The Brief

Wendy Powitzky thought she’d finally found a way off the street in Orange County.

The former hairdresser had spent years sleeping in her car and parks around Anaheim, near the suburban salons where she used to work. One day a social worker told Powitzky about an old piano shop recently converted into a shelter.

She just had to clear security to reach her new twin bed.

That’s where guards at the taxpayer-funded shelter groped and strip-searched her and several of her neighbors, and left them in constant fear of eviction, according to a lawsuit filed on behalf of eight former Orange County shelter residents.

“It was going to be my saving grace,” Powitzky said of the Anaheim shelter. “It was more unsafe.”

As California’s homeless population spiked nearly 40% in the past five years, the growth has been accompanied by a boom in private security. Governments, nonprofits and businesses are increasingly turning to hired guards to triage homelessness, opening a new front in the state’s housing crisis — one ripe for violence and civil rights issues, but thin on accountability and state oversight.

More than a dozen recent legal proceedings and public contract disputes reviewed by CalMatters suggest that, rather than ensuring safety, guards can compound already dangerous and chaotic situations.

Shelter residents in multiple Southern California cities have alleged in lawsuits that they were raped or sexually assaulted by shelter guards, including a Los Angeles case where a guard was sentenced to prison after a homeless woman complained of repeated abuse. In Sausalito, people living at a publicly funded tent city said in court that contract workers dealt drugs and harassed women. After a homeless woman in L.A. was stabbed to death by a fellow shelter resident, her family sued a guard for negligence in an ongoing lawsuit, alleging that he remained at an onsite office despite loud screams during a long attack.

No state agency publicly tracks how many guards work with homeless people, let alone what happens when things go wrong. The California agency that regulates guards — the Bureau of Security and Investigative Services — denied a CalMatters public records request for complaints and reports of violence involving guards and homeless people.

Several lawsuits, meanwhile, allege that security companies, shelter operators and government regulators have failed to properly train and oversee guards, who in some cases are paid just over minimum wage and struggling to stay housed themselves.

“Private security is a lot cheaper than cops,” said Paul Boden, executive director of activist group the Western Regional Advocacy Project. “And a lot less regulated.”

Around the world, economic researchers have found that private security reliance tends to rise along with income inequality and fear of crime. The industry grew nearly 20% in California from 2010 to 2022, the most recent state data shows, to more than 301,000 licensed guards — a force that outnumbered sworn law enforcement officers roughly 4 to 1.

In recent decades, court rulings have put some limits on local governments’ and police’s ability to clear encampments and interact with homeless people. Private guards are bound by different rules.

The legal complaints against security guards underscore bigger flaws in the state’s approach to homelessness. Guards and other front-line workers often aren’t trained to handle complex social issues. And despite public officials who criticize homeless people for rejecting shelter, some unhoused people say shelters and city-run encampments can be worse than the street.

More political pressure is on the horizon. This spring, the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on whether clearing encampments when there is no shelter available violates the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Donald Trump’s presidential campaign includes a plan to “relocate” homeless people from cities, arresting those who refuse and sending others to large tent cities. In California, a bipartisan statewide bill would make it easier to sweep encampments and ticket or move people off the street.

As crackdowns loom, homeless advocates argue that pouring money into stopgaps such as private security and temporary shelters — rather than permanent housing — will breed more problems.

“You put people in power over incredibly vulnerable people who are dependent for their very place to live,” said Minouche Kandel, a staff attorney for American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. “It’s a setup for abuse of power.”

The O Lot Safe Sleeping site at Balboa Park in San Diego on March 22, 2024. Photo by Kristian Carreon for CalMatters

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The Bureau of Security and Investigative Services said it has received 20,475 total private security complaints since 2019, but that it has no way to search for how many involved unhoused people.

“The Bureau looks into every complaint it receives, and when determining if a violation has occurred, the Bureau relies on facts and information obtained during the course of an investigation,” the agency said in a statement.

Former shelter residents like Powitzky are the first to note that there can be very real security concerns associated with homelessness. It isn’t easy, she said, for people who have struggled with trauma, constant stress and sometimes addiction or mental illness to live in close quarters with limited privacy.

That’s why she was initially reassured by the uniformed guards at the front door of Anaheim’s La Mesa shelter in 2019.

