Homeless residents of some of California’s biggest cities increasingly are facing criminal penalties for the actions they take to survive on the street, according to a first-of-its-kind CalMatters analysis of data throughout the state.
Saturday marks the one-year anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson, which upended California’s homelessness strategy by allowing cities to enforce blanket bans on camping — even if no shelter beds are available. Immediately after the decision, unhoused Californians and the people who help them reported seeing an increase in enforcement. But CalMatters’ reporting, gleaned from more than 100 public records requests, appears to be the first statewide effort to quantify that increase.
CalMatters analyzed data on arrests and citations for camping and other homelessness-related offenses for 2024, comparing the six months before the June 28 Supreme Court decision to the six months after. We found increases in cities throughout the state, even in those where local leaders said they didn’t change their policy as a result of Grants Pass.
Here are some of the places with the most significant increases, according to police data:
- In San Francisco, then-mayor London Breed promised to be “very aggressive” in moving encampments following the Grants Pass decision. She delivered: Arrests and citations for illegal lodging increased from 71 in the six months before the ruling to 427 in the six months after — a 500% increase.
- Even though Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass spoke out against the Grants Pass decision, calling it “disappointing” and vowing to lead with housing instead of enforcement, homelessness-related arrests increased 68% after the ruling.
- Citations and arrests doubled in San Diego, which also doubled the size of its police teams that respond to homelessness.
- In Sacramento, the number of citations and arrests nearly tripled – from 96 in the six months before Grants Pass, to 283 in the six months after. From January through May 2025, Sacramento police had already issued 844 citations and arrests, suggesting enforcement continues to trend upward.
- Stockton issued just 14 homelessness-related citations in the six months before the Grants Pass decision. In the six months after the ruling came out, that number jumped to 213.
- It wasn’t just big cities that saw more enforcement: Citations and arrests increased by more than two-thirds in Ukiah, on the North Coast, and more than doubled in Merced, in the San Joaquin Valley.
The ruling, which found that the city of Grants Pass, Oregon did not violate the constitution by banning encampments throughout the city when no shelter was available, accelerated a shift toward a pro-enforcement approach to homelessness. Buoyed by voters fed up with large encampments near their homes, Gov. Gavin Newsom used the opportunity to urge cities to ramp up enforcement and pass anti-camping ordinances.
The people making the case for enforcement argue it’s a type of “tough love” that’s sometimes necessary to get people off the street. If someone refuses multiple offers of help, the threat of arrest might make them finally say yes, said San Diego Police Department Capt. Steve Shebloski.
“I hope nobody has to go to jail, and I hope everybody takes services,” he said. “I just dont think that's the reality of where we’re at with certain individuals.”
The type of help police can offer varies widely by city and situation. In San Diego, the Homeless Outreach Team, which includes police officers as well as social workers and mental health professionals, is supposed to offer shelter before issuing citations or making arrests. Between May 2024 and May 2025, that team made 357 placements into housing or shelter, Shebloski said. People refused help 2,471 times, he said. And they accepted another form of services 3,578 times, from a referral to a treatment program, to a ride to an appointment, to a new toothbrush. The department does not track how many people wanted shelter but couldn’t get it.
In Stockton, police take a more hands-off approach: They hand out flyers with six phone numbers people can call to reach homeless shelters and other organizations.
But shelter beds aren’t always available. Last year, California had more than 187,000 unhoused residents, and fewer than 76,000 year-round shelter and transitional housing beds, according to data compiled by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Doctors, academics and social workers who work with people on the street often say arrests make it harder for unhoused people to get back on their feet. When someone living outside gets a citation, they often miss their court date — they might lose the ticket or simply forget the date amidst the chaos of life on the street — which leads the court to issue a warrant for their arrest. People with active warrants can’t qualify for many housing and treatment programs.
They don’t understand. It’s not camping. It’s surviving.
— Beverly Harding, 58, Sacramento
In many situations, people cited or arrested for homelessness-related crimes are never charged, or the charges are quickly dismissed. But the threat of an arrest can be just as disruptive as the arrest itself. People leave their campsites to avoid getting taken to jail, and in so doing, lose touch with the outreach workers trying to connect them with housing and other services.
