LA used to jail people for sleeping on the street. A case changed the city’s lens on homelessness

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

It didn’t matter if they had no money or nowhere else to go at night: Unhoused people who slept on the streets of Los Angeles in the early 2000s could be ticketed or arrested for violating a city ordinance that barred sitting or lying on a sidewalk.

“You arrest them, prosecute them. Put them in jail,” LAPD Chief William Bratton told the L.A. Times in a 2005 interview. “And if they do it again, you arrest them, prosecute them, and put them in jail.”

“It’s that simple,” he added.

Yet L.A’.s temporary shelter beds were (and continue to be) vastly outnumbered by its unhoused population. Unhoused people who were arrested for sleeping on the street lacked money to pay fines and the resources to navigate the court system. They’d get out of jail and end up again sleeping on the street.

What to do about homelessness remains one of the most hotly contested issues in LA, but a 2006 federal court case fundamentally changed the conversation: Jones v. City of Los Angeles denounced the idea that someone could be a criminal just because they were unsheltered. Even as the U.S. Supreme Court has walked back the protections that Jones created, L.A. leaders by and large haven’t returned to the practices of the Bratton era. As cities around the state reevaluate how encampments are policed, an examination of the original case can illuminate the fraught policymaking surrounding the crisis — and what’s at stake today.  

The case

Edward Jones, married couple Patricia and George Vinson, Thomas Cash, Stanley Barger and Robert Lee Purrie had all been previously cited or jailed for sleeping on the streets of L.A.’s Skid Row. A lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union and National Lawyers Guild argued that they simply had no alternatives, and so, L.A.’s anti-camping restriction should not be enforced between 9 p.m. and 6:30 a.m.

The case ultimately made it to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. In their 2006 ruling, the Ninth Circuit found that the Eighth Amendment — which protects against excessive fines as well as the better-known “cruel and unusual punishments” — prohibited the city from punishing what was  “an unavoidable consequence of being human and homeless without shelter.”

In writing the court’s majority opinion, Judge Kim Anita McLane Wardlaw noted the hardships experienced by each named appellant. Two couples slept outside to avoid being separated at a shelter; others suffered from disabilities that impeded them from promptly moving to an available shelter. Another man who was arrested learned that police had destroyed his tent and tossed his belongings in the street. They were gone by the time he returned.

Depriving people of their possessions after an arrest is “particularly injurious” to unhoused people who “have so few resources” to begin with, Wardlaw said.

A tarp covers a portion of a person’s tent on a bridge overlooking the 101 Freeway in Los Angeles, Thursday, Feb. 2, 2023.

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Jae C. Hong

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Such police actions, Judge Wardlaw wrote, not only restricted their “personal liberty,” but also “caused them to suffer shame and stigma.” 

“[The ruling] forcefully articulates in really important ways why unhoused folks should not be punished for sleeping outside when they have no place else to go,” said Shayla Myers, an expert in the criminalization of poverty and homelessness and the director of impact litigation and policy at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles.

The surprise settlement

In a surprising development, however, the city of Los Angeles settled the case. As a result, Jones was nullified, and attorneys and the courts could no longer reference it in similar cases.

But in 2018, the Ninth Circuit essentially restored Jones’s precedent in Martin v. City of Boise, ruling that penalizing unhoused people sleeping outside when they had no access to shelter violated their Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

“[The ruling] effectively just reupped Jones, adopted it, cited to the reasoning [and affirmed its] principle,” Myers told The LA Local.

Meanwhile, the Jones settlement bolstered protections for unhoused people in L.A. and beyond, Myers told The LA Local.

“It was very purposeful, and it was clearly drafted by people who are deeply invested in unhoused folks,” she said. 

The settlement required L.A. to increase the number of available housing units above a baseline before it could enforce its anti-camping ordinance. But because the city “consistently lost” units instead of gaining them, Myers said, the settlement remained in force for over a decade.

The impact

In 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a devastating blow to those advocating for the decriminalization of homelessness.

In the case of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson, the conservative supermajority overturned the earlier ruling in Boise. In a 6–3 vote, the higher court ruled that the Eighth Amendment’s protections against cruel and unusual punishment did not bar cities from enforcing public-camping ordinances against unhoused people even when no shelter beds were available.

The Supreme Court’s Grants Pass decision is based on a narrow textual interpretation of the Constitution that considers only the type and severity of punishment — in this case, fines and short jail sentences for repeat offenders — not the argument that it’s unreasonable to criminalize a basic human function when someone has no alternative. According to Justice Neil Gorsuch, who delivered the majority opinion, such punishments are neither cruel nor unusual, since city and state governments “have long employed similar punishments for similar offenses.”

Writing for the dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor excoriated the majority opinion, which she said “leaves the most vulnerable in our society with an impossible choice: Either stay awake or be arrested.”

Children play at the Safe Landing for Families, county land with 10 state trailers that now house families with children. Residents at this site receive wraparound services and assistance connecting them with longer-term affordable housing.

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Damian Dovarganes

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L.A., however, has not passed a citywide anti-camping ban in the wake of Grants Pass. Although the city is conducting controversial encampment sweeps, Myers believes “there has been less willingness” by residents, organizers and city officials “to accept criminalization of homelessness.” 

“Jones did not happen in a vacuum,” she noted.

For example, the Grants Pass decision prompted Gov. Gavin Newsom to order encampments that pose a public safety risk be cleared. The L.A. County Board of Supervisors responded by affirming that people who are arrested in them will not be held in county jails. 

“Arresting people for sitting, sleeping, or lying on the sidewalk or in public spaces does not end their homelessness, and will only make their homelessness harder to resolve with a criminal record and fines they can’t afford to pay,” the supervisors’ 2024 motion said. “Our homelessness and housing crisis is regional, and will only be solved with a coordinated, unified response, and resources for housing and services.” 

Today, Myers and other litigators are working to protect other constitutional rights of unhoused people in LA from a variety of ordinances.

“If you let jurisdictions violate people’s rights, they will continue to rely on ordinances that erase the visible signs of homelessness,” she said. “Because it’s easier to throw someone in jail than it is to build an apartment.”

Published as part of a national effort by local newsrooms to reflect on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. You can see coverage from other newsrooms by clicking here.