One night when Powitzky attempted to enter the shelter with her adult son, a guard approached after she cleared the metal detector and told her to put her arms up. The guard proceeded to “rub her hands all over” Powitzky’s breasts, she said in the lawsuit, making her son “uncomfortable watching his mother get touched in this manner.” Powitzky didn’t complain for fear of eviction.

Later that same month, Powitzky said another shelter guard forced her to expose her breasts in front of male guards and other residents. More invasive searches where guards “inappropriately rubbed” her body followed, she said in the lawsuit, even after she did complain.

“I honestly just felt like they wanted to get people out of there — ‘You’re going to do what we want, or you’re going to get out of here,’” Powitzky told CalMatters. “It’s a horrible way to run a situation for people that are already having problems with their life.”

The shelter was built by the city of Anaheim and run by the nonprofit Illumination Foundation, which then contracted with L.A.-based security company Protection America. The foundation did not respond to multiple requests for comment about how much they paid the guards, or the allegations by residents. In response to the ongoing lawsuit, the foundation and the city of Anaheim said in court filings that security searches were a city requirement at the shelter, but that neither party “can be held vicariously liable for alleged sexual battery” by guards.

The La Mesa shelter was shuttered in 2022 as part of a plan to focus on and expand another city shelter, Anaheim spokesperson Mike Lyster said in a statement. Protection America and Orange County declined to comment. The security company denied the allegations in a January court filing.

“We require high standards for our shelters and expect security to be done with compassion and respect,” Lyster said in the statement. “The issues raised here were taken seriously and investigated. We stand by our shelter operator’s work and procedures at La Mesa.”

In addition to the searches, Powitzky said in the lawsuit that it was impossible to work her way out of the shelter; she lost two jobs due to scheduling issues with a strict curfew. She left in early 2020 when COVID hit, not wanting to get stuck inside with shelter staff and guards who, the lawsuit alleged, appeared to lack appropriate training.

“I’m still in limbo. I sleep in my car at night,” Powitsky said in the interview. “I will never go to a shelter again.”

Encampment wars

On the first sunny morning after days of tent-thrashing rain on Skid Row, a downtown Los Angeles native and longtime activist known as General Dogon (given name Steve Richardson) is rallying the neighborhood. Between taking orders for new sleeping bags financed by an online fundraiser, the Los Angeles Community Action Network organizer points out the security guards that dot the streets around him.

Just around the corner was where, three decades earlier, Dogon saw the first of what he called “the red shirts” — uniformed, armed private guards hired by a local tax-funded business group charged with cleaning up downtown. He’s been fighting them ever since.

California’s private security industry has existed for more than a century, but in 1994 state lawmakers granted the business groups — formally known as Business Improvement Districts, or BIDs — a right to spend public money on private security. Dogon had just gotten back from serving a long prison sentence and was living in a nearby residential hotel when he started to hear stories that turned into class-action lawsuits.

“They was jacking up homeless people, taking their tents, pushing them down the street,” he recalled. “They were so bad, we was getting complaints from drug dealers that they was taking the drug dealers’ stuff.”

First: General Dogon stands behind caution tape and observes an encampment sweep along a block of Skid Row. Last: ​​An encampment sweep by the city of Los Angeles along a block of Skid Row.

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Dogon had a front-row seat for court battles in the 1990s and 2000s that added some checks to prevent BIDs and their guards from harassing people and destroying belongings.

But with California now home to a record 181,000 homeless residents, tension on public streets is hitting another high. And when it comes to private security, BIDs were just the beginning.

Guards still patrol many property-tax-funded downtown districts. Cities are also directly entering into contracts with security companies and nonprofits to patrol encampments or other public areas. Some businesses and residents hire their own guards, frustrated by property crime and what they consider a lack of police responsiveness.

For security companies, it all adds up to surging demand from clients who increasingly expect them to replicate law enforcement, complete with guns, body cams and pricey liability insurance, said Robert Simpson, owner of Fresno County Private Security. It’s a far cry from earlier eras of “observe and report” security, he said, when guards were trained to call police for social issues or more heated conflicts.

“Now if we make that phone call, they may show up two, three days later,” said Simpson, whose company was sued after a guard shot a homeless man in what the guard described as self-defense. “We’re navigating what is being presented to us.”

