EXPOSED LAPD slush fund for “Interim housing-Homeless services”
Former Mayor Garcetti’s “A Bridge Home” and SECZ “sexy zones” turned a City account for homelessness into an LAPD overtime “carve-out”, paying bonuses to half the force in one 8-month period.
$100/hour for 10 continuous years
One of the Los Angeles Police Department’s many overtime sources amounts to 88,353 hours, or 10 continuous years of 24/7 overtime at $8.36M. The account, earmarked for housing and services for homeless people, seems to keep replenishing, only to get diverted away from the intended unhoused recipients again.
At a generous rate of $94.62 per hour, LAPD siphons OT from an account conspicuously called:
“Other Homeless Services-Interim Homeless Housing ‘IHHS’”.
Are LAPD service providers?
4,390 sworn officers (including eight Lieutenants and 535 Seargeants) out of LAPD’s total 8,799 sworn officers, or half the entire force, billed for overtime out of this homeless services account in the eight-month period from July 1, 2022 to February 12, 2023:
Then-Chief Michel Moore detailed the use of two identical databases within the Department’s On-Line Overtime System “OLOTS” for the specific purpose of tracking sworn overtime funds related to City shelters and “results” in an April 12, 2023 report titled:
Moore’s April 2023 report follows on a September 7, 2022 report called:
In the September 2022 report, Moore (on behalf of LAPD) “respectfully requests the transfer” of $5M in “unappropriated balance” from “Police Department ABH Account” into the “Department’s Overtime Sworn Account”, alluding to another $1M for:
“shelter interventions beyond the ABH funds”.
That’s in addition to the remaining $4M from:
“…the total eight million dollars in ABH funds”.
If you’re counting, that is over $9M laundered to LAPD with nothing to show for it except a matrix that claims 221 people were “housed”.
LAPD doesn’t have access to housing resources to distribute to the unhoused people they frequently incarcerate.
LAPD could certainly afford to rent hotel rooms or apartments, the type of use this money was clearly earmarked for. “Interim housing-homeless services” could have meant purchasing an entire motel to get the most housing out of the finite fund, but somehow, this money got into the wrong hands.
Who is LAPD working for?
A table attached to item #5 on LA City Council’s agenda from Friday, September 20th, 2024 spells out an LAPD overtime system wherein each of the 15 Council Districts are annually allotted thousands of homeless-policing hours. The most recent formula LAPD used to allocate shelter-related hours for each district is as follows:
IHHS = $8,360,000 / $94.62 per hour = 88,353 hours Citywide
27 ABH * 1,000 hours each = 27,000 ABH hours
= 0–4,000 hours per CD, depending on how many ABH in CD
88,353 total hours - 27,000 ABH hours = 61,353 remaining hours
/ 15 CDs
= 4,090 hours per CD
Each CD gets 4,090–8,090 hours, for a total of 88,353 hours.
This funding apparently has been available for LAPD to use as they see fit for several years, with LAPD fulfilling its obligation to the City by regularly submitting reports to City Council detailing their spending from the IHHS account.
Mayor Eric Garcetti’s legacy “A Bridge Home” homeless shelter initiative is finally winding down as leases on many of the properties are expiring. That means LAPD are now being paid generous overtime to “secure” locations as benign as a Metro park-and-ride lot, where A Bridge Home’s Aetna Street location, operated by The Salvation Army, stood from August 2020 to August 2023 per CF19-0563.
