Editor’s Note: The testimony below is from a July 26 rally at Los Angeles City Hall, as the city council met to approve an expansion of L.A. Municipal Code 41.18, which prohibits sitting, sleeping or lying on the sidewalk. The expansion would increase the amount it covered to include 20% of the city. This was a unique city housing amendment because there were no housing proposals connected to the greater criminalization of poor people. This protest was the first of three increasingly effective, widely supported and in-your-face actions organized by the Services Not Sweeps coalition. It comes from real people talking their truths. It was a moment of clarity and shared hope for the future. — Chris Venn, Reporter for the People’s Tribune
General Dogon:
This ordinance has been found unconstitutional in federal court, not just one time. It has been proved to be unequal punishment. So why has the city continued to twitch, turn, and play with this ordinance to try to make it fit in? Because it is designed to determine who can be in public space and who cannot – the criminalization of public space. All the way back to the day when the hobos were thrown into city jails under vagrancy laws, our rights have been taken away, slowly but surely, from the Supreme Court to the local cities. It’s time for us to stand up and fight back This is one thing that the George Floyd rebellion told us – when we take it to the streets, we shut this motherfucker down. Whose streets? Our streets! The job right now is for everybody to go back to your individual neighborhoods and educate your people to what’s going on. If you aren’t involved in an organization, get involved, no matter who you join. White People for Black Lives, Street Watch, LA CAN, join all these groups, join the Catholic Worker, because when you join any of these groups you join us all. If any shit happens, we’re going to take it to the streets.
LaDonna
I’m unhoused in the San Fernando Valley. I feel like they’re doing this systematically, it must be a plan. They take our encampments and put us in places that are undesirable, places that look like FEMA camps. They’re called Bridge Homes. There are curfews and there are cesspools and there is unfairness. And the tiny homes, where if you don’t have a partner, they’re going to pair you up with some random person in that small ass space. No, we don’t want to go there. Meanwhile, there’s no busses that run at night. I was there for Mother’s Day. I don’t have kids, but I wanted to see my mom. They told me that wasn’t a good reason for me to stay out. That’s crazy. These programs are crazy. All of it. Then this law. They had a room in this hotel that had a pool and a gym, but we can’t go into the pool or the gym. We must walk by it all day in the hot sun.
Carla Orendorff
We need to confront this law. We need to pull together because this is bullshit. The day 41.18 was passed the number of overdoses that we saw, the number of people who died, in those days and weeks, we haven’t talked about this. Everybody who is supporting people in the streets saw this happen. When you pass a law that says you don’t belong, you don’t exist, people die. When we say this code equals death, we mean it. Every vote for it is a vote that will lead to the death of our friends, our families, and our communities.
Mama Cat
I’m too old and I needed housing. The only way to get housing as an elder was to put a tent up. I went into a bridge home, it was horrific. They had elders, convicts, and addicts altogether. It’s not that any of the people are bad but altogether it’s not a good mix because there was no protection. They told me, “We are not here to protect you.” So I went back to the streets, and I was cited there under 41.18, so I went into the Mayfair Hotel where I was tortured, I mean mental abuse, verbal abuse, humiliation, degradation, and no compassion. You’re isolated in your room; you don’t have a key and you are not allowed to talk to people next door.
Now when we live out in a tent, we’re a community, we take care of each other. But we’re not allowed to do that in a Project Room Key. It is a carceral situation. You get searched and you can’t have things in your room that normal people live with. This is a fraud on the most vulnerable of Los Angeles. Now I’m in a Project Room Key place that is going to be closed on August 19th, I’m going to be let out back into the streets and I will die because I’m an elder and I can’t do this anymore.
It is time to stand up and fight back. Be more like Paris, be more like Chile. We’ve got to picket in the streets, cause people are dying. Nonprofits are the biggest money-making scheme in Los Angeles. We want to know where the money’s going because it surely isn’t helping homeless persons
Gustavo
Now they want to spend a half billion dollars to save the city but they don’t have a dollar for people who’re sleeping outside in the streets. We are the people, we are justice.
Pete White
Show us what democracy looks like. So those selected individuals ran away from what democracy truly looks like. They shut down, they walked out, and they have not silenced our voices. What is on the table today, when we say repeal 41.18, when we say abolish, what we’re really saying is repeal Jim Crow, repeal redlining, repeal Okie Towns, repeal sundown laws, repeal black codes, repeal redlining again, repeal operation mojado, what they are attempting to do is guard individuals who make this city what it is. We say hell no, we won’t go, With me without a voice, we look at our hard-earned tax money going to the slave catchers, we say hell no we won’t go. This is what democracy looks like.
