Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt says he wants to get tough.<\/p>\n
The reality TV personality contends that the root cause of Los Angeles\u2019 homelessness crisis is drug addiction and mental health and pledged to use the police and other coercive efforts to clean the streets. <\/p>\n
\u201cOnce you start enforcing the law, things are going to move quick,\u201d Pratt said on Joe Rogan\u2019s podcast. \u201cWe\u2019re going around and we\u2019re just arresting people and the people that aren\u2019t getting arrested, we\u2019re getting to mandatory medical treatment.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe reality is no matter how many beds you give these people,\u201d he said this month at a mayoral debate. \u201cThey are on super meth, they are on fentanyl.\u201d<\/p>\n
Such an effort would represent a sharp shift away from the city\u2019s current policy of largely voluntary measures and clash with the vision of Pratt\u2019s two main opponents in the race, incumbent Karen Bass and especially City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who has repeatedly voted against anti-camping zones.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaking it illegal and arresting people is not the way to solve this problem,\u201d Bass said at the debate<\/a> on KNBC-TV.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen they\u2019re offered shelter,<\/a> they go inside,\u201d Raman said at the same debate.<\/p>\n In public statements, Pratt has broadly characterized his solution to homelessness as enforcement, but has provided little detail on how he would get 27,000 people off the streets in the face of civil rights protections, limited jail capacity, budgetary constraints and lack of city control over already overwhelmed treatment services.<\/p>\n And experts in city law and social services say the policies he has advanced \u2014 including mandatory treatment and arrests \u2014 face huge legal, financial and practical hurdles. <\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s only so much a sitting mayor can do,\u201d said Elizabeth Mitchell, an attorney representing a group of mostly business and property owners in a landmark homelessness case against the city.<\/p>\n Pratt has framed his plan in black and white terms, asserting during the debate, \u201cIt is illegal to live on the street.\u201d<\/p>\n In fact, Los Angeles had a citywide anti-camping ordinance, but the City Council repealed it in 2021 after a federal appeals court ruled that the constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment prohibits the arrest of a person for sleeping on public property if no suitable shelter is available.<\/p>\n \u201cThat law was repealed as a failed policy,\u201d said Shayla Myers, an attorney for the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles who has represented homeless litigants in lawsuits challenging city homeless policies. \u201cUnfortunately, tens of thousands of people in Los Angeles have no other option but to sleep outside in public places.\u201d<\/p>\n The revised ordinance known as 41.18 restricts sleeping near schools, day-care centers or other sensitive locations designated by the City Council. In addition, across the entire city, the law bans blocking sidewalks in ways that would impede a wheelchair or within several feet of a driveway or building entrance. <\/p>\n The U.S. Supreme Court later reversed the appeals court ruling in another case, but the City Council has not reinstated the blanket anti-camping law.<\/p>\n Pratt\u2019s campaign did not respond to questions seeking to clarify his positions, including whether he wants to arrest people for the act of sleeping on the streets or only if they are using illegal drugs or committing some other illegal act. <\/p>\n If Pratt wanted to stop camping citywide, he\u2019d need to get the City Council to do so, which could prove difficult given the current membership. <\/p>\n Raman and Bass<\/a> have said they don\u2019t support arrests as a way to get people off the street. Raman voted against the limited prohibitions in the revised 41.18 and routinely votes no on the creation of new 41.18 zones, earning the ire of some of her colleagues, though she says as mayor she wouldn\u2019t oppose efforts by council members to use the law in their own districts.<\/p>\n Bass said she does support 41.18 as currently enforced. <\/p>\n The Los Angeles Police Department\u2019s enforcement guidelines say officers must first seek voluntarily compliance by educating the person sleeping on the street and asking them to move. If the individual refuses or moves and later returns, officers can issue a citation or make a misdemeanor arrest.<\/p>\n Mitchell, who represents the LA Alliance for Human Rights in the landmark homelessness lawsuit, said a mayor could take some minor steps to increase 41.18 enforcement such as speeding up the placement of anti-camping signs needed to enforce the law in some places. <\/p>\n However, she said that the ordinance does not allow police to use arrests as the first option of enforcement, and that Pratt would need to convince the City Council to change the law if that\u2019s what he wanted to do. <\/p>\n A mayor could work with the police chief to crack down more on public drug use, but that effort would also run into the limits of the criminal justice system. <\/p>\n Simple possession of a controlled substance without a proper prescription, or illegal drugs such as fentanyl and cocaine, typically carries a maximum penalty of one year in county jail, with greater penalties for repeat offenders. In practice, possession of small amounts generally receives much shorter sentences. <\/p>\n \u201cA lot of them are released really early because bed space is taken up by felons awaiting sentencing,\u201d said Mike Webb, a former Redondo Beach city attorney who created a homeless court. <\/p>\n Any effort to increase enforcement \u2014 either of 41.18 or drug laws \u2014 will also come with the challenge of an understaffed Police Department in a city with budget constraints, Mitchell said. Then there\u2019s the cost to process people through the criminal justice system, including any stints in jail.