default judgment<\/a>, U.S. District Judge Dale S. Fischer found the city willfully fabricated and altered key evidence, ending the case in favor of the plaintiffs without trial. It\u2019s a landmark legal win for six unhoused residents and advocacy organization Ktown For All, who filed the lawsuit in 2019, challenging whether L.A. Sanitation employees violated unhoused residents\u2019 constitutional rights when seizing and discarding belongings during sweeps. <\/p>\nL.A. city code allows employees to remove and impound unattended, abandoned or hazardous items that are in the public right-of-way. In the lawsuit, plaintiffs alleged city sanitation workers arbitrarily seize and destroy property without objective standards or proper notice. With the default judgement, the court accepted those allegations as true. <\/p>\n
City\u2019s misconduct\u00a0<\/p>\n
The judge found that L.A. city employees altered reports or otherwise tainted evidence in more than 90% of the cleanup cases examined by the court in order to justify the city\u2019s legal defenses of unhoused residents\u2019 belongings. <\/p>\n
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According to the judgement, city employees systematically doctored or falsified records about encampment cleanups, including Health Hazard Assessment Reports, after the lawsuit began. The judge affirmed that city employees rewrote reports to change the reason for seizures, including adding details about \u201cbiohazards\u201d and describing property as \u201csurrendered\u201d or \u201cdangerous.\u201d <\/p>\n
The L.A. City Attorney\u2019s office hid the misconduct from the court and violated multiple court orders over five years, the judge said. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe court cannot proceed to trial with confidence that plaintiffs have had access to the true facts,\u201d Fischer wrote. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhere a party so damages the integrity of the discovery process that there can never be assurance of proceeding on the true facts, a case-dispositive sanction may be appropriate,\u201d she continued, quoting another legal ruling. <\/p>\n
Reaction from the attorneys<\/p>\n
Shayla Myers with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said the city\u2019s fabrication and alteration of documents made a fair trial impossible. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe fabrication of cleanup reports in this case is itself an indictment of the city’s practices,\u201d Myers said. \u201cAt these sweeps, the city provides unhoused people absolutely no recourse.\u201d<\/p>\n
L.A. city officials did not immediately respond to request for comment on the court\u2019s decision. <\/p>\n
What\u2019s next?<\/p>\n
The plaintiffs are seeking damages and a permanent injunction blocking the city from seizing and discarding personal property during encampment cleanups. They have until March 27 to file a brief in support of a proposed permanent injunction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Federal judge rules against LA in homeless property seizure lawsuit, finding city fabricated records A federal judge this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":175754,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[36997,48854,83773,83771,83772,48,52,51,47,50,49,71251],"class_list":{"0":"post-175753","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-city-of-l-a","9":"tag-encampment-sweeps","10":"tag-federal-court-ruling","11":"tag-judge-dale-s-fischer","12":"tag-ktown-for-all","13":"tag-la","14":"tag-la-headlines","15":"tag-la-news","16":"tag-los-angeles","17":"tag-los-angeles-headlines","18":"tag-los-angeles-news","19":"tag-unhoused-in-l-a"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175753\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/175754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}