Months after a Belmont Shore resident-led effort to “take back” the neighborhood drew condemnation for its focus on the homeless population, a community meeting seeking to inform residents how to report crimes and better organize community watch groups drew about 100 people in southeast Long Beach Tuesday night.

The meeting is part of a monthly public safety series hosted by Councilwoman Suzie Price, who represents the area. This particular meeting was an attempt at a conversation focusing almost solely on issues surrounding people experiencing homelessness and the perceived increase in crime in the area.

Some of the area’s residents have attributed these crimes to a growing homeless population in the area, with some taking issues into their own hands last year by forming a group that aimed to photograph and report people experiencing homelessness, some of whom the group suspected of committing crimes in the area.

The group’s initial meeting in November sparked a backlash in the community. Counter protestors showed up to shout down the early morning “march to take back Belmont Shore,” saying the march was an attempt by privileged property owners to force out and harass the homeless.

Price, while denouncing the march effort late last year, announced that Tuesday’s meeting would have information on how to form and organize community watch groups, something she said can protect neighborhoods from becoming victims of crime.

The meeting included a panel of city officials including representatives from the City Attorney’s office, City Prosecutor’s office, and Health Department as well as representatives from the Long Beach Police Department and Long Beach Fire Department. Price called the meeting in an effort to better inform her constituents on how the laws in Long Beach can and can’t be enforced and why.

Residents filled out notecards with questions ranging from which alleys are being patrolled by police officers to the schedule for tapering down traffic lanes around the soon-to-open shopping center at Second Street and Pacific Coast Highway.

But many of the questions revolved around crime and those experiencing homelessness: Why are people allowed to steal retailers’ private shopping carts to carry around their belongings and what can the LBPD or the stores do to reclaim them? How many beds are available at city shelters and what could the city do to get people into those beds and off the streets?

Shannon Parker, a homeless services officer with the city, said that, on average, people on the streets refuse services 17 times before accepting help. But even then, processing a single person can take about 11 hours, a drop in the bucket considering the city’s 2017 homeless count found over 1,200 people to be unsheltered.

Parker said then the issue becomes the ability—or lack thereof—to find them a bed. Help could be on the way though as the city announced this week that it had acquired a property that it hopes to turn into a year-round shelter by 2020. The additional 125 beds expected to be created when it opens would push the city’s total to 400.

“They are at capacity each and every night,” Parker said. “It is very rare after 4 p.m. that we can call up and get access to a shelter bed.”

https://lbpost.com/news/crime/lbpd-says-they-accidentally-inflated-crime-stats-by-over-counting-serious-assaults/

Long Beach Police Department East Division Commander Patrick O’Dowd said that the city is striking a balance between the interests of residents and those experiencing homelessness.

O’Dowd and Price took turns attacking recent state laws that redefined some felonies to misdemeanors and upped the dollar threshold for a felony theft from $400 to $950. They said the laws have either tied the department’s hands at enforcement or have taken away incentives from the court system to put lower-level offenders into rehabilitation programs.

O’Dowd sought to explain differences between crimes like burglaries and robberies and how the department prioritizes the calls for service it responds to first.

Residents have expressed frustration at the department’s lack of response time when they report crimes, but O’Dowd noted that it could be due to his division’s size, which includes virtually everything east of Signal Hill, and the number of officers he has, but also the severity of the crime being reported.

The department breaks down calls for service into categories of severity, with the most urgent calls being those in which a person is facing immediate danger.

O’Dowd noted that while the perception might be that crime has increased in the area crime is actually down in East Long Beach. LBPD statistics for the department’s East Division show that residential burglaries dropped by nearly 28 percent and grand theft auto dropped by nearly 17 percent.

There were some increases in areas like auto burglaries (1.3 percent), petty thefts over $50 (52.7 percent) and grand theft (28.1 percent). Citywide Long Beach recorded 30 murders, two of which occurred in the East Division’s reporting districts.

Price sided with the figures provided with LBPD and against the sentiments often expressed on sites like NextDoor, that crime in East Long Beach is spiraling out of control in relation to other cities. Price, who works as a deputy district attorney in Orange County, said that property crimes are up nearly everywhere in the region but that residents should be more fair in regard to what cities they’re comparing Long Beach to.

“A lot of the times people will say ‘Why is this happening here and it’s not happening in Newport Beach?’” Price said. “Honestly, as much as I value and respect people’s opinions I don’t know why anyone would compare us to Newport Beach. There’s nothing about the demographics that are even remotely similar other than we have water here and they have water there.”

https://lbpost.com/news/city/ramp-beach-enforcement-homeless-outreach/

While being realistic about the crime rates in her district, Price has remained dedicated to lowering it more. Over the years she has proposed a number of policies aimed at cracking down on everything from bicycle chop shops, loitering in and around businesses on Second Street and the noticing period before a person’s belongings can be removed from public property, reducing it from 72 hours to 48 hours.

But some efforts like driving people from camping in public spaces and sleeping in their cars are not yet enforceable either due to the number of shelter beds the city has available or the language in city ordinances.

Deputy City Attorney Sarah Green said she would like to go back and update some of the language in city ordinances to allow it to enforce anti-camping laws and sleeping in cars if the laws can be made constitutional. Green seemed optimistic with the combination of the winter shelter’s introduction and a pending City Council order to identify safe parking lots where people can legally sleep in their vehicles that laws could be re-written to survive legal challenges.

“I’m trying to figure out what sections we can use, how to remove the sections that we can’t anymore and update them so we can use them,” Green said.