The shelter itself operated for three years, then remained on-site but decommissioned for several months. A three-month-old Google Earth image of the lot clearly shows that there is no ABH:
On the aerial view, the footprint of the shelter designed by City-contracted Lehrer Architects, whose president Michael Lehrer sat on the Board of Homeless Health Care Los Angeles, is clearly visible:
But from the recent street-level view, it is clear that the trailers and umbrellas have been gone since at least July:
A small red-and-white sign on the inner fence on the G-line (formerly Orange line) park-and-ride lot on Aetna Street reads:
“NO USING THE BUILDING AS A BATHROOM
NO SLEEPING
NO LOITERING”
Of note about the sign: it is not an ABH Special Enforcement Cleaning Zone “SECZ” (“sexy zone”) or LAMC § 41.18 (“sit/lie”) sign, as City ordinances do not apply on Metro property since Metro is County jurisdiction. LAPD do have a contract to police the Metro system and seem to have exploited their role in ABH by taking over this lot through patrolling. The sign appears to have been placed by LADWP, who are located directly across Aetna Street. They installed the power and water hookups, visible with green guards around red pipes, which were not there before ABH.
After ABH de-mobilized, but before it vanished, the Aetna husk sat, fenced, until still-perfectly-usable bunk beds, functioning washer/dryers and large temporary trailers got hauled off, presumably to be stored or disposed of. Double chainlink fences were installed during the Inside Safe operation in the same area last year. The fences, rented from United and Herc, make the sidewalks on Aetna Street virtually unusable because the temporary outer fence, redundantly running parallel to the permanent one, blocks the sidewalk with protruding “feet” that are held in place by large orange sandbags.
Councilwoman Imelda Padilla won disgraced Council President Nury Martinez’ CD6 seat in a special election after the Fed Tapes fallout. Her district has not hosted a single ABH, not even an empty one, for more than a fiscal quarter now. Yet it looks like LAPD is still getting paid for 1,000 “interim housing homeless services” overtime hours completed in CD6 because of the Aetna ABH location being there. Salvation Army’s Aetna ABH appears on LAPD’s list of 27 ABH locations in their most recent quarterly IHHS overtime report, which billed for the last quarter of FY23-24, April 7th–June 29th.
1,054 IHHS overtime hours and 44 details were reported as being used by LAPD’s Van Nuys division in Q4. Van Nuys division includes another ABH (Van Nuys) outside of CD6’s boundaries, and each ABH gets 1,000 hours per quarter, meaning they should have only used half of that for two ABH, and 250 hours for one ABH, since Aetna was closed.
But since each district gets 4,090 additional hours annually, it is possible LAPD are still within their self-imposed guidelines regarding usage of the funds, which they decided don’t have to be used at ABH necessarily, but anywhere there is a “nexus of crime and homelessness”.
Interim Chief Dominic Choi’s July 16th FY23-24 Q4 report also presents resources deployed to CARE+ and Inside Safe operations, with Van Nuys division claiming eight sergeants, 25 details and 82 officers. It is not clear how many hours this consumed or at what expense.
FY23-24 Budget Recommendations
R.34 What’s in a name?
Police Department Sworn Overtime or Homeless Services and Interim Housing?
It appears CD13 Council member Hugo Soto-Martinez proposed a more accurate name for the IHHS slush fund during the FY23-24 budget recommendation process:
“…to change the title of the Unappropriated Balance Line item relative to Sworn Overtime related to Interim Homeless Housing Sites from ‘Sworn Overtime - Interim Homeless Housing Sites’ to ‘Police Department Sworn Overtime and Other Homeless Services-Interim Homeless Housing Sites.’”
—CF23-0600-S34 CD13 Hugo Soto-Martinez
However, renaming the account is essentially surrendering to LAPD’s scheme of diverting funds dedicated for helping homeless people over to the department which punishes us for our inability to access housing. It is true that re-naming a slush fund may legitimize it to the point of no longer technically being a slush fund, but renaming it after the police who shouldn’t be touching it in the first place is an open invitation for LAPD to continue to abuse discretionary funding…and vulnerable people who rely on that funding for their shelter.
Ruth is an unhoused woman in the City of Los Angeles who investigates and reports on corruption affecting homeless people. She challenges all displacements and hosts a weekly displacement-themed X Spaces as @rooflesser at 7pm PST on Sundays, batteries permitting! Come talk or listen!
Illustrations made from prompts in Wombo’s free dream.ai app for iOS
Graphics made in free Canva app for iOS
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