Long Beach says it’s willing to wield criminal penalties to clear city’s worst encampments

Long Beach leaders say they’ll soon start citing and arresting people who refuse to move from unsafe homeless encampments and those that block public access to places like parks, libraries and beaches — but only as a last resort.

City staff is working to identify areas with problem encampments that will “be subject to an intensive inter-departmental engagement effort, including multiple days of outreach, credible offers of supportive services and shelter, clean-up protocols, and notification that the area needs to be vacated,” Deputy City Manager Teresa Chandler wrote in an 11-page memo released Monday.

If those efforts fail, the city teams will issue misdemeanor citations “as appropriate,” Chandler wrote.

Long Beach has yet to specify target locations, but Chandler wrote they’ll include encampments that block access to public amenities, take up inordinate amounts of space or host activities that raise “significant public health or safety concerns.”

The decision, which marks a sea change in Long Beach’s strategy to combat homelessness, comes more than a month after the U.S. Supreme Court sided 6-3 with the city of Grant’s Pass, Ore., and ruled that local governments are allowed to enforce bans on sleeping outside in public spaces regardless of whether or not shelter beds are available.

It also comes days after Gov. Gavin Newsom vowed to withhold funding from governments that do not ramp up their encampment sweeps. He previously issued an executive order last month that directed state agencies to begin removing encampments from state land and called on cities to follow their example.

Standing in front of a cleared encampment near a Los Angeles freeway last week, Newsom demanded “demonstrable results” in reducing homelessness.

“I want to see results,” Newsom told reporters at a news conference. “I don’t want to read about them. I don’t want to see the data. I want to see it.”

Under the pressure of the governor, cities across California have made polarizing decisions over how to humanely deal with the rising number of unhoused people and public frustration over safety.

In San Francisco, city police began enforcing in late July citywide sleeping bans without assurances of available shelter. Officials in Fresno proposed increased anti-camping fines up to $500, or up to six months in jail — a similar measure is being looked at in Stockton. And the city of San Diego, a year after it banned sleeping on sidewalks, has launched a surfeit of sweeps and moved unhoused residents into sanctioned campsites.

But others, including Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and LA County officials, have resisted the charge, saying the governor’s approach only addresses the visibility of homelessness. At a July 31 meeting, county supervisors reaffirmed their stance that individuals removed from encampments will not be jailed.

“Being homeless is not a crime, and we will maintain our focus on criminal behavior rather than an individual’s status,” Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said at the meeting.

Monday’s memo marks Long Beach’s first public response to the mounting pressure. In it, Chandler reaffirmed the city’s current “human-centered approach,” which steers public safety’s response from incarceration towards a slower, coordinated method that places people on a path to permanent housing.

Chandler walked a thin line between chastising overaggressive enforcement and acknowledging it as a viable “tool when appropriate.”

“Widespread issuance of citations or arrests solely for violations of the City’s anti-camping ordinance will do little to reduce overall rates of homelessness and could create additional barriers for people to access housing and services,” Chandler wrote. “They also can be used as a tool to address locations where there is a threat to public health or safety and when other solutions are not working.”

The city has rarely arrested or cited anyone for camping on public property. In Long Beach, only eight people have been cited for violating the anti-camping ordinance between January 2022 and July 15 of this year — and only one arrest has been made, according to police records. Nearly 3,200 encampments were cleaned last fiscal year, Long Beach officials said.

In a city where there aren’t enough shelter beds to house the number of people who want them on a given night, it does no good to continually shift encampments from one place to another, Homelessness Bureau Director Paul Duncan said Monday.

“We’re never going to end homelessness by doing cleanings or enforcing homelessness, we’re just going to push people to the margins, or out into rural areas where there aren’t any resources,” Duncan said.

He and other city officials have emphasized upstream fixes, like easing the housing crisis and providing addiction and mental health services.

Jeff Levine, who runs the Long Beach Rescue Mission, agreed that communities cannot arrest their way out of the homelessness crisis, even if the law allows them to try, but he thinks the potential for criminal consequence adds some accountability to a model where historically it has been lacking.

“I don’t know as a society where we accepted that people could use or shoot up illicit drugs outside a school at 2 0’clock in the afternoon,” Levine said. “This is saying, ‘I love you too much to let you kill yourself out on the street.’”

There is concern that the governor’s order and the Supreme Court’s decision could lead to a clash of neighboring policies across the county’s 88 cities and unincorporated communities that results in a constant shifting of homeless from one area to the next, sometimes into neighboring jurisdictions.

In the memo, Chandler wrote that Long Beach since June has convened with the South Bay Cities Council of Governments to draft a “Good Neighbor Pledge,” in which each municipality promises to not shift their local homeless to another city. Similar pledges are being considered within the Gateway Cities Council of Governments and by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

Duncan said there is some worry that the city of Huntington Beach, which has come out in favor of increased enforcement, may push its homeless out of its limits.

“It’s not like a hidden secret or anything, if Huntington Beach starts to push everybody out of their city, people don’t disappear,” Duncan said. “They just go elsewhere.”

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