Parking Lot "Homeless Cleansing" Likely on April 11th Agenda

Entering any of the City's 20+ parking lots or garages will become illegal for everyone in May unless you're parking a car or bike. In that case, you must leave within 10 or 15 minutes or face a fine of $100 and up. This is the proposed law.


While picking up some audio tapes of the Downtown Commission's last "special meeting", I got some more information from Matt Farrell, the main staff member for that Commission.

The "special meeting"--the second of two in as many weeks--was held under pressure from Mayor Mathews and Councilmember Coonerty. The goal: to rush forward the anti-homeless "cleansing" of all the City-owned parking lots and garages (over 20, taking up about 8-10 city blocks), even though OTHER ALTERNATIVES HAVE NOT BEEN FORMALLY CONSIDERED.

Farrell said he was preparing his staff report for City Council. He didn't know why the law originally appeared on the City Council agenda for a first reading (on an afternoon session) prior to Downtown Commission discussion or have any details about that process.

Asked if he had any stats about whether the same people remained or immediately returned after police actually visited parking lots and garages, he said he didn't have any. (This is signficant because if police visits usually disperse people, you don't need a new law, just use more ride-throughs and existing laws.)

Asked about contacts with the Homeless Service Center, Farrell said the some weeks ago he had spoken for about ten minutes with Ken Cole, the Executive Director, who felt that parking garages were not "safe or appropriate" places to sleep and wanted the law "enforced fairly", having no problem with it if that were done.

Farrell had no stats no how many of the 541 "calls for service" last year in the parking garages (out of 70,000+ in the City and an uncertain number in the downtown area) were actually police "ride-throughs" generated by the police themselves, as Deputy Chief Vogel described in his testimony on March 23rd.

Farrell had no stats about the crime situation elsewhere in the city compared with parking lots and garages, to give us some sense of whether there was a particularly bad "crime" problem there--other than, of course, sleepcrime, coverupcrime, and survivalfromtheelementscrime, e.g. camping.

The law was generated by conversations between beat officers and parking lot workers, Farrell said.

Asked whether he thought police ignored some of the calls and whether that might be the reason for merchant/parking lot attendant frustration, he agreed, but defended the practice, saying it was necessary to conserve resources.

He didn't have any statistics of how often the police were "too busy" to reply to calls because of competing demands.

Farrell also noted that the Downtown Association (the merchant group that gave us the Downtown Ordinances against sitting, sparechanging, performing, and political organizing) voted to endorse the law, with some dissent.

The Association held a closed meeting after the Downtown Commission meeting last Thursday, excluding advocates and members of the public.


Check previous articles for more info: http://indybay.org/news/2006/03/1810426.php

The Downtown Commission's 3-23 special meeting should be archived at http://www.radiolibre.org/brb/brb060402.mp3 by April 3rd or 4th.