Some security companies advertise “transient eviction” or other services to “control and manage any homeless activity.” In LA, security company DTLA Patrol and its armed, state-licensed guards were featured in a report on a local TV station on how “Private Security Helps LAPD in Homeless Crisis.”

“Essentially, we are a subscription-based law enforcement service,” the company’s founder told KNBC in 2020, emphasizing that his guards focus on private rather than public property.

State-licensed security guards must undergo background checks and complete 40 hours of required training within their first six months on the job, compared to 664 hours for law enforcement basic training.

The state also requires guards to take a series of classes offered by dozens of state-authorized private companies or colleges. Classes span citizen’s arrests, terrorism and de-escalation, plus a “public relations” course that covers diversity, mental illness and substance use. In recent years, state lawmakers moved to require new use-of-force training and reporting standards, after which incident reports more than doubled from 2019 to 2023, state reports show.

Now, the security boom is poised to collide with encampment backlash.

California Sen. Brian Jones, a San Diego Republican, is leading a bipartisan effort to strengthen encampment bans in cities across the state. Senate Bill 1011 is modeled on a San Diego camping ban designed to push people into large, outdoor tent cities with 24-hour security.

Any concerns about security or other civil rights issues, Jones said, should be weighed against dire street conditions.

“Those things are happening in the encampments, too — you know, sexual assault, drug abuse, drug overdoses, murder, attacks,” Jones said. “It’s easier to keep an eye on and enforce if the locality does decide to use a safe camping site.”

Homeless people and their advocates, meanwhile, say security guards are just one of several converging threats. Police shootings of homeless people have spurred other wrongful death and excessive force lawsuits. Two serial killers recently targeted people in tents in LA and Stockton.

All told, death rates for homeless people more than tripled in the past decade, the University of Pennsylvania found. Advocates across the country increasingly worry about vigilante violence, as Kentucky weighs a measure that would decriminalize shooting people camping on private land.

“It’s a really scary time,” said Eric Tars, legal director of the National Homelessness Law Center. “When we have governments giving permission to their own law enforcement to harass and punish people, it gives an implicit green light to others.”

The new guard

Small local security companies. Bigger regional firms winning contracts across the state. Global private security behemoths that dabble in homeless shelters.

In the sea of companies vying for publicly funded homeless security work in California, one newcomer stands out: a six-year-old San Francisco nonprofit called Urban Alchemy. It insists it’s not a security company at all, but it has received public funds earmarked for security and been called a “de facto” security provider in legal complaints filed by former shelter residents.

Urban Alchemy advertises street cleaning services and “complementary strategies to conventional policing and security.” Its revenue quickly multiplied — from $36,000 in 2019 to $51 million in 2022, tax records show — after winning a slew of contracts to manage city-funded shelters and sanctioned encampments.

With a motto of “No fuckery,” the marketing revolves around de-escalation, “calming public spaces” and employing workers who have experienced homelessness, poverty and incarceration.

Some who have lived in shelters managed by Urban Alchemy tell a different story.

“They come on very friendly and sympathetically and then use drugs to take advantage of us, many of whom are struggling to stay clean,” one former resident of a Sausalito site contracted to Urban Alchemy, said in a 2022 court filing in a wide-ranging civil rights lawsuit against the city.

Outreach workers hired by Mitch O'Farrell's council district hand out food and water to unhoused people at an encampment near the Shatto Recreation Center on Nov. 2.

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Urban Alchemy won a $463,000 city contract to manage the Sausalito tent city housed at a public tennis court during the pandemic. In the civil rights suit, which the city eventually paid $540,000 to settle, encampment residents alleged that Urban Alchemy workers sexually harassed women and “used and trafficked methamphetamine.”

The city did not respond to requests for comment, but said in a legal filing that two Urban Alchemy workers were removed from the site and one was fired, and that no police reports were filed. Urban Alchemy’s contract with the city was not renewed, and the organization denied the allegations in a statement to CalMatters. The nonprofit has larger ongoing government contracts in LA, Portland, Oregon and San Francisco, where another former worker is awaiting trial on charges of attempted murder after shooting a person outside the shelter where he was working.

Urban Alchemy declined to make an executive available for an interview. The organization said in a statement that its workers complete “extensive training,” including two days of paid lessons and roleplaying on conflict resolution, complex trauma and inclusivity. Workers are not required to be state-licensed as guards, and people with criminal backgrounds could be ineligible under state law.

