Story after story is emerging from local and national media about the impact of homelessness on LA — including crime, decay, and fear.
The California Post has found that some homeless housing developments, including buildings that the city and state have bought for the purpose, are generating hundreds of emergency calls for all kinds of violent crimes.
Police are constantly being called out to these sites, some of which sprang up inside otherwise happy neighborhoods with little warning.
The increase in the homeless population recently revealed by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) only serves to highlight the increasing threat to public safety these developments represent.
When I was the watch commander at Pico Rivera Station back in 2014, there was one location that served as a dedicated halfway house for those suffering from mental illnesses, known as Pico Gardens. Located on a busy intersection off Rosemead Boulevard, the multistory complex generated an incredible number of calls for service to our station.
Averaging at least two calls per day year-round, the patients treated at this halfway house were constantly involved in disturbances within the facility itself. These extended into the parking lots of adjacent businesses.
Think about that for a second. A poorly staffed patrol station was forced to devote hundreds of man-hours to address complaints arising from one property, and forced to ignore other pressing issues throughout the city and surrounding unincorporated areas.
In 2025, the city of Los Angeles Fire Department admitted that a full 54% of its calls for service were related to homeless encampments. In essence, first responders, both police and fire, are continuously devoting an ever-growing share of their calls for service to mental health disturbances in homeless housing developments and encampments that represent a threat to public safety.
When a resident calls to report suspicious characters cruising through the neighborhood, that call receives a lower priority than, say, a call to Pico Gardens. In fact, all routine calls for service take a back seat to a priority call involving someone suffering from a mental crisis.
If the call requires calling out a Mental Evaluation Team (MET), then it can tie up the assigned unit for a substantial portion of its shift. Moreover, detaining someone involuntarily for 72 hours due to a mental health crisis, under the provisions of Section 5150 of California’s Welfare and Institutions Code, can mean more administrative work for officers. That, in turn, means further time away from handling emergency calls and simply being present in the community to deter crime.
With law enforcement agencies across the nation struggling to provide adequate staffing levels for their communities, mental health-related calls for service continue to consume greater resources than what is available to provide basic patrol services on a consistent basis.
The deinstitutionalization of psychiatric hospitals, starting in the 1960s under then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, who signed into law the bipartisan Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, had as one of its lofty goals to “guarantee and protect public safety.” In reality, the closing of psychiatric facilities has only increased the threat to public safety, as those suffering from the severest forms of mental illness, such as paranoid schizophrenia, are left to their own devices on the streets, in direct contact with the public.
As politicians try to sell the idea of “community-based alternatives,” there are few communities actually signing up to host one in their midst. Physical threats are bound to increase, property values are bound to decrease, and the community is left holding the bag after one of these housing alternatives is dumped in their neighborhood.
It’s time to bring back psychiatric facilities with step-down capacities to treat the most acute patients, forensic inpatient services, all the way down to outpatient treatment. Let’s stop pretending that communities will knowingly welcome quantifiable threats to their own safety.
And it’s time to take real, permanent action to remove homeless encampments that are a threat to public safety — for their own residents, and for their neighbors.
Alex Villanueva was Sheriff of LA County from 2018 to 2022. He changed parties from Democrat to Republican and is running for sheriff again in 2026.
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