<\/p>\n \u201cCriminalization and arrests of people being unhoused is the most expensive response to homelessness that you can possibly have,\u201d said Jed Leano, senior policy advisor at Inner City Law Center. <\/p>\n It\u2019s also ineffective and inhumane, he argued, because people arrested will simply end up back on the streets.<\/p>\n Pratt\u2019s candidacy comes as many voters have grown frustrated over the lack of progress in cleaning up the streets despite billions of their dollars being spent to get people into shelters and permanent housing. Since 2023, unsheltered homelessness has fallen by 17.5%, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, but nearly 27,000 still remain on the sidewalks, parks, RVs and elsewhere on the street.<\/p>\n A 2025 poll from Politico and the UC Berkeley Citrin Center<\/a> found 61% of California voters supported or somewhat agreed with arresting homeless individuals if they refused offers of shelter.<\/p>\n Benjamin Henwood, director of USC\u2019s Center for Homelessness, Housing and Health Equity Research, said many in the public believe drug addiction and mental health problems to be the main causes of homelessness, because those issues are highly visible on city streets. But he said research<\/a> consistently shows that while those issues play a role, the main driver<\/a> is the high cost of housing. <\/p>\n After all, people struggle with addiction and mental health in lots of cities, but those places don\u2019t have the high rates of homelessness as Los Angeles.<\/p>\n A recent study<\/a> by the Benioff Homeless and Housing Initiative at UC San Francisco found that about 37% of homeless people were using illicit drugs regularly, and 25% said they had never used drugs, Just over 65% reported having regularly used at some point in their lives, and 27% had started after becoming homeless.<\/p>\n Bass has credited her Inside Safe program, which cleans encampments and moves people into motel rooms, for driving the recent decline in street sleeping. And to improve, she has said she wants to increase social services offered to those in the program and do more to trim costs to provide shelter.<\/p>\n Raman, who has criticized Inside Safe as too expensive, says she wants to deploy street medical teams to help people facing drug addiction and mental health challenges, potentially by partnering with Los Angeles County, which provides such services<\/a>. She also wants to rely more on temporary rental subsidies to get people into housing cheaper.<\/p>\n Pratt on his campaign website says too much money has been spent on trying to get people inside first and not on addressing drug addiction and mental health. Under his administration, he said, he would require treatment to receive \u201ccity-funded assistance\u201d and reserve long-term housing for people who are sober.<\/p>\n In a candidate questionnaire, Pratt told the Southern California News Group that he would redirect money from homeless programs he called ineffective and spend it on mandatory treatment that \u201caddress the root causes of street disorder.\u201d <\/p>\n Those ideas face huge hurdles. <\/p>\n For one, homeless dollars are often required by law or regulation to be spent on specific things such as permanent housing or shelter and a mayor can\u2019t change that on their own. <\/p>\n Leano said the mayor also can\u2019t unilaterally mandate people receiving city-funded housing assistance enter treatment. He said doing so was likely illegal even if the City Council agreed to it, because of \u201chousing first\u201d policies codified in state law.<\/p>\n Treatment services are also run by the county and not the city. And pretrial and posttrial diversion programs \u2014 where someone undergoes treatment<\/a> in lieu of incarceration \u2014 would also need the cooperation of the court system, which the mayor does not control.<\/p>\n Webb, the former Redondo Beach city attorney, said the L.A. mayor could implement such a diversion program but only in concert with the city attorney, and then its success would depend on providing services. <\/p>\n \u201cIf he is successful as mayor and tries to obtain greater resources for mental health, it could work and it could be a good thing,\u201d Webb said.<\/p>\n Another avenue Pratt put forward in an interview posted on YouTube<\/a> is using the expanded definition of gravely disabled<\/a> in a law championed and signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2023. The amendment to the state conservatorship law adds substance use and inability to provide medical care as the basis for placing a person under the mandatory care of a relative or public guardian.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you can\u2019t manage your own mental state, you can come in and have a hold, a psych hold for 72 hours, and if it seems like this person needs real treatment, it can go to 45 days and then it can go up to a year conservatorship,\u201d Pratt said.<\/p>\n But longer holds require a psychiatrist\u2019s recommendation and court order. And because step-down facilities for longer holds are in short supply, patients often remain in expensive emergency rooms for longer periods or are merely released.<\/p>\n The vast majority don\u2019t go beyond the 72-hour hold, said Dr. Gary Tsai, director of the county bureau of Substance Abuse Prevention and Control.<\/p>\n \u201cThe likelihood that someone would go through that entire process all the way up to yearlong conservatorship, it\u2019s low,\u201d Tsai said. <\/p>\n Notwithstanding the legal complexities and dearth of resources to implement his proposals, Pratt has alluded to a blanket workaround: a local version of the Trump administration\u2019s call for self-deportation of illegal immigrants.<\/p>\n \u201cOnce you start enforcing the law, first off, people who want to do drugs, live on the street, they will leave L.A,\u201d he said in the YouTube video. \u201cThey\u2019ll see, \u2018Oh, this mayor\u2019s not playing around. We need to go somewhere else.\u2019 \u201d <\/p>\n Staff writer James Queally contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt says he wants to get tough. 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