Judge Finds LA City Tinkered With Court Docs In Homelessness Lawsuit

A federal judge has found that Los Angeles officials “altered, modified, and created documents” as part of their legal defense in a lawsuit brought by a group of unhoused people and a community organization who claim their property was illegally seized and destroyed during encampment cleanups.

The multi-year lawsuit claims the city violated their constitutional rights when seizing and destroying tents, medication, documents, and other belongings they need to survive on the streets.

U.S. District Judge Dale S. Fischer wrote in a Feb. 15 order that the city has also repeatedly failed to provide documents, and its claims that some of the documentation wasn’t requested is “demonstrably false.”

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“The Court declines to discuss further the City’s excuses and failings,” Fischer wrote. “Suffice it to say that the City’s credibility has been damaged significantly.”

The lawsuit was filed in July 2019 by seven unhoused people living in neighborhoods across L.A. and a volunteer-led organization, Ktown for All, that works with Koreatown’s unhoused community.

What the court found

The problems were discovered years after the lawsuit was filed through an ongoing forensic examination that was ordered by the court in 2022, according to Shayla Myers, a senior attorney with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, which is representing the group of unhoused people and Ktown for All.

Myers told LAist the forensic examination was meant to get to the bottom of their concerns about the city’s evidence, and they’re not surprised by the findings.

“The fact is there were a significant number of examples of instances in which the forensic examiner located original documents that had not been turned over,” she said. “And there were differences between the documents that the forensic examiner located and the documents that were actually turned over to plaintiffs.”

The city told the court that it only made “administrative changes” and that its policy is to have city employees review documents for accuracy, errors, and completeness, according to the court order.

Fischer pushed back on those claims, writing that the city “cannot seriously expect the Court to conclude that the changes admittedly made by the City are comparable to a change in punctuation.”

Fischer wrote that even if the changes were corrections, as the city suggested, they shouldn’t have been made after litigation started. She added that the original versions of some altered documents “apparently no longer exist.”

Ivor Pine, a spokesperson for the L.A. city attorney’s office, told LAist they don’t comment on pending litigation.

How we got here

The lawsuit challenges the constitutionality of the city’s code to enforce encampment sweeps and its practice of destroying unhoused people’s critically important belongings.

They claim the city has violated their Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable seizure of property by confiscating it without a warrant and without probable cause.

“Rather than investing in solutions like bathrooms, handwashing stations, and trash cans, which would both meet the real and immediate public health needs of the City’s thousands of unhoused residents, and in turn, would also respond address many residents’ complaints, the City has responded instead by seizing and destroying homeless people’s belongings,” the lawsuit states.