CalMatters’s case forces Los Angeles officials to submit secret complaints to homeless shelters

Los Angeles authorities have begun to publish thousands of internal records related to the conditions in homeless shelters in response to CalMatters lawsuit challenging their repeated refusals for public records.

Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, better known as Lahsa, agreed settlement With Calmatters in the Supreme Court last month, committed to publishing at least 175 incident reports every week until the request for public records is fulfilled. The agency estimates that there are 5,000 such reports.

Calmatters has been submitted legal appeal in the fall after Lahsa repeatedly rejected our requests for copies of the internal shelter incident reports – Documents designed to track serious problems in taxpayers funded for homeless, including deaths, attacks, domestic violence and emergency medical cases.

For the first time, we requested the reports in January 2024. Lahsa refused to release them and claims that the reports were in the “privilege between a lawyer and a client”, although the documents were created by contracting operators and not by lawyers. Calmatters and our Covington & Burling lawyers have pressed the agency to justify their claim and to provide evidence that lawyers are receiving the reports. The agency didn’t.

Five months after we requested the records, Lahsa updated its incident reporting form, adding “Communication with a lawyer/product for a lawyer’s job” at the bottom.

In December, the agency and Calmatters agreed to a court agency that requires the records to be published. “Without recognition of liability, which is explicitly refused, LAHSA agrees to provide the edited copies of the requested incident reports in exchange for rejection of the petition and mutual exemption from attorneys’ fees and expenses,” the agreement said.

The new recordings of shelters that Lahsa provides to Calmatters to describe indoor incidents, giving the public a rare look at the taxpayers funded by the taxpayers who serve as the first line of protection of the state against street homelessness. They will not include personal information about the shelter residents.

“Lahsa’s concern about this was to protect the privacy of the vulnerable people who serve the resolution system,” said Paul Rubenstein, Deputy Chief of Lahsa’s external links, in email to Calmatters. “We are glad that we have been able to reach an agreement to share useful data in a way that protects people’s privacy while maintaining LAHSA’s commitment to transparency.”

CalMatters asked the records as part of our report on accusations of brutality from the shelter private guards, dysfunctional housing programs for homeless and poor supervision of homeless shelters. Lahsa records will help the public to understand What happens in the shelters and how these incidents are observed by civil servants.

In Los Angeles, politicians have been particularly pressing to justify current costs of homeless services after signs of recent recent audits. A December audit found that a quarter of the beds in the shelters in the city were left unused, which cost taxpayers $ 218 million from 2019 to 2023. This is in addition to several court cases brought for violence and widespread concern for Lack of accountability.

Shelters must provide temporary home and services and connect residents with more permanent homes, but guards say that this often does not happen as intended.

“Less than 1 in every 5 people enrolled in the city-funded shelters have been able to secure some kind of permanent housing,” writes City Controller Kenneth Mezia in an audit in December, adding that “Lahsa should process its contract and A performance monitoring program to guarantee the agency can immediately identify the service providers for homeless services who do not work well. “

District officials are considering going even further. one proposal Two district supervisors will deprive the funding and responsibility of LAHSA – an agency with $ 875 million a year, established in 1993 to coordinate the regional responses of homelessness – and will transfer many functions to a new county entity.

“Lahsa plays an important role,” said leader Lindsay Horwat after Audit in November, “But the current structure does not correspond to the scale of this crisis.”

The agency and its defenders countered that shelters are difficult by the wider residential crisis in the country and that Lahsa is still in the best position to coordinate resources in the region with the largest homeless population in the nation.

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