Down on Skid Row

Tonight on "Crushed by Inertia," we'll meet a man who is so poor he refuses to even live in a house!

The LAPD says it has opened its first criminal investigation into the dumping of homeless people on skid row after documenting five cases in which ambulances dropped off patients there Sunday. Police said the patients, who had been discharged from a Los Angeles hospital, told them they did not want to be taken downtown.Los Angeles Police Department officials, who photographed and videotaped the five alleged dumping cases, called it a major break in their yearlong effort to reduce the number of people left on skid row by hospitals, police departments and other institutions.

Homelessness in Los Angeles is completely out of control and no one seems to care. I mean, no one in Los Angeles seems to care about any of the other people around them. We've raised blocking the world out to the level of an art form. The company that makes those Bluetooth earpieces really ought to design some electronic interface that fits snugly over the eyeballs, to prevent the user from having any inadvertant eye contact with strangers. That thing would sell like gangbusters if you had a stand set up at the Grove or Westside Pavillion.

So if everybody's walking around trying to ignore their fellow mindless consumers, imagine their attitude towards the guy trying to grab 20 winks in that alcove.

When I first moved here in the mid-'90s, there were lots of homeless people around in most of the city's nieghborhoods. Generally, and I didn't do any kind of official sampling, but they struck me as the sort of people you'd expect to see on the street. Namely, people with relatively severe mental problems.

I got to know a few of the bums roaming around Westwood by nam during my tenure at UCLA. They were basically local celebrities among students. Rumors used to abound about some of them - that they were from a wealthy family and just wandered off on occasion to live on the street, or that they had once been students at UCLA before dropping out and just drifting around the off-campus apartements. (There was one guy I met named "Ocean" whom I'm pretty sure fit into this latter category).

My point is, the homeless problem in Los Angeles isn't necessarily new, but it strikes me as worsening over the past few years. Now there are homeless people everywhere I go in town, and many of them seem like capable, non-insane individuals who have been let down by a cruel and unconcerned society.

There's a guy who lives in his van in the parking lot behind the video store where I work. (I suppose there weren't any spots left down by the river.) Sometimes, he has romantic trysts in there with the loud, schizophrenic girl who wanders the block talking to herself about evil plastic surgeons and talking mannequins. Tonight I spotted them back there talking while, in a tent behind the trendy boutique not 20 feet away, a bunch of eager young fashionistas and B-level celebrities ate cupcakes and drank and had their photos taken repeatedly and pretended to care about people with breast cancer. Ah, home sweet home.

Though police have documented other cases of hospitals dropping off recently discharged patients in the district, "this is the most blatant effort yet by a hospital to dump their patients on skid row against their will," LAPD Capt. Andrew Smith said.Officials at Los Angeles Metropolitan Medical Center strongly denied that they had improperly handled the patients.

Dumping has emerged as a major political issue in Los Angeles, with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and other critics saying that the practice exacerbates the ills of a district that already has the largest concentration of homeless people in the West.

I'm not 100% on this Villaraigosa character. His solution to the failure of LAUSD is "put me in charge of the whole thing!" There still isn't any goddamn bullet train to Vegas and I've been waiting for that shit for a full decade now. And when asked about hospitals dumping homeless patients in Skid Row to fend for themselves, he's worried that it's ruining the otherwise-lovely Skid Row neighborhood.

Wrong answer, Antonio. This is disgusting because it treats human beings like so much trash, requiring disposal. Not because it might prevent the Gentrification Squad from opening up a new Coldstone there.

"What, they have homeless guys being bused to Skid Row? But there's already a ton of homeless guys there! We need to start spreading that shit around more. I demand that you immediately re-dump them in Palos Verdes!"

Police said they were investigating whether the patients were falsely imprisoned during their transfer and also whether the hospital violated any laws regarding the treatment of patients.

How lovely...

Sunday's investigation began about noon, when an LAPD sergeant saw a patient being left in front of the Volunteers of America homeless services center on San Julian Street. He immediately called an LAPD videographer, who over the next few hours recorded four more ambulances arriving at the facility and leaving patients who had been discharged from Los Angeles Metropolitan. The hospital is on Western Avenue near the 10 Freeway.

Yes, we certainly couldn't let the homeless people remain in beautiful, scenic Koreatown! They could mar the otherwise delicate, etherial beauty of a neighborhood populated entirely by check cashing places, bail bondsmen and massage parlors.

Police also recorded interviews with the patients as well as with James Frailey, a 30-year-old attendant with ProCare, a private ambulance company.

Frailey told police that the hospital had hired his company "on a regular basis" to move discharged patients from the medical center to skid row and that other private ambulance companies also take patients to the area. He said the hospital appeared to have made "no prior arrangements" for the patient he transported Sunday, according to police records.

One patient the LAPD interviewed on videotape, 62-year-old Marcus Joe Licon, told officers that he "never wanted to go" to skid row and asked that he be dropped off at his son's house. According to LAPD records, Licon said he was at the hospital because of problems with his knee and was released after they gave him "some painkillers and some medication."

Okay, let's review. Individuals go to this hospital complaining of ailments. After a cursory treatment, the hospitals essentially kidnap homeless patients and forcibly ship them to pre-approved downtown shelters. Have I got that right?

There is no law against sending patients to skid row after they have been discharged. But the city attorney is looking at whether hospitals that engage in dumping could be penalized for violating the federal Emergency Medical Transfer and Active Labor Act, which requires medical facilities to screen and stabilize all patients and penalizes them for releasing or transferring patients who are medically unstable.

