In bid to help homeless people, L.A. to erase more than 1 million minor court citations
In a dramatic move designed to ease the challenges facing the region’s poor and homeless people, Los Angeles officials said Wednesday that they were voiding nearly 2 million minor citations and warrants that had kept people trapped in the court system.
A Times data analysis in 2016 found a vicious cycle of homeless arrests. Los Angeles has more than a dozen “quality-of-life” laws — restricting sleeping on the sidewalk, living in a car or low-level drug possession, for example — that police usually enforce with a citation. The tickets typically start out at less than $100, but often top $300 once court fees are added. Tickets pile up, and people go to jail.In a joint announcement Wednesday, Los Angeles City Atty.
In separate motions to the Los Angeles Superior Court, Feuer and Lacey moved to suspend fines and fees for minor pedestrian, quality-of-life and moving violations.Feuer recalled and quashed nearly 150,000 city warrants, and moved to dismiss about 800,000 pending years-old infraction citations. Lacey took action to dismiss 248,000 county warrants and dismiss roughly 900,000 pending infraction citations — more than half of which are older than 10 years, she said.
and end a cycle that sees those sleeping on the streets repeatedly jailed and subject to collection orders for fines — up 31% over five years before. In San Francisco, judges four years ago stopped issuing bench warrants for no-show defendants and ultimately eliminated tens of thousands of outstanding warrants from the last decade.
“There’s got to be some other attention paid to all the damage these warrants made,” he said. “The tickets started out as infractions and turned into jailable offenses.”
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