Advocacy Group Wins Effort to Slow Crackdown on the Homeless

The Los Angeles police department will temporarily back off efforts to arrest and remove homeless people from the city’s Skid Row neighborhood, reports The New York Times.

In the past year, police have arrested people for sleeping on sidewalks in Skid Row, which is densely populated with the homeless. During that year, the homeless population dropped by one half, to 4,000. Property crimes dropped by one quarter and violent crimes by one third.

But the American Civil Liberties Union pressured the police to stop the effort until the city provided housing for the poor. The group won a federal court order that halted the arrests, and the city agreed to provide 1,250 more beds before it renewed clean-up efforts.

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