Sacramento’s DA dangerously politicizes homelessness at the worst possible time | Opinion

Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho has dangerously politicized the region’s worsening homeless problem by launching an investigation into unnamed Sacramento city officials for potentially violating civil or criminal laws.

Ho’s crusade stands no chance of actually improving our homelessness crisis and, instead, threatens to make it worse. It needlessly complicates a tenuous partnership between the city and county to make tangible progress in the coming months by expanding both shelter and treatment services.

At a press conference Tuesday, Ho was given the opportunity to publicly say that Mayor Darrell Steinberg and the entire city council were not part of the announced investigation into “city officials.” But he did not. This turned a minor disagreement over what law enforcement interventions are legally permissible into a full-blown political stunt.

By creating this cloud of suspicion over the city’s elected officials, Ho is fanning dangerous political flames. There is widespread and understandable public frustration at the lack of progress in reducing the number of local residents who end up on the streets, which has been proven to be mainly caused by the lack of affordable housing. We fear a political trend in Sacramento that seeks to tap into public anger by suggesting that our region’s leaders have not sufficiently criminalized homelessness. A war on homelessness will fail just as locking away the user in yesteryear’s war on drugs did.

Ho believes that the city is misinterpreting a federal court decision that limits local intervention if the community cannot provide shelter to homeless people living in an encampment. He contends that the court decision does not prevent Sacramento from enforcing a state public nuisance statute if a local encampment fits that definition.

City Attorney Susana Alcala Wood simply disagrees, and she has reason to.

In a letter to Ho, she pointed to a regional federal court decision that invalidated a camping ban in Phoenix, Arizona. Also, California law does not require of government agencies “an affirmative obligation to eliminate public nuisances on their property.” At present, the city can move an encampment that blocks a sidewalk, which is a clear violation of public access. And the city has been enforcing this ordinance.

Neither does Ho seem to appreciate that in Sacramento, the city council does not hire the chief of police. Law enforcement is directly managed by the chief, whose boss is the city manager, who is guided by the legal advice of the city attorney. If Ho has a strictly professional disagreement, it is with them. Absolutely nothing here rises to the level of Ho’s staff investigating whether anyone inside the Sacramento City Hall broke any civil or criminal statute.

What a waste of time and an unfortunate distraction. It perfectly reflects the degrading state of Sacramento politics. Elevating friction among governments is no way to make progress when solving the region’s homelessness demands tremendous partnership.

The Sacramento City Council faces a big decision Tuesday; Mayor Steinberg is urging the council to delegate to City Manager Howard Chan the authority to identify and establish new “Safe Ground” managed encampments. Steinberg wants these sites located throughout the city. Brick-and-mortar shelters are going to take time and money to get constructed, and Safe Ground represents the only way to make progress quickly.

The city’s existing 1,100-bed network of shelters is at or near capacity on any given day, so adding capacity is the only way to give Sacramento more management choices when it comes to moving the inhabitants of encampments into safer environments — something that the courts clearly allow. That is the kind of visible, albeit incremental, progress that Sacramento desperately needs.

It’s true that the city of Sacramento, and the county for that matter, are far behind other cities such as San Diego in creating shelter space to house homeless people.

But if Ho wants to truly help, he could support Safe Ground, even near his neighborhood, as an important step toward improving overall public safety. The public needs to get comfortable with this step in managing homelessness. Reassurance from our top prosecutor would be the kind of courageous political statement that is conspicuously missing right now.

This story was originally published July 20, 2023 at 5:00 AM.