Oh, I forgot that bit. So they're kidnapping homeless people still in need of medical care and forcibly shipping them to downtown shelters. That's the essential story here?

Jeff Isaacs, chief of the criminal division of the city attorney's office, said hospitals also could face more serious criminal charges if they were found to have forced people to go to skid row. "If these people are being taken against their will, we are talking about false imprisonment and in some cases elder abuse," Isaacs said.

Ah, yes, let's throw a bit of Elder Abuse on top there, just to cleanse the palatte. Great name for a death metal band, that...

My point here isn't just that kidnapping old homeless people is wrong. I'd hope an entire blog post wouldn't be needed for a revelation of that caliber. I'm just befuddled by the lack of concern we all have for homeless people. It's not just giving a guy on the street $1 or $2. It's just not something that's discussed. Aside from local newspapers (which offer news about homeless issues only when there's some new legislative proposal or shocking abuse such as the one in this article), homelessness gets no attention whatsoever.

It's just further proof that all these sermonizing nutjobs of the Religious Reich Right are full of shit. They're not real Christians, these guys on the radio and TV condemning gay marriage, abortion rights and stem cell research.

I'll repeat that point because it's one of the most important central conceits behind this entire post/blog. These phony Republican Christians aren't real Christians. Real Christians hate poverty. It was their savior's Public Enemy #1. He wasn't creating miracles that protect womb babies, he was magicking up fishes and loaves of bread that he'd...get this...proceed to just hand out for free to hungry people!

So a person who looks at the state of America today and decides that the biggest problems are stem cell research and the possibility they might pull the plug on Terri Schiavo isn't a real Christian. He or she's a moralizing Elmer Gantry-esque opportunist and should be immediately called out on his or her bullshit.

David Kuo, that former Bush administration official who has written a book about this very issue, appeared on Bill Maher's show this week. He discussed his early discussions with George Bush about planned anti-poverty initiatives and lamented that the President never bothered to actually fund these initiatives. He's definitely a guy with his priorities straight. Still, I can't help but think that he's still full of shit.

Come on, Kuo...At one time, you believed the President seriously cared about poor people? Really? George Bush has always had the appearance of complete and total self-involvement. I believe he walks through life without ever pausing for a moment to consider things from any other perspective than his own. He ignores outside opinions, he shelters himself from criticism and scrutiny, he spends all day with a few key advisors, he's uninquisitive and he's downright hostile when questioned.

Born-again or no, I'd have a hard time imagining that guy taking up any kind of altruistic cause. If Bush started a campaign to get the nation's most adorable kitten out of a tree, I'd suspect he had devious ulterior motives.

Amanda at Pandagon has an interesting post up about the connection between religion and morality. She argues, in typically compelling fashion, that the conventional wisdom of morality deriving from religious teachings is backwards. A moral secularist makes an individual decision based on weighing the potential outcomes and considering them from the perpsective of right vs. wrong. He or she arrives at a final decision about what to do based on a defensible, logical position.

Religion pretty much removes this kind of consideration from the process. A person just does whatever the Invisible Space Man tells them to do. Something is RIGHT if the Space Man says it's right, and wrong if the Space Man told Moses or James Dobson that it was forbidden.

This is not to say that there aren't any moral religious types. I've known a few. Also, there are plenty (plenty!) of irreligious scumbags. I've known more than a few. But by removing any reliance on reasonable judgements about right and wrong from moral considerations, fundamentalism ends up encouraging self-serving or mypoic decision-making.

Gay marriage strikes me as an obvious example (and it's one mentioned at Pandagon, of course). Clearly, the moral stance on gay marriage is "let gay people get married." It's the only reasonable resolution to this question. They're both consenting adults. Their union doesn't cause any direct or indirect harm to anyone else, or even impact anyone else's life in any sort of verifiable way. Let 'em get married.

But if you actually read the Bible, Jesus in no way implies that gays shouldn't be afforded the same rights and privileges as anyone else. Never. Not once. He's down with everybody. You sense he probably hung out with some gay guys. He never has sex in the Bible, so for all we know, JC himself might have been a bender. Who knows?

Homphobic individuals who want to ostracize or punish gays, probably out of deep-seated guilt about their own homosexual urges, yearn for an opportunity to enshrine their prejudice in the law. So they latch on to God as an excuse for their intolerance. In a weird, twisted way, it makes sense...God's all-powerful and all-knowing, so he's the ideal excuse for violating the central principle of American life - equality.

It's an option that's not open to atheists. If I wanted to morally oppose gay marriage, I'd have to actually think of a reason why it's immoral. That's hard to do. Impossible, actually, because two men or two women having sex and going in together on insurance isn't immoral. Much easier to blame it on Invisible Space Man. Or his Invisible Space Offspring.

Anyway, it's clear that Christians in America aren't taking their religion at face value any longer. Their Scripture is all about poor people. That's the constant refrain. Take care of the less fortunate. Show the most kindness to those who have the least.

That's not really Christianity any more, at least not around here. It has become a bunch of these excuses for hate - hatred of Muslims, hatred of coastal liberals, hatred of gays, hatred of immigrants, hatred of minorities - rather than a moral code. I'm not crazy about any version of the Jesus Thing, personally, but that's just because it's not my thing. If it works for you, that's great, but the thing isn't supposed to just be about Christmas trees and chocolate bunnies and Mel Gibson movies and shooting abortion doctors in front of their small children. It's about helping the less fortunate, instead of strong-arming them and shipping them off to holding facilities on Skid Row in private ambulances.