“In a weird way, it undermines the housing process to such an extent that you end up working for homelessness and against the people who are experiencing homelessness,” said Brett Feldman, director of street medicine at USC.
Some leaders are pushing back against the enforcement mindset. This week, two Democratic Congress members introduced the “Housing Not Handcuffs Act,” which would prohibit federal agencies from punishing people for living outside if they have no other option.
Grants Pass made no difference, say cities where arrests and citations spiked
In the year since the Grants Pass decision, at least 50 cities and three counties in California passed new ordinances targeting homeless encampments, according to a recent analysis by UC Berkeley Law students and faculty. Some ban camping only in specific areas, such as near schools, waterways or levees, while others ban camping throughout the entire city. Some cities, such as Fresno, made camping a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail and $1,000 in fines.
Even cities that didn’t pass ordinances started cracking down on encampments with new vigor, using old rules.
To quantify that crackdown, CalMatters filed more than 100 public records requests to police departments, sheriff’s offices, prosecutors and city and county governments for data on arrests, citations, charges filed and encampment removals. Those requests span a sample of about 35 large and small cities and counties throughout California. When requesting law enforcement data, CalMatters asked each agency to provide a list of the ordinances it uses to address homeless camps. In some cities that included ordinances that specifically prohibit encampments, but it could also include rules that ban sitting or lying on the sidewalk, impeding the right of way, storing belongings on public property and violating city park rules.
Los Angeles Councilmember Nithya Raman said she was surprised to see the data showing arrests related to homelessness increased 68% in her city, jumping from 920 in the six months before Grants Pass, to 1,549 in the six months after. Not all of those arrests led to someone being taken to jail. Some were what is called “noncustodial arrests,” where the person is released on site.
There were no policy changes in how the city dealt with encampments after the Supreme Court ruling, Raman said. But the city continues to expand its list of “sensitive locations,” such as near schools, where it bans encampments, she said.
“One of the city’s top priorities is to reduce unsheltered homelessness and bring people indoors and off the streets,” Raman said. “Our urgency to do that did not come from the Grants Pass decision in any way, shape or form. We were already focused on that.”
Bass’ office did not respond to requests for comment.
But Feldman, who provides medical care in encampments on the streets of Los Angeles, said he saw a noticeable change after the Supreme Court ruling. Suddenly, the areas where his team used to regularly find people were empty. That was a problem, because only about 5% of the team’s patients have reliable cell phones. If medics can’t find their patients, they can’t give them important follow-up care — such as their monthly antipsychotic injection or medicine to treat opioid addiction. As a result, their patients get sicker.
“It was really tough for a few months,” Feldman said, though he believes enforcement has gone back down to pre-Grants Pass levels in recent months. That’s because most people have moved out of the heavily enforced areas (such as around schools) and re-settled in places that escape police notice, he said.
The data CalMatters obtained from the Los Angeles Police Department does not include 2025 information.
San Diego similarly did not pass a new camping ban after Grants Pass. Its “unsafe camping” ordinance passed in 2023, and police also enforce older rules that prohibit encroaching on the public right of way. Shebloski says Grants Pass hasn’t changed anything in San Diego, despite the correlated increase in enforcement — 524 arrests and citations in the six months before Grants Pass, and 1,045 in the six months after. That’s because the police department added officers to its Neighborhood Police Division and Homeless Outreach Team, under the direction of its new police chief — which coincidentally lined up with Grants Pass, he said.
“I can tell you there's absolutely zero operational direction that, ‘Grants Pass is now passed, go out there and write tickets,’” he said.
Outreach workers struggle to find clients
Beverly Harding, 58, has been on the streets for about 10 years. For the last year of that time, she was sleeping in a makeshift tent she pitched in various places along X Street in Sacramento, by attaching tarps to the shopping cart that held her food.
She still cries sometimes when recounting her run-ins with police, who she says have confiscated treasured items, including a necklace that held her mother’s ashes. An arrest last fall was particularly traumatic. A friend’s dog had bitten her wrist a few days before, and she’d gone to the hospital for treatment, she said. When the officers grabbed her injured wrist and handcuffed her, Harding said she almost passed out from the pain. She said she still gets shooting pains through her damaged wrist.
