Years ago Parenting Magazine asked me to do an article on a homeless mother with children. The idea was simply to find such a family and follow them around for a month. I agreed and, for 30 days, entered the lives of a thirty-something woman and her three kids. The woman, whose name I’ve long ago forgotten, didn’t have a discernible drug problem. Nor was she a drinker. She’d ended up on the street to escape and abusive husband. I watched as she bounced around from shelter to shelter, trying to find a place that would accept both her and her fragile family.

But while there always seemed to be enough shelter beds for men who needed them, the beds for women with kids were extemely difficult to come by

I liked the mom, who struggled hard to overcome her circumstances, at least during the time I observed her. But she always seemed to be swimming upstream.

Yet it was her children who got to me. They were nice kids, and seemed intelligent behind their preternatural watchfulness. I remember one time when I asked the oldest girl, who was ten at the time. about her dreams for the future. She told me she wished she lived in a place where she could sometimes have friends over to play. That was it. But she recited the wish as if the possibility was as far out of reach as the moon.

I bring all this up because, in this week’s LA City Beat, the cover story is again by smart USC journalism grad student, Matt Mundy, and it’s about the homeless kids of Skid Row. Matt wrote the story in a longer version as his master’s thesis for his USC degree, then cut it down to feature size with the help of City’ Beat’s News Editor, my pal, the excellent Alan Mittelsteadt.

According to Mundy’s research, there are 13,521 homeless students in the Los Angeles Unified school system. In California, there are 178,014, and the country….907,000. And those are just the school-age children on the street we know about. The homeless are notoriously census resistant.

Homeless children are four times more likely to drop out of school and two times more likely to score lower on standardized tests; one in ten homeless students will miss at least one month of school each year, 36 percent have repeated a grade, and 14 percent – double that of other children – are diagnosed with a learning disability. All of these problems are caused, exacerbated and impacted in myriad ways by their troubled environments.

Read the rest here.

Let no child be left behind, indeed.

Photo by Monica Almeda, New York Times

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I’m normally against throwing the book at adolescents, legally speaking, when they break the law. In this case, it’s tempting to make an exception.

Just before 1:30 a.m., this past Sunday morning, officers from LAPD’s Central division, the group that patrols Skid Row, saw a homeless man on the sidewalk enveloped in smoke. Three teenagers were standing over him. As the officers rolled up to find out what was going on, they noticed something odd: Rather than helping the man, who was developmentally disabled, two of of the three boys were videotaping him using their cell phones. Worse, his blanket was on fire.

When the officers put out the fire and hauled the three boys down to the station, they found that all three—two 17-year-olds and a 15-year-old—had cell phones featuring videos of their act of throwing a smoke bomb at the homeless guy, the blanket fire, and whatever distress resulted.

Plus there were other videos stored in the phones, showing other assaults on other homeless men—all bearing July dates, all of individuals sleeping on Skid Row or in Hollywood. Some of the attacks involved smoke bombs. In other cases, the teenagers shot people with “airsoft” pistols—B-B-like air-guns that shoot plastic pellets. Once they threw a bicycle at a homeless man.

On Monday, police arrested a fourth kid, a seventeen year old, whom they said had also participated. According to the AP, the kids told investigators that they’d been influenced by Bumfights, a vile, independent 2002 video series that still sells at a rapid clip over the Internet, in which homeless were paid to fight each other on film. (Bumfights is credited as inspiring other incidents of violence by teenagers against the homeless, including the 2004 murder of a homeless man in Milwaukee by three teenage boys.)

In February of this year, CNN reported that Bumfight-inspired teenage age “sport” beatings and killings of the homeless were on the rise. The perpetrators are usually middle-class kids.

It seems that the LA teenagers had hoped to post videos of their assaults on the Internet too, just like Bumfights.

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At each step in the now-infamous Genarlow Wilson legal saga, Douglass County prosecutor, David McDade, has behaved without any sense of decency or proportion. And now there’s a brand new development.

First let’s recap the underlying case: Genarlow Wilson is the football star from the state of Georgia, homecoming king, 3.2 grade point average boy with no priors who, at 17-years-old had the bad sense to have consensual oral sex on New Year’s Eve of his senior year with a schoolmate. His partner was a 15-year old girl who, like Wilson ran on the high school track team. According to both teenage participants, the sexual encounter was initiated by the girl, who was clearly having a night of questionable judgment herself.

Wilson was arrested for having oral sex with a minor-–never mind that he was a minor too. Incredibly, the offense carried a mandatory ten year prison sentence. Wilson was convicted of aggravated child molestation and sentenced to the required decade in lock-up. The law has since been changed to exclude teenagers, but the change doesn’t apply retroactively. As of now, Wilson has served nearly 29 months of his sentence. [For further backstory check my earlier posts here and here.]

After 28 months in prison, Wilson was fiinally set free by a sensible Monroe County Superior Court judge who reduced Wilson’s felony conviction to a misdemeanor. But then the state Attorney General Thurbert Baker and prosecutor McDade appealed the judge’s decision. So Wilson remained locked up. A few weeks ago, the young man’s attorney tried to get him out on an appeal bond, but the judge turned the bond request down. The Georgia State Supreme Court was to have heard the appeal in October.

Then today, suddenly there was good news. The State Supreme Court has moved up the appeal date by three months, to July 20—over the objections of the prosecutor. The court also decided to hold an expedited hearing on the Douglas County Superior Court judge’s decision to deny Wilson bond pending his appeal. (Here’s the AP story.)