In an email, Urban Alchemy’s community and government affairs head Kirkpatrick Tyler said, “Urban Alchemy practitioners do life-saving work in our communities that is more difficult than most of us could imagine.” When it comes to security issues, he said workers are taught to use “emotional bank accounts” and follow a six-step process to de-escalate: “If at any point during this process, a person becomes violent or has a weapon, practitioners will call the authorities.”

Tyler said the nonprofit is “saddened by the news media’s repeated eagerness to regurgitate every one of these kinds of claims it hears about Urban Alchemy – an organization that happens to be composed of more than 90% Black formerly incarcerated long term offenders.”

Several of Urban Alchemy’s own workers have also sued the nonprofit over alleged labor and wage violations, discrimination, sexual harassment and unsafe work environments. A San Francisco sexual harassment case – which Urban Alchemy has denied – is ongoing, and the organization has settled other labor lawsuits in San Francisco and LA.

Carmina Portillo heard about the job by chance. The 38-year-old LA resident and auto mechanic was homeless herself and evangelizing at a park when she got curious about a man in uniform sitting next to a Porta Potty.

“I asked the guy there how much he was getting paid, and it was $19 an hour,” Portillo said. “I was like, ‘Wow, that’s a lot for just sitting there.’”

Last year, she filed a lawsuit against Urban Alchemy over alleged unpaid wages, discrimination and wrongful termination after working for eight months at an LA “Safe Sleep” site — a temporary outdoor shelter lined with city-funded tents. It was always an unwieldy job, Portillo said, ranging from making sure no one was overdosing to cleaning bathrooms or serving food.

State records show Portillo wasn’t licensed for security work. Rather, she and colleagues were left to “take matters into our own hands,” she said in an interview, if problems arose. In one case, Portillo said in the lawsuit that a supervisor discouraged her from calling for medical help after a homeless resident told her in Spanish that he was in distress.

Urban Alchemy denied the claims in a legal response, arguing that Portillo did not complain and that its other employees “acted reasonably, in good faith, and in a manner consistent with the necessities of their business.”

Looking back today, Portillo pauses when she thinks about what to call Urban Alchemy.

“I would just say it’s a gang,” she said. “Literally that’s how I felt. There’s a lot of tension.”

Tyler of Urban Alchemy said, “Every large organization deals with some HR issues. When these issues arise, we take them seriously, and we do our best to handle them fairly.”

Portillo settled her lawsuit with Urban Alchemy; the terms are confidential.

A deadly response

Three hours inland in Fresno, a different type of reckoning over homelessness and private security is playing out — over what happens in extreme cases, when clashes with armed guards turn deadly.

In March 2021, a Fresno man with a history of mental illness named Joseph Gutierrez was shot to death after a struggle with a 21-year-old guard outside a vacant building. The guard in the case was not hired by a city or a shelter, but by nearby businesses to patrol the area.

Surveillance video shows that the guard employed by Fresno County Private Security lightly kicked a sleeping Gutierrez’s feet and shined a flashlight in his eyes. Once awakened, an unarmed Gutierrez got up and lunged for the guard’s neck. The guard shot four times at close range. A fifth shot hit a bystander in a parking lot, who survived.

No criminal charges were brought against the guard. Gutierrez’s widow recently agreed to an undisclosed settlement in a civil wrongful death lawsuit brought against the security company. The company didn’t admit responsibility in the settlement, and Simpson, the owner, emphasized that the shooting was in self-defense.

“You’re going to have the Monday quarterbacks — ‘Why didn’t he do this?’ ‘Why didn’t he do that?’” Simpson said. “Until you’re in the moment, you can’t quarterback that.”

A dentistry office off the main road of Shaw in central Fresno on Feb. 5, 2024. The business used to be a vacant building and the scene where Joseph Gutierrez was shot and killed by a security guard while seeking shelter in the entryway of the building.

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It’s not the only recent guard controversy in Fresno. Last year, another private security contractor was removed from local homeless shelters after the Fresno Bee reported on guards’ pepper “spray first, ask questions later” policy.