“They don’t understand,” Harding said. “It’s not camping. It’s surviving. And if you don’t have a home, where else are you going to try to survive? Anywhere you can.”
These days, the authorities are moving unhoused people around Sacramento on a daily basis, said Joe Smith. He’s the director of residential services for homeless services nonprofit Hope Cooperative and board chair for the county’s continuum of care, which coordinates the area’s response to homelessness. Because of that movement, Smith said, people are seeking out hidden spots to sleep, away from the gaze of law enforcement.
That’s making it harder for outreach workers, who have housing and other services to offer, to find their homeless clients. Smith saw that first-hand last fall. An unhoused man finally got a spot in Smith’s Hope Landing housing program after years of trying to get off the streets, but no one could find him. The program pushed his move-in date back three times, in hopes that someone would be able to track him down.
The client eventually resurfaced and Smith was able to get him into housing earlier this month. It was just in time: A few more days, and the client would have lost the spot and had to start the entire process over. Even so, the delay meant he needlessly spent about six extra months on the street.
Smith, who was homeless himself between 2005 and 2011, said he’s “deeply concerned” the increase in enforcement is making other people lose out on housing opportunities.
“How devastating is that?” he asked. “Surviving outside becomes a lifestyle for you, and your ticket out comes up and nobody can find you. What a shame that is.”
A missing tent doesn’t mean someone has found housing
Shortly after the Grants Pass decision, then-Mayor Breed vowed to crack down on homeless encampments. What difference did the 500% increase in arrests and citations make in the city?
The number of tents and structures on San Francisco’s streets dipped to 222 in March — the lowest it’s been since the city began counting regularly in April 2019. That’s down from 360 in April 2024.
But just because someone has ditched their tent doesn’t mean they are off the street.
“Most people are just sleeping on cardboard or on the street and moving every night,” said Chris Herring, a UCLA professor of sociology who researches homelessness in San Francisco and beyond.
In Stockton, the city launched a “take back our parks” campaign to crack down on encampments after Grants Pass. Around the same time, the police department was recovering from a COVID-19 pandemic-era staffing shortage and increased its staffing in the departments that typically respond to homeless encampments.
Police issued hardly any citations for violating park rules (including camping, drinking and lighting fires in a public park) or obstructing sidewalks in the six months before the Grants Pass ruling. In the six months after, police cited people for those offenses 213 times.
Police give a 72-hour warning before they clear an encampment, said Officer David Scott, public information officer for the Stockton Police Department. If people don’t move after those 72 hours are up, officers may cite them. In rare cases, if someone is being combative, police may make an arrest instead, he said.
Police also hand out flyers with phone numbers people can call for housing, shelter beds, showers, meals and other resources.
“We’re always going to be out there,” Scott said. “We want to provide those resources and help to those individuals that are vulnerable. And we’re going to continue the efforts in that area. But at the end of the day, we’ve got to make sure that our city is safe and as clean as we can get it.”
The flyers list numbers for six service providers (including one that’s listed twice). But there’s no guarantee any will be able to help with whatever the homeless person calling needs. St. Mary’s Community Services, one of the providers listed, had two-dozen beds available across its men’s, women’s and recuperative care programs as of June 25. A week before, it had just 11. None were available for families.
Police have no way of tracking whether anyone calling St. Mary’s or the other providers gets help, or whether they just move a few blocks down the road and start the cycle over again.
And for some people, police interactions don’t stop just because they’ve moved indoors.
After living on the streets for about a decade, Harding recently moved into a community of tiny homes for homeless residents in Sacramento, where case workers are supposed to help her find permanent housing.
Shortly after, Harding and her boyfriend were hanging out in front of a nearby laundromat, using the Wi-Fi. She was downloading music onto her phone, and he was downloading games. Harding said they had a thin blanket over them, because it was cold.
An officer showed up and told them camping wasn’t allowed there, and they had to move, Harding said.
“I said, ‘Excuse me. I’m not camping. I live next door.’”
Aaron Schrank and Lisa Halverstadt contributed to this story.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
