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When the Supreme Court and then Gov. Gavin Newsom gave the green-light to crack down on homeless encampments this summer, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass loudly took issue with that approach — setting herself apart from other big-city leaders.
But despite Bass’ public stance against it, and her efforts to change how the city handles sweeps, the city continues to fall short when it comes to protecting the rights of people living on the streets, according to a new report from a prominent global human rights organization.
In the report, Human Rights Watch chronicles how it says Los Angeles has prioritized moving its homeless residents out of public view (and sometimes citing or arresting them) over helping them. Police and city workers use the threat of punishment to force people to move out of encampments, and Bass has prioritized temporary hotel rooms and other shelters over permanent housing, according to the report.
“Mayor Bass has done some very good things on this issue,” John Raphling, associate director in the U.S. program at Human Rights Watch, said in an interview with CalMatters. “But the sweeps continue. The encampment clearances continue. And the criminalization by the police continues.”
Human Rights Watch took issue with Bass’ hallmark solution to homelessness: her Inside Safe initiative, through which the city moves homeless residents from encampments into hotels. Human Rights Watch said the program, which has served more than 2,400 people since it launched at the end of 2022, is “unsustainably expensive, plagued by inconsistent and inadequate support services, and stymied by the lack of permanent housing for people to move on to.”
The mayor knew she had inherited a broken system when she took office at the end of 2022, and made it a priority to get people off the street, Lourdes Castro-Ramirez, the mayor’s chief housing and homelessness officer, said in an emailed statement.
“The majority of this cynical and disingenuous report about the City’s approach to addressing homelessness relies on citation and enforcement data from 2016-2022, before the Mayor took office,” she said in an emailed statement. “This report makes no recommendations that would result in someone coming off the street today and wants to take us backwards to a time where people sit around pontificating about policy changes while Black and Brown people languish and die on 100 degree sidewalks and homelessness explodes in our City.”
In compiling the report, Human Rights Watch says investigators interviewed more than 100 unhoused or formerly unhoused people and analyzed data from police, the Los Angeles Department of Sanitation, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority and the mayor’s office.
“LAHSA’s outreach teams attend the City’s CARE and CARE+ clean-ups to provide client-centered, trauma-informed help to our unsheltered neighbors,” Christopher Yee, spokesperson for the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, said in an emailed statement. “During our work at all CARE and CARE+ locations, we keep with our principles and best practices in providing connections to shelter, documents, and other services people may need.”
The police department said it wouldn’t comment until the report was made public.
Mayor Bass’ public stance on homelessness in Los Angeles
The accusations contrast sharply from the way Bass’ administration says it handles homelessness. When the U.S. Supreme Court in June ruled it’s legal for cities to ban homeless encampments — even if they have no shelters available — Bass was the most prominent city leader to take a stand against the decision. Even as Newsom and other local leaders applauded the ruling in Grants Pass v. Johnson, Bass called it “disappointing” and said it “must not be used as an excuse for cities across the country to attempt to arrest their way out of this problem.”
A month later, when Newsom issued an executive order directing state agencies to clear encampments and pushing cities to do the same, a coalition of mayors from the state’s 13 biggest cities cheered the move. But Bass again was critical. “Strategies that just move people along from one neighborhood to the next or give citations instead of housing do not work,” she said in a statement emailed July 25.
But according to Human Rights Watch, moving people along and handing out citations instead of housing is exactly what Los Angeles has been doing. From 2016 through 2022 (the most recent data available in the report), nearly all of the citations issued by the Los Angeles Police Department went to unhoused people — and unhoused people comprised more than 42% of misdemeanor arrests, according to the report. Police cited and arrested unhoused people for violating ordinances that prohibit sitting or lying on public sidewalks, as well as for infractions such as drinking alcohol in public, littering, loitering and violating park regulations.
While the number of arrests and citations issued in the city have declined from 2016 to 2022, Human Rights Watch said police continue to use the threat of arrest to force unhoused people to move out of encampments, and then destroy their belongings.
Yee disagreed, saying that during the past couple of years, the role of police at encampment cleanups has been “limited” and mostly occurred at camps with a history of violence.
