Fighting (For) The Homeless

On November 5th, I saw a TikTok post from General Dogon of the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LACAN) asking for people to come to their headquarters at 838 East 6th Street in Los Angeles to celebrate twenty years of standing up for the Skid Row community and to learn what their future looks like.

I was intrigued. General Dogon reminded me of a member of Public Enemy’s S1W’s or NYC’s Guardian Angels.  He had a militaristic intensity to him and the words he spoke (I could tell) were well rehearsed throughout his life but 100% genuine.

General Dogon’s video marked the first time I had heard of LACAN. I have lived in Los Angeles since 2015, but have spent much of my time in ‘The Valley’. I was familiar with LA Rescue Mission, People Assisting The Homeless (PATH), and Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA -which recently lost its LA County funding because of mismanagement). These were large organizations that worked to secure shelter and services for people. But, Los Angeles is huge and homeless services in The City (and in all of the US) are not centralized. General Dogon’s video made me curious as to what LACAN did.

I took my bicycle to The Red Line and rode the train to Pershing Square. I rode from 4th Street over to 6th Street and started heading into Skid Row. I have been to Skid Row before. It is a spectacle of bedlam. Disoriented people are walking in the streets, trash is everywhere, tents line the sidewalks, and the air is filled with the smell of grime and the sound of sirens. The place makes me sad. It is the perfect image for modern American values: “Neglect Equals Freedom”. I locked my bicycle to a bike rack across the street from LACAN and in front of a building with security outside (as even though I am pretty cavalier, I too worry about my stuff getting stolen ‘in a bad neighborhood’).

Los Angeles Community Action Network has its own gated one story building. I was early, so I was invited to visit the rooftop garden. I walked up the outdoor staircase to a manicured meditation/relaxation area carved out around the building’s mechanics. I was struck at the thought of how the bedlam must affect people who work on Skid Row daily - which also made me reflect on how the people who live on Skid Row have no escape.

I walked back down the staircase and into the meeting room. Fifty or so chairs were set up in front of a presentation table below a large wall-mounted flat screen monitor with large stereo speakers on each side of the screen. As people entered, they struck up conversations and introduced themselves to one another. There was a real community environment in the room. Different pictures and illustrations hung on the back wall and a display of news articles and objects from LACAN’s journey (such as old cameras) lay on a side table.

The meeting started by the host (Pete White) playing a recently produced video describing what Los Angeles Community Action Network does and why they do it. Sign up sheets for LACAN training were passed around while the video played. I think that NOT signing up for training was NOT an option, so I signed up. According to the video, Los Angeles Community Action Network started in order to document the harassment of homeless people and community members by police and private security. Since Skid Row is in the middle of many big business districts, those who want those businesses to succeed do everything possible to keep the poor and homeless away. Oftentimes, this includes questionably legal activity.

The Unites States system is an adversarial system. Laws are made and then used in arguments in court. LACAN realized that they could fight for the people on Skid Row by providing documentation for the courts. They sought out Public Defense attorneys who would work with them and they built systems and training to prevent the people who want Skid Row gone from having an easy legal advantage.

After the video, a panel of attorneys and community organizers spoke at length about their fight to keep people on Skid Row from being rolled over by The City and private businesses. They spoke of a new Care Court being pushed by The City. The attorneys made it clear that Care Court was a euphemism for internment camps (and I’m guessing insane asylums). Care Court entails compulsory medical treatment for those on the street and I was reminded of our recent early 20th Century past with having our undesirables committed - and how (in the 1970’s) those institutions got exposed for abuses.

The training I went to (run by Adam Smith) explained the need for teams of four to positively interact with the community and to competently document any actions by authorities (police, sanitation, and/or private security) that were negatively impacting that community. We were told how and when to interact with the police and how NOT to give them an excuse to remove us from the scene. The training was reminiscent of words of wisdom I had heard in 1960’s interviews with civil rights leaders.

General Dogon and Adam Smith explained that their fight to protect the community shifts as public sentiments shift. In The US, you are expected to make enough money to pay for sanctioned shelter (ie: an apartment or house). If you do not or cannot pay for this shelter you become a public enemy. Laws in Los Angeles that challenge a person’s humanity come with their own set of complications when enforcing them. People MUST sleep. People MUST eat and evacuate their waste. People MUST be somewhere. If a person has no bedroom, they will sleep in public. If they have no bathroom, they will urinate and defecate in public (and they will not wash themselves). And, if they have no home, they will BE in public.

Laws that tell people that they cannot block sidewalks, pee/poop in public, or stand in a certain spot do not provide solutions to those offenses so they only create more chaos and work for the people who enforce those laws - making them not worth enforcing. If you make people roll up tents, the tents still have to go somewhere. If you charge a person with loitering, you have to prove that they were about to commit a crime (and that person still has to BE somewhere).

All of this training really exposed to me my personal problem with this adversarial system we’ve built. I understand that our courts assume that everyone has their own motivations and priorities and that those motivations and priorities get to be publicly argued and fought over in front of a judge. (For example, it is true that the owner of a business has a priority to keep his business entrance clear of dirty crazy people while the dirty crazy people in front of the business conversely have a priority to be able to live.) However, this fight trains us to not have any social agreement whatsoever. Instead, EVERYTHING is conflict and leverage. 

I often say that this country is about what you can get. What this means is we just get to battle over everything and solve nothing. We put more money into the fight than the solution. A perfect acknowledgement of this is when attorneys make a good living wage to represent their clients. Their clients may be living on the street, but that client living on the street makes money for that attorney. What if that client didn’t live on the street? I know, the attorney would be out of work… and maybe on the street.

This is where the Hippie Socialist in me starts to emerge, but I’m just trying to solve a problem instead of make money from the conflict. At some point, someone has to solve something. Families and communities used to be our socialism. They would solve problems instead of make money FROM those problems. But, we have eroded families and communities and have tried to replace them with ways to scale our passive income.

People need to be somewhere. People need shelter and stability. People need support. In the capitalist/adversarial court model, these things cost too much money and people who can’t afford The American cost of living are piling up on our streets. Skid Row is arguably the worst of the worst in The US. Skid Row seems to be for those people who have completely given up on their humanity. To their credit, LACAN has not given up on these people OR their humanity and if General Dogon and his people at LACAN can improve their community’s lives everyday, there is no reason why other communities can’t step up and help the people that are around them.

I see people in the community finding solutions as our only way out of this national mess that we have made for ourselves. We always look to centralize and scale a system to solve a problem (like Amazon did with e-commerce). I argue that we need to decentralize and scale the people who are looking to do something to make their communities better. Positive and direct action is the only way we can even begin to make a dent in our homelessness conundrum and we all need a little more General Dogon style drive and courage  to get things done.

If you are interested in the work of LACAN,  a link to their website is below:

https://cangress.org