Los Angeles caught covering up huge rights violations
With the billions of dollars the State and City invest in homeless services, it'd be nice if some could be used to help folks, rather than embezzled.
The City of Los Angeles lost a court case over the improper seizure and disposal of property from unhoused people without it ever going to trial. Forensic analysis showed the city had “modified or fabricated” 90% of the reports filed over 144 “cleanups.”
“This means that the court has accepted all of the facts alleged in the case as true without a trial, effectively granting a win for the plaintiffs,” lead plaintiffs’ attorney Shayla Myers of the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, said at a news conference Thursday.
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“For years, our members have been hearing and telling the same stories all across this city,” the group’s volunteer president, Sherin Varghese, said Thursday.
“They took my ID. They took my medication. They took my tent. They took all my clothes and blankets. They took my parents’ ashes,” Varghese said. “They took the bike I take to work. They made fun of me while they tore my life apart and threw it into a trash truck.”
These types of clearings are commonplace in LA and are used as a tactic to displace folks and discourage them from returning. Late last year, the City swept up and destroyed Nathan “The Venice Piano Man” Pino’s piano off the boardwalk, where it had safely been undisturbed for years.
With the billions of dollars the State and City invest in homeless services, it’d be nice if some could be used to help folks, rather than embezzled.
Of course, what this typically means is just that they have to promise not to do it again so obviously. (My prediction is that the next step will be the city's expensive lawyers arguing at length that the property they destroyed was worthless because it belonged to people who were unhoused, so only a tiny token payment settles the whole thing.)