“I’m not surprised that this is a mounting problem with the growing number of homeless folks out there,” said Butch Wagner, the attorney who represented Gutierrez’s widow and children. “These security people have no idea what the hell they’re doing.” 

The guard in the Gutierrez case took additional courses at a local community college, and work logs filed in the case show that he came into contact with homeless people often: asking “three vagrants” to leave a Family Dollar store, removing a man from the Little Caesar’s Pizza dumpster, moving along people sleeping in bushes and alleys all along his route — “no use of force required,” he often wrote in the logs.

Wagner, who has also filed suit against police officers accused of shooting homeless people, is most concerned about rules governing when guards are armed.

State law requires that private guards who want to carry a gun apply for a permit and pass a test with the Bureau of Security and Investigative Services demonstrating that they are “capable of exercising appropriate judgment, restraint, and self-control.”

Simpson said it’s up to his guards whether they want to be armed, and also whether a client requests it. He estimates less than 5% of his Fresno County Private Security guards are armed.

“It is your choice. You want to be armed, you can be armed,” Simpson said of his policy. “But you will use a company firearm.”

Had he lived to tell about it, Gutierrez, 35, would have been more qualified than most to weigh in on the debate about where his home state should go from here on homelessness and security.

Before he was killed outside an empty building with 19 cents in his pocket, he’d been a guard, too.

Have you stayed at a California homeless shelter? Tell us about your experience here. 

This coverage was made possible in part by a grant from the A-Mark Foundation.

A new law will require local agencies to publicly disclose audio recordings and written records of 911 calls originating from privately run immigration detention facilities. The bill was prompted by CalMatters reporting on alleged sexual assaults at the Otay Mesa Detention Center.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 423, called the Detention Facility Transparency Act, on Tuesday. It was one of 21 immigration-related bills in a package his office announced the same day.

The law will require local agencies to turn over recordings and written records of 911 calls from privately run detention facilities, if a member of the public requests them. It includes an exception if an active investigation is underway and requires redacting the names of affected individuals.

“Well, it goes without saying, these past two years, Donald Trump has brought fear and has brought anxiety, disruption and stress to our immigrant communities,” Newsom said in a recorded video statement on his website.

“So, today, I sign a number of bills to strengthen transparency and to strengthen accountability and oversight over federal immigration enforcement and civil detention in our state,” the governor said.

State Sen. Lena Gonzalez, a Democrat from Long Beach, introduced SB 423 as state investigations and courts found serious gaps in essential medical care within the facilities. She said the aim was to stop private operators, and the agencies that work alongside them, from keeping what happens behind detention walls from the public's view.

In February, L.A. Taco reported that detainees inside Otay Mesa were throwing lotion bottles wrapped with notes about conditions inside over the wall of the facility to organizers standing outside.

“For 280 days we haven’t eaten a single piece of fruit, banana, apple, orange, or anything fresh," an Otay Mesa detainee wrote, the news outlet reported. "We are all in one big room with no doors or windows. We can’t see any grass or trees. We are all constantly sick.”

Gonzalez, who is chair of the Legislative Latino Caucus, said no person “should have to resort to throwing notes over the walls of a detention facility to have their needs met and their voices heard.”

Earlier this year, CalMatters sought information, including 911 audio records and other reports, about alleged serious incidents at detention facilities through a California Public Records Act request. While a San Diego County sheriff’s spokesperson said the agency was not investigating those cases, he said he was unable to turn over additional records because they were part of “a law enforcement investigation.”

“When journalists and reporters attempted to obtain records about reported incidents at these facilities through the Public Records Act, they faced severe pushback from law enforcement, citing vague investigatory records exemptions, despite there being no active investigation,” said Gonzalez.

Immigrant Defense Advocates and the First Amendment Coalition co-sponsored the bill.

“The governor has sent a powerful message: No more secrecy. SB 423 makes clear that 911 calls and related records about events in detention must be released upon request. This will shed more light on a notoriously opaque system, leading to stronger oversight and accountability,” Ginny LaRoe, Advocacy Director, First Amendment Coalition, said in a written statement.

Gonzalez’s bill was one of several detention oversight bills Newsom signed Tuesday. Others impose a new 25% tax on private detention facilities, expand health, safety and oversight requirements for the centers, and add to the state attorney general’s oversight role.

