Skid Row Residents Sue Downtown Business Improvement District

Advocates for the homeless sued the City of Los Angeles and a group of downtown business owners Friday to stop what they allege is the illegal seizure of personal property from people living on Skid Row.

The city already was under a federal injunction prohibiting police from seizing property that is not abandoned, an immediate threat to health or safety, or evidence of a crime.

Despite the injunction, private public safety officers — known as “red shirts” — hired by a consortium of downtown business owners continue to take unattended property from the homeless along Skid Row, in violation of the transients’ constitutional rights, according to the lawsuit filed in Los Angeles federal court.

A representative of the L.A. Downtown Industrial District — among the named defendants in the lawsuit — was not immediately available for comment.

The seizures at issue are separate from street cleaning by the city and are not part of an organized maintenance schedule, according to the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles.

Instead, the officers remove property without any notice — with seizures often occurring during times that officers know homeless individuals are receiving services or eating at area missions, the lawsuit alleges.

One of the plaintiffs, the Los Angeles Catholic Worker community, alleges that the shopping carts the group distributes to the homeless on Skid Row are frequent targets of the downtown business owners’ security force.

“The carts not only give people a place to put their things, but they also help many people just walk down the street,” said Catherine Morris, one of the Catholic group’s organizers. “The … constant taking of people’s things and our carts make it harder for people to live on the street and harder for us to do our work.”

— City News Service