Sonja Verdugo experienced the city’s sweeps policy first hand in 2018 when she lived in an encampment in downtown Los Angeles while also holding down a temporary job as a receptionist. Every Tuesday the city made the camp residents pack up all their belongings and move — though everyone would just come right back a few hours later.
“It was horrible,” Verdugo said. “It was really stressful.”
It also prevented her from landing a permanent job, as she had to leave work every week to move her belongings.
“How do you explain that to an employer?” she asked. The city helped Verdugo find permanent housing two years ago through its Project Roomkey program, and she now works as an outreach worker helping other people on the streets. She says she continues to witness the city sweeping encampments and throwing away people’s belongings.
Inside Safe
As an alternative to criminalizing homelessness, Bass has touted her signature Inside Safe program, which clears camps and then puts the camp residents up in hotels with the ultimate goal of moving them from there into permanent housing.
“There are a lot of problems with it,” Raphling said. “It’s a huge, huge amount of money for a very small amount of people for a very temporary situation handled in a coercive way.”
From December 2022 through March 2024, Inside Safe cleared 42 encampments and moved 2,482 people into hotels, according to Human Rights Watch. Of those people, just 440 had moved on to permanent housing as of March 2024, while 504 had returned to the streets. Most of the rest were still living in the hotels, while a handful had died or been jailed or hospitalized.
While the number of unhoused people living in Los Angeles remained about the same this year compared to 2023, the number of unhoused people living on the street — as opposed to in shelters — decreased 10%. Bass has pointed to that drop in people living on the street as proof Inside Safe is working.
But the program is expensive. It cost the city more than $300 million to run Inside Safe for its first year, which included a cost of more than $3,500 per month for each hotel room, according to the report.
Inside Safe participants also have complained about conditions in the hotels, pointing out issues ranging from dirty sheets and malfunctioning appliances, to leaks and mold — even violence and poor security, according to the report.
One participant, who Human Rights Watch identified as Andrea S., moved into an Inside Safe hotel last year after the city cleared her encampment on the median of a busy street in Los Angeles. The sweep itself was traumatic, and Andrea told Human Rights Watch that the authorities made her give them permission to destroy her belongings as a condition of giving her a hotel room.
“Mayor Bass has done some very good things on this issue. But the sweeps continue. The encampment clearances continue. And the criminalization by the police continues.”
John Raphling, associate director, U.S. program at Human Rights Watch
The city cleared 51 people and removed nearly 42,000 pounds of material and possessions during that sweep — including more than 700 pounds of hazardous waste, according to the report. The city didn’t store any items for occupants to retrieve later, according to the report.
Once she moved into the hotel, Andrea told Human Rights Watch that the room was dirty and the shower didn’t work. Then, the city moved her multiple times between different rooms and even different hotels. One week she moved five times, according to the report, which she said exacerbated her anxiety and stress. Now, she’s worried about how long she’ll be allowed to stay in the program — which also worsens her anxiety, according to the report.
A 2023 CalMatters investigation found similar issues with the program. It determined that while Inside Safe succeeded in getting many people indoors and removing numerous encampments, it struggled to provide the mental health and other services participants needed, while also struggling to move them into permanent housing.
Human Rights Watch also criticized the way the city doles out hotel rooms. It prioritizes people from prominent encampments instead of reserving rooms for people who need them the most, such as those who are elderly, disabled or sick, according to the report. As a result, while residents from camps targeted by Inside Safe end up in hotel rooms, people displaced from less-prominent encampments often do not, according to the report.
“When LAHSA conducts outreach ahead of CARE and CARE+ operations, it offers shelter to those in the encampment if it is available in that area,” Yee said in an emailed statement to CalMatters. “However, due to the high occupancy of the LA region’s shelter system, shelter placements are not always available.”
As city officials decide how they will respond to Newsom’s push to clear encampments, Bass has a chance to change Los Angeles’ policies and become an example of how to do it right, Raphling said.
“I think she’s saying the right things about not criminalizing,” he said. “Now she’s got to really back that up.”