The new laws take effect Jan. 1.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Six Flags Magic Mountain is retiring its famous X2 roller coaster amid lawsuits alleging serious brain injury caused by the ride.

The Southern California theme park said Tuesday that it is permanently shuttering the ride after nearly 20 years. Six Flags recently settled a wrongful-death lawsuit from the family of a 22-year-old man who died after riding the coaster in 2022, and three more lawsuits alleging traumatic brain injuries were filed last week.

“While X2 consistently passed a multitude of safety tests, we have decided to close the ride because we believe it’s the right thing to do,” park President Brian Oerding said in an online announcement. “Ride safety is a cornerstone of our business, and when we see guest confidence affected, we take it seriously.”

The ride has been closed since the evening of July 12, after two women who rode the coaster less than a week apart both needed to be rushed to the hospital after they exited.

One of them, 25-year-old Naomi Greer-Wilkinson, collapsed shortly after the ride ended and was found to have massive brain bleeding inside the skull that required emergency brain surgery. She remains in a vegetative state in the hospital, unable to speak or move and dependent on a ventilator. Her family filed a lawsuit against Six Flags on her behalf.

Her attorneys said more than 100 people claimed they suffered brain injuries from the roller coaster in the past two years, and more lawsuits would be filed in the coming weeks.

According to the Six Flags Magic Mountain website, the X2 roller coaster reaches a top speed of 76 mph (122 kph) and has a total length of 3,610 feet (1,100 meters). The seats rotate 360 degrees “so your body will be flipping around the entire time,” and the ride features two “raven turns” — half loops that turn into sheer drops midway.

It debuted at the park in 2002 under the name X as the world’s first “fourth-dimension” roller coaster and reopened in 2008 as X2 with new trains and special effects. The uniqueness of the ride drew thrill-seekers from around the world and garnered a fervent fanbase.

The park settled a wrongful-death lawsuit filed by the family of Christopher Hawley, a 22-year-old who died the day after he rode X2. He was taken to the hospital after the ride with severe brain bleeding. The medical examiner’s office said his death was from blunt head trauma. The case was settled at the end of August, a few days before the trial was scheduled to start.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday allowed the administration to resume, for now, deportations of migrants to countries that are not identified in their removal orders, handing President Donald Trump another victory in his aggressive immigration agenda.

The court also said it would take up the case for full oral argument in December.

The court's brief order granting the petition did not outline a reason for staying a lower-court order that blocked the third-country deportations. It noted the court's three liberal justices objected to staying the order.

Solicitor General John Sauer told the justices the third-country deportation policy amounted to "an essential tool to remove certain aliens, including some of the worst criminal aliens" in court papers earlier this month. The administration said it has used the policy to deport tens of thousands of noncitizens to Mexico and countries in Africa and Latin America after the migrants' home countries refused to accept them.

"While certain aliens may benefit from stalling their removal, the Nation does not," Sauer wrote in an emergency application Sept. 24.

The action by the high court marks the third time the justices have rejected efforts by U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy in Boston to pause the deportations, which the judge said violate due process rights and fail to give detainees meaningful notice to raise arguments that they have credible fears of torture or abuse in the countries where they could be sent.

The National Immigration Litigation Alliance, which is representing migrants facing deportation, said in court papers that their clients are facing significant harms.

"The record shows that class members removed without meaningful notice or an opportunity to present country-specific protection claims have faced prolonged and arbitrary detention, beatings and sexual assault, disappearance, and chain refoulement to countries from which the United States had already granted them protection," wrote lawyer Trina Realmuto. "These harms cannot be undone."

The Department of Homeland Security said Murphy's rulings have created a logistical nightmare, including canceled flights, potential diplomatic clashes, and a lag in removing people convicted of assault and drug crimes.

The administration argued that if a country has assured Secretary of State Marco Rubio that it will not engage in persecution or torture, that should be enough to deport a noncitizen to a country that's not their own.

The Supreme Court's conservative supermajority has recognized the president has substantial authority over the border. Last summer, in a 6-to-3 decision, the court ruled President Trump has sweeping power to end the temporary protected status program for people who can't return to their home countries because of wars and natural disasters.

Copyright 2026 NPR

The bell had already rung on a recent morning at Newport Beach’s Ensign Intermediate School. But two of the school’s students hadn’t made it to class. Instead, they were sitting on a sidewalk across from campus, detained by a police officer for parking their e-bikes on the street.

