ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : Only Red Ink and a Red Face

Over and over, the City of Santa Ana is being told that it cannot handle its homeless problem the way it has. It just can’t seem to get the message.

In the latest legal skirmish, a homeless man was awarded $9,300 by a Superior Court jury last week. It decided that the city had violated his rights when a city maintenance worker confiscated and discarded the man’s belongings. He had carefully hidden them deep inside some bushes outside the Orange County Hall of Administration. Among the things Mashone Bonner lost were photographs of his children and a ring and a watch given to him by his estranged wife.

Members of the jury said after the trial that they sympathized with the city’s problems in trying to cope with the homeless problem--a burden the city unfairly shoulders for the rest of the county.

But, as one juror said, it was the perceived “attitude” of the city in trying to “get rid of the homeless” rather than pursuing a more positive course that finally convinced him the city was on the wrong track.

By choosing the path that it did, Santa Ana has ended up paying hundreds of thousands of dollars defending itself in lawsuits brought by homeless people subjected to police sweeps or other city actions in the Civic Center. The city has nothing to show for those efforts except red ink and a red face.

Santa Ana officials say that the city alone should not be expected to handle a county problem. That’s true. But it’s also true that by spending civic energy on questionable efforts to get tough on the homeless, the city has diverted itself from important regional efforts to fight drug and alcohol abuse, which is a major problem among the homeless.

If city administrators and the City Council need further proof that their hard-nosed policy isn’t working, they should look around the Civic Center. The problem has only worsened.

The city needs to turn its attention to helping the homeless get off the streets. That’s a much better approach than “evicting” them from the Civic Center, where hundreds have encamped because there are too few alternatives.