Meanwhile, prosecutor David McDade continues to behave abominably. It seems that McDade’s original case against Wilson was greatly bolstered by the cooperation of Verna Cannon, the mother of the 15-year-old girl in question. Yet, after Wilson was sentenced, Cannon felt she’d made a mistake and talked to a local reporter about her thoughts on the case. In particular, she told the reporter that much of the reason she cooperated with the prosecution was because McDade told her that if she didn’t, he might charge her with neglect for letting her daughter attend an unchaperoned party.

In other words, he threatened her—in the nicest possible way.

When word of Cannon’s chat with the reporter got back to McDade, he sent two of his assistants to Cannon’s house to intimidate her into “clarifying” her remarks to the reporter about McDade’s alleged threats. Cannon refused to be pushed by the staffers’ goon-like behavior, and politely declined.

Now an audiotape of McDade’s staffers visit is floating around the Internet. According to this Atlanta Journal Constitution editorial, the recording ain’t pretty.

UPDATE: Here’s a link to the audio and to part of the transcript.

UPDATE TWO: And just when you think things can’t get worse….this happens. (Sigh. Just follow the link.)

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Remember that creepy Skid Row/hospital dumping case caught on video last Spring? (I know, I know. There’ve been a lot of really creepy Skid Row dumping cases in the past 12 months. So, to refresh your memory about this particular case, you’ll find the video below.)

Here’s the deal: there will be an announcement at a Tuesday morning press conference regarding both the ACLU’s lawsuit and LA City Attorney, Rocky Delgadillo’s criminal charges stemming from the case. The lawsuit and the charges arose from an incident in March of 2006, in which a 63-year-old woman, Carol Ann Reyes, was found wandering on Skid Row, allegedly dumped there after she was was discharged from Kaiser Permanente’s Bellflower hospital. The hospital was accused of sending Ms. Reyes to Skid Row in a taxi cab, whereupon the driver essentially booted her out near the corner of 5th and San Pedro, in front of the Union Rescue Mission.

What won’t be announced until tomorrow, (but what we’re telling you tonight) is that ACLU and Kaiser have agreed to a mutual settlement, and that, based on what we hear from well-connected friends, the ACLU folks are extremely pleased.

As for Rocky’s office, they’ll be will be making their own announcement tomorrow. It will have to do with “guidelines” that have been worked out with Kaiser that prevent the hospital from misbehaving in the future—or words to that effect. Presumably this guideline agreement saves the hospital from a criminal prosecution, which might have a nasty effect on its accreditation, et al.

Despite all these swell announcements to come, the still-pressing question is whether the settlements and guidelines constitute a hard enough legal and monetary smack that it will dissuade other hospitals from dumping in the future.

If the past is any guide, the answer is: Not really.

If you’ll remember, for months before the Carol Ann Reyes incident, service providers and city officials, Jan Perry included, had been complaining that hospitals were dumping their indigent patients on Skid row, and the Central division of the LAPD had been actively investigating the complaints.

The tough part, said the cops and the prosecutors, was getting enough to charge a hospital then making charges stick, since homeless and/or mentally ill folks often don’t make for the best witnesses. But this time, the Union Mission’s surveillance video caught the dumping on tape. While the camera rolled, a taxi hung a U in the middle of San Pedro St., pulled up to the curb, dropped off an elderly woman in a hospital gown, then drove away. A disoriented Ms. Reyes was then seen shuffling along the sidewalk (and through the video frame) in her gown and hospital booties.

Amazingly, even that video and the threat of criminal prosecution didn’t stop other hospitals from continuing to dump homeless patients after discharge as this October 2006 NPR story shows:

Police who interviewed some of the patients being left at Skid Row say that none of them reported asking to go there. One man, says [LAPD Central Division] Capt. Smith, had asked to be released to his children’s home in Pasadena.

Our supervisors actually gave that guy a ride back to his house, and his family was outraged,” Smith says. “Not only did they not know that he’d been discharged but the fact that he’d been brought to Skid Row instead of home further outraged that family.”

And then, of course, there was February’s award-winningly horrifying case of the paraplegic man wearing a soiled hospital gown “and a broken colostomy bag” who was “found crawling in a gutter” in Skid Row (as the LA Times then described it).

Obviously, there are no guarantees, but here’s hoping that tomorrow’s announced deals will accomplish what a string of embarrassing news stories and repeated appeals to LA’s hospitals’ humanity could not.

I’m not betting the ranch on it.

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UPDATE - POST PRESS CONFERENCE

Well, maybe there is reason to be optimistic. In addition to the terms of the civil suit, which are confidential, the joint settlement works out a series of protocols and practices that Kaiser has agreed to follow ever after. The idea is less to be punitive, than to set up well-thought out guidelines that Kaiser and, following their lead, other hospitals can live with on a practical basis, but that treat the vulnerable among us in a humane, dignified, and compassionate manner. Hey, improvement is possible.

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Nobody likes the idea of having paroled sex offenders living in our neighborhoods. But when an offender has served his or her time, and we make it impossible for them to live anywhere, what kind of people are we exactly?

This CNN story of Florida parolees whom the Fla. Department of Corrections has, for lack of alternative, relocated under a bridge (along with members of the local rat population), has been deservedly burning up certain portions of the blogosphere. Jeralyn Merritt at Talk Left reminds us that Florida is the same state that banned sex offenders from hurricane shelters.

And just in case you think no such person is living in your neighborhood, you might want to check here:

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Check out the preview for our new Street Stories section.

For more, click here.

The guy pictured below is Central Division Senior Lead Officer Deon Joseph. Joseph has made LA’s Skid Row both his specialty and his personal mission. He’s one of the people we’ll be profiling in the upcoming series on Skid Row: Welcome to the Homeless Capitol of the World.

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