The situation at Ensign has gotten messy since the school district, Newport-Mesa Unified, voted to ban e-bikes from middle and elementary school campuses, citing safety concerns. Many students kept riding their e-bikes to school anyway, parking them in swarms in the surrounding neighborhood.

The neighbors did not like this. Shouting matches ensued between students and homeowners. At least one student returned from class to find her tires deflated.

The city responded to the tension by putting up “No e-bike parking” signs on several streets.

The city of Newport Beach prohibited e-bikes on some streets around Ensign Intermediate School after neighbors complained.

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“I wouldn't want it in my neighborhood either, like, I get it,” said Corey Gulbranson, who got a $100 parking ticket on behalf of his daughter, one of the Ensign students detained for allegedly illegally parking her e-bike. “But at the end of the day, we're just trying to get our kids to school on a legal mode of transportation.”

Crucial teen commuting tools? Or dangerous devices?

E-bikes and significantly more powerful e-motorcycles have become very popular in many Orange County suburbs, where the streets are wide, public transit is spotty, and distances are longer than some are willing to pedal on a regular bike. For teens and tweens, e-bikes provide a taste of independence. They also relieve parents of some of their driving duties. Plus, e-bikes can replace polluting cars.

But their popularity has brought an alarming increase in serious injuries, especially among young riders.

At Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, e-bike crashes are now sending more kids to the ER than any other cause, according to Dr. Tetsuya Takeuchi, the hospital’s trauma medical director. More than 70% of those patients had some level of head injury, from minor concussions to devastating brain damage, he said, often because they were not wearing a helmet.

But even Takeuchi recognizes the nearly irresistible draw of e-bikes.

“If you ride one, you realize how easy it is to go everywhere with it,” he said.  “I am not by any means surprised at how popular this is, especially amongst kids.”

‘Bicycle-shaped devices’

Not all e-bikes are equally fast, or equally dangerous. California uses a three-tier system, developed by the bike industry, to classify e-bikes depending on:

• engine power
• max speed
• whether the bike has pedals 
• whether a cyclist has to use those pedals before the engine kicks in 

California law prohibits children under age 16 from riding Class 3 e-bikes with engines capable of reaching 28 miles per hour. In reality, though, many kids are riding e-vehicles that go faster — in some cases, much faster.

“There are lots of what I will call 'bicycle-shaped devices' being ridden,” said Asha Weinstein Agrawal, a research associate at the Mineta Transportation Institute at San Jose State University. “Some of them are legal e-bikes. Some of them are not.”

Agrawal recently co-authored a 210-page report on e-bike safety. It includes data collected from middle and high schools in Marin and San Mateo counties, which showed that only 12% of students’ e-bikes fit into the legal classification system. The other 88% were more powerful than legally allowed under California law.

A Newport Beach Police officer tickets a middle schooler for parking her e-bike on the street across from Ensign Middle School on Sept. 4, 2026.

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Any bicycle-shaped device that goes faster than 30 miles per hour is technically an e-motorcycle, which requires a special driver’s license and, if ridden on public roads, insurance and registration.

Agrawal said it’s hard for parents, and even police officers, to figure out what’s legal and what’s not.

“Nobody understands this,” she said. “It’s very hard to enforce.”

The crackdown

Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer has taken some unusual approaches to addressing the e-bike dilemma. To date, he has pressed criminal charges — including for child endangerment — against four parents after their children were involved in collisions, all of them on e-motorcycles, not e-bikes.

One of those parents, a woman from Aliso Viejo, was charged with three felonies, including involuntary manslaughter, after her 14-year-old son allegedly struck and killed an 81-year-old man while doing wheelies in the street in Lake Forest on an e-motorcycle souped up to reach 60 miles per hour.

People with e-bikes, e-scooters and e-motos move through the long line at the Orange County District Attorney's buyback event at Angel Stadium, Sept. 13, 2026.

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The DA’s office said it has also sent letters to retailers reminding them of a ban on selling products used to modify e-bikes to go faster than legally allowed.

Spitzer recently tried another novel approach: buybacks. On a recent Sunday, hundreds of people brought their e-bikes, e-scooters and e-motos to an event at Angel Stadium in Anaheim, hoping to turn them in for up to a thousand dollars in gift cards. The county event was paid for with $100,000 in asset forfeiture funds.

