Several Orange County cities are praising a Supreme Court ruling that will allow police officers to enforce anti-camping homelessness laws in public spaces.
The court’s 6-3 decision along ideological lines ruled that cities can enforce bans on homeless people sleeping in public spaces. Homeless advocates argued those laws amount to a cruel and unusual punishment since they effectively criminalized being homeless, but the court disagreed.
The consequential ruling is bound to increase enforcement against homeless people sleeping in parks and streets with citations. About 4,100 people in Orange County are homeless and living without any shelter, according to a January point in time count.
Police officers will now be able to issue civil citations, often misdemeanors, to people who have set up temporary shelters. Those citations, when ignored, can lead to jail time.
The county along with several OC cities, including San Clemente, Garden Grove, Newport Beach and Huntington Beach, had signed on to an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to provide clarity on what cities and counties can do to enforce anti-camping laws.
Cities in recent years have operated under the instruction that they needed to provide shelter space when enforcing public sleeping bans.
Gov. Gavin Newsom in a Friday statement said the court’s decision gives state and local officials “definitive authority to implement and enforce policies” to clear encampments.
“This decision removes the legal ambiguities that have tied the hands of local officials for years and limited their ability to deliver on common-sense measures to protect the safety and well-being of our communities,” Newsom said.
City leaders in San Clemente, who have struggled with enforcing public safety and nuisance issues regarding sleeping and camping on beaches and city streets, were thrilled Friday with the Supreme Court ruling.
“It was a good decision,” Mayor Victor Cabral said. “In our mind, it means we can use our people (dedicated homeless liaisons) to direct people more forcefully into housing and services that are out there.”
San Clemente has been confronting a growing homeless population the last few years, with more and more people congregating at its beaches, in canyons, around the downtown and at RV parks. Cabral said the two dedicated city staffers monitor the city’s 31 homeless people, who are resistant to services.
“In San Clemente, I hope it validates that the work we are doing can be continued without pressure to conform to uniform regulations established at higher levels of government or the courts that seem to have mixed results in reducing homelessness,” City Manager Andy Hall added.
Orange Mayor Dan Slater said the ruling will allow the city’s efforts to address homelessness to be more successful. The city opened a homeless resource center on West Struck Avenue in 2022 that offers meals, showers, a place to get mail and laundry facilities, but also experts who can connect people to health care, social services and housing.
“In Orange, we are ready and willing to help direct and assist those who are legitimately homeless,” Slater said. “That could be for domestic abuse, eviction, job loss and many other reasons. However, it needs to be known that if you only want to live a home-free lifestyle, Orange is not the place for you.”
Stanton Mayor David Shawver said the ruling gives the city the ability to make the community safer without having to change much. Homeless people living near areas like a power plant, where the city has dealt with fires and vandalism, can now be cited and cleared by police, he said.
San Juan Capistrano City Manager Ben Siegel said the city’s leaders are pleased by the court’s ruling, but he doesn’t expect “significant changes” for how the South County city of 34,000 addresses homelessness.
Newport Beach Mayor Will O’Neill said his city has developed a “robust approach to homelessness that combines compassionate social programs with commonsense enforcement,” which, he said, explains why the city is also seeing a reduction in its point-in-time count.
“I expect to see changes in our municipal code that would align with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision,” he added.
Anaheim spokesperson Mike Lyster said the ruling won’t “change things dramatically day-to-day” for how the city interacts with its homeless population, but, if needed, the power can be used.
“This would be for extreme cases,” Lyster said.
Those who violate the city’s anti-camping laws now could be cited by Anaheim Police and punished with a misdemeanor offense at the discretion of the city attorney’s office. The city has a program that works with judges to present homeless people who have had multiple encounters with law enforcement with the choice of either receiving services from the city or facing potential legal consequences.
“Sometimes it’s in the courtroom, or the back of a police car, where someone finally agrees to take the offer of help,” Lyster said.
Advocates remain concerned
The Supreme Court case comes out of the Oregon city of Grants Pass. There, the city of 38,000 people with 600 experiencing homelessness had anti-camping laws in place that triggered fines and could lead to jail time.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had previously ruled that the Eighth Amendment’s cruel and unusual punishment clause banned cities from enforcing anti-camping laws without “practically available” shelter space.
Homeless advocates painted a dire picture of the ramifications the Supreme Court’s ruling might have in Orange County.
Assemblymember Sharon Quirk-Silva, D-Fullerton, said not all Orange County cities have taken their responsibility seriously to combat homelessness.
“Many cities have no shelter beds, but every city has someone who’s homeless,” Quirk-Silva said. “Now we will, in fact, return to pushing homeless individuals from one city to another, having some cities do zero work.”
Second District Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento, who chairs the county’s Commission to End Homelessness, said it is “crucial that enforcement measures do not criminalize poverty or our unhoused populations.
“Unfortunately this ruling reflects a short-sighted approach that fails to remedy the systemic issues at the core of our housing crisis,” he added, “and will likely lead to many local agencies eventually arresting their way out of homelessness without addressing the underlying causes of poverty and inequity.”
Becks Heyhoe-Khalil, executive director of United to End Homelessness, an initiative of the Orange County United Way that aims to provide housing to homeless people, was disappointed with the ruling and said penalizing people who have no other place to sleep than on the street is not the right approach.
Locally, a steady tide of people are falling into homelessness or are at risk, Heyhoe-Khalil said. According to the latest point-in-time count, almost 50% of people had fallen into homelessness in the last year, with 76% of them having their last address in Orange County.
A lack of available shelters has added to the problem, she said. “When young people call saying they’re in need, we have to tell them it’ll take about five to six months to be able to access an emergency shelter.”
Michael Sean Wright, founder of Wound Walk, a street medicine team based in Orange County, said he believes the ruling could motivate people who’ve been unwilling to be sheltered in the past to seek shelter. But citing individuals who are homeless, he said, will not solve the problem.
“We have to address the causations. You can’t arrest your way out of a problem,” Wright said. “We have to take a less punitive, more informed approach.”
For Wright, that’s approaching homelessness from a medical standpoint. Many of the people living on the street have massive wounds — complex infections, lower extremity wounds, staph infections — that make it difficult for shelters or jails to have them there, he said.
“We have to continue down the path of getting these folks medical treatment,” he said. “The nutritional choices are not that plentiful outside, so you’re getting no sleep; plenty of bad, highly processed foods; and a lot of stress. It’s very difficult for the body to heal wounds in those environments, in those conditions.”
In August, CalOptima Health, the county’s public health insurer, is expected to expand a street medicine program that brings primary care and case management to places where people experiencing homelessness are. It’s already been operating for more than a year in Garden Grove, where it launched.
Quirk-Silva, who chairs a committee on homelessness and mental health services in the legislature, said the ruling may serve as a hammer in some cases to bring people — who might have been unwilling in the past — into shelters.
But more citations equals more arrests, meaning more people experiencing homelessness on the streets could go to jail. It’s not as simplistic as “now we can punish and cite people,” she added.
“How will they pay? Problems will escalate if they miss their court appointment, fees may increase,” she said.
“And the question remains: Where will they be sheltered?”
Staff Writers Jonathan Horwitz, Annika Bahnsen and Destiny Torres contributed to this report.
