost some $2 million to post signs alerting people of anti-camping laws, which were approved on Sept. 3, 2021.
“We just move them to hidden places until there's a complaint on those hidden places or until homeless people just decide they are human beings who have a need to sleep and just sleep there anyway,” Dunzweiler told the Southern California Record. ‘It’s just this constant ebb and flow of policy and frustration that we all have that we can't come up with an answer for so we just try and hide it and move it as much as we can to make the complainers happy until the next person complains.”
As previously reported in the Epoch Times, the two council members who vetoed the measure were Nithya Raman and Mike Bonin who expressed concern about pushing people into shelters during a time that coronavirus infections are surging.
“There is no place for someone to be settled when they are homeless and that is part of the problem is you never get settled to a point where you can start getting your life back,” said Dunzweiler who lives in Burbank. “You're always on the run unless you have money to pay for shelter and that feeds into the problem.”
Instead of criminalizing the unsheltered, Dunzweiler would like to see triage of the homeless population in order to prioritize those who are seeking stability and using that success as positive proof to move forward.
“I've never met a police officer who enjoys hurting homeless people,” he added. “That's not why they got the job. It has to be this interplay between the people on the street or the people living in their cars and the people trying to help them. It's not a single stamp decision made for you by government or by community. It's got to be a reciprocal conversation between people that are willing to change their current existence and try to get back to stability.”