One man near the front of the line said he had arrived at 1 a.m. By the time the event started at 10 a.m., sheriff’s deputies were turning people away.

“Holy smokes,” Spitzer said from behind a podium mounted in the parking lot. “Look at the participation. … And you can see why, because we have a serious problem here in Orange County and across the nation with individuals who have e-bikes and e-motorcycles.”

Spitzer spoke about the dangers, but also the attractiveness of a high-powered personal vehicle, especially for teen boys.

 “We're not gonna change our internal DNA about who we are as young people and the fact we wanna go places, and we wanna experiment, and quite frankly, we like fast things,” he said. “ But the fact of the matter is when you have a machine, and you don't understand its capabilities, you can find yourself in harm's way very quickly before you can control that mechanism.”

Orange County District Attorney is testing out a range of strategies to crack down on illegal e-bikes and e-motos, including a buyback event at Angel Stadium on Sept. 13, 2026.

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Jill Replogle

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Are unsafe riders ‘ruining it for other people’?

Paul Dumont drove to the buyback event all the way from Chatsworth in hopes of exchanging five e-bikes he had bought for his kids and grandkids.

“They got injured on them when we first got them, so they've been sitting in storage,” he said of the bikes.

Dumont said he wished he had bought less powerful e-bikes. “But I bought them the best ones,” he said. “I thought they'd be better.”

Denise Mills and her 17-year-old son Nathanael came from Torrance to turn in three e-motorcycles that he had been riding to and from his high school last year. He stopped after the school told him it was illegal. A new state law defining e-motorcycles took effect in January.

A student at Ensign Middle School runs to campus after parking his e-bike at a nearby park, Sept. 4, 2026.

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Jill Replogle

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LAist

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“That was very unfortunate because it's his primary source of transportation,” Mills said. “Now it's his dad and I.”

Nathanael said he had logged several thousand miles without an accident.

“ Partially it's, like, people ruining it for other people,” he said of efforts to tighten the rules for young riders.

Local leaders grapple with the flood of e-bikes

Cities and school districts are testing a variety of approaches to decrease e-bike crashes and injuries, from prohibiting riding on sidewalks to outright bans for young riders. The Brea City Council has even discussed using police drones to follow unsafe youth riders home in order to inform their parents.

In a more typical approach, the Huntington Beach City School District requires all student e-bike commuters to pass a safety course in order to get a permit to park their bike on campus. Newport-Mesa has a similar program for high schoolers.

Marin County limits youth under age 16 to riding Class 1 “pedal-assist” e-bikes, which have motors that kick in only while pedaling, and shut off once the bike reaches 20 miles per hour. The ban on more powerful e-bikes for young riders is part of a pilot program approved by the state legislature that sunsets in 2029.

At the federal level, O.C. Congressman Dave Min, D-Irvine, co-authored a bill earlier this year, the Safe SPEEDS Act, that would develop nationwide safety standards for e-bikes, including minimum age recommendations.

A dilemma for parents

Parents of student e-bike commuters have said they do not oppose regulating the vehicles, and they want authorities to crack down on dangerous and illegal riding. But an outright ban goes too far, they’ve said.

“ I know there are kids that are a little wild,” said Kellie Newcombe, whose 13-year-old daughter is still riding her pedal-assist bike from their home in Costa Mesa to Ensign Intermediate School in Newport Beach.

“That is not my child. That is not her friends. They are so ridiculously safe and by the book,” she said. “It's just super frustrating that they would say every kid cannot ride an e-bike.”

A spokesperson for Newport-Mesa Unified told LAist in an email that the school district’s new e-bike restrictions have gone smoothly and are helping to reinforce safety. But that is not how Gulbranson and Newcombe see it.

“We've had my daughter intimidated by multiple neighbors now,” Gulbranson said. “This whole guise of doing it under safety is totally misguided.”

Newcombe said she worries about her daughter’s safety more now that an increasing number of parents are driving their kids to school.

“They're in a rush because the traffic is insane,” she said. Plus, her daughter now has to cross a busy street to get to campus.

Newcombe said she wishes the school district would work with local leaders and police to enforce e-bike rules and to create safer paths to school for responsible riders.