Class Action Suit Settlement Helps Venice Homeless
By Peggy Lee Kennedy, Venice Justice Committee
A class action lawsuit has been
settled in favor of Venice homeless people whose property was seized by Los
Angeles Police and other City employees, without warrant, and then destroyed
during a homeless sweep that took place in September 2004.
Carol Sobel, President of the Los Angeles
National Lawyers Guild, waived her legal fees, increasing the total cash
settlement available to homeless people. The cash settlement was dispersed the
first week of February 2007.
To get a
portion of the settlement a proof of claim form needed to have been submitted by
last November. Deepest regrets are extended to any person affected by the sweep
– and not found.
The case, Noe
v. the City of Los Angeles, was partly based on written and videotaped
statements from 22 people directly affected by the sweep along with videotape
and still picture evidence of ten or more dumpsters full of the homeless
people’s belongings found in Westchester and documented by Calvin E Moss
and myself, of Venice Food Not Bombs and the Venice Justice Committee.
Sobel’s lawsuit providing cash
settlements to Venice homeless people, which helped move some into housing
situations and improved their living conditions.
The settlement further included an
order that homeless property, if not abandoned, must be held for 90 days. Common
sense, the constitution, and the State of California seem to all say we are
supposed to be protected from the police seizing our property without a warrant
or probable cause. Police should not seize and destroy property in order to rid
an area of it’s homeless population. Such is the situation, though.
Around seven in the morning, Thursday before
Labor Day 2004, Ibrahim Butler phoned me, “You need to get down here.
There was a big sweep on the beach.” Usually, beach sweeps come just
before a popular tourist holiday or a big event.
Calvin and I arrived on the Boardwalk
shortly thereafter, but people were distressed (rightly so) and trying to find
out where their belongings had been taken: the Venice LAPD Sub-Station, the
Venice County Works Yard, or the LAPD Pacific Division Station?
We handed out incident reports and
decided to go looking for a form called Claim for Damages against the City of
Los Angeles. The form is available downtown in the clerk’s office at City
Hall, but I thought it was worth a shot to go looking for it at the LAX
courthouse clerk’s office.
The
LAX clerk’s office doesn’t provide Claim for Damages forms, but the
ride back turned out to be really worth the trip. Well, that’s where we
were when Calvin said, “Is that their stuff?” and there it was - the
seized belongings in ten or so full dumpsters all sitting in that park - in
plain view from Lincoln Blvd.
A
homeless person in Venice would not have thought to go looking in a park behind
the Westchester City Council office three towns away from Venice, but we drove
right by it.
Besides things being
broken, the dumpsters had already been scavenged through. Calvin videotaped for
a few minutes and we rushed back to tell people where their stuff was.
Posted: Thu - March 1, 2007 at 06:09 PM