There’s no question San Diego’s camping ban has made an impact.
Its passage last summer corresponded with a drop in homelessness downtown, more people asking for shelter and an increase in riverbed encampments. Other cities have moved to follow San Diego’s lead. Some lawmakers want to take the rules statewide.
But that doesn’t mean many residents are actually ending up in court for living in a tent.
During the ordinance’s first six-plus months, the city attorney’s office filed charges against just two people for allegedly violating the ban, according to spokesperson Andrew Sharp. An additional eight cases were still under review as of Feb. 6.
Police arrested one person twice and issued 30 tickets during a similar period, meaning prosecutors, at most, had agreed to pursue less than a tenth of available cases.
Even if the other eight are eventually taken up, that would still amount to around a third of what officers initially acted upon since the ban took effect July 31.
“It’s not as easy as it seems when you’re trying to prove cases like this, when it’s a brand-new law,” said City Attorney Mara Elliott. “It’s taking a little time for us to roll it out into the community so that everybody’s marching to the same tune.”
The disparity did not reflect a rift with the Police Department and the two agencies continued to collaborate on how to improve enforcement, Elliott added.
Experts said a number of factors might be keeping numbers low, including limited resources and the higher standard prosecutors must meet when weighing whether there’s enough evidence to win over a jury.
“You do go cautiously when you don’t know what the parameters are,” said Jan Goldsmith, a former San Diego city attorney. Case law is limited and judges are similarly wading into new territory. “You don’t want to issue a bunch of cases that are all struck down.”
Multiple dismissals could even provide ammunition to legal challenges seeking to overturn the law, officials said.
Then there’s the vulnerability that comes with homelessness.
“It’s not just a new law,” said Alfonso Esquer, a former investigator with the U.S. Department of Justice who now directs the criminal justice program at Point Loma Nazarene University. “It’s also a very delicate law that requires some sensitivity.”
Among the people who won’t ultimately be punished is the 28-year-old man who received the first camping ban ticket in August. Paul Pfingst, a former San Diego County District Attorney, noted that prosecutors may want to give residents time to adjust.
As word spreads, the number of cases taken to court could rise, Pfingst said.
It’s possible San Diego’s convoluted system for tracking when shelter is available — the city and housing commission oversee separate networks and there has not been a real-time monitoring system — has affected what prosecutors think they can win.
The ordinance sometimes only applies if beds are open, and a city attorney’s initial legal analysis of the ban noted that successful convictions could hinge on shelter employees being able to testify that they had room at the moment someone was detained.
The legal landscape is also in flux. Later this year, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to decide whether homeless people have a right to sleep on public property when there’s nowhere else to go. San Diego signed on to an appeal asking the justices to reconsider an earlier federal court ruling that said cities generally needed to have shelter available before clearing tent camps.
“We’re all waiting to see what happens there,” said Elliott, the city attorney.
The absence of a camping ban charge does not necessarily mean there’s no case at all. The 58-year-old man who was the only person arrested last year for the ordinance won’t go to trial for sleeping outside — but he is facing a felony for allegedly selling methamphetamine, according to Sharp, the office spokesperson.
Sharp added that there was no internal policy telling prosecutors to not prioritize the ban.
Furthermore, the office’s experience in court with a different ordinance used to target encampments offers reason for caution.
San Diego’s encroachment law prohibits sidewalks from being blocked by personal property and prosecutors pursued nearly 75 of those and other related charges in 2022, according to a statement from the agency.
Yet 50 of those cases were ultimately dismissed while more than 20 people never showed up for trial, officials said. Two others sought diversion programs and a third is still being evaluated to see whether they’re competent to face a judge.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s a similarly lopsided comparison between encroachment tickets and prosecutions. Police have issued far more than 100 of those citations and arrests since September, but the city attorney’s office only filed charges in 26 cases as of early February, according to Sharp. Another 25 were still under review.
The Police Department did not respond to requests for comment.
Local leaders have defended the camping ban as just one of many tools to address homelessness.
“People who assumed the goal of the ordinance was to arrest people may be surprised by the low number of prosecutions,” Councilmember Stephen Whitburn wrote in an email. “However, its purpose was to have a clear law that encourages people to move out of encampments and into safer and healthier places.”
Hundreds have relocated to the city’s new designated camping areas near Balboa Park in recent months, although the region’s shelters do not have enough room for everybody asking for a spot.
In his state of the city address earlier this year, Mayor Todd Gloria praised the low levels of police enforcement as evidence that the law was “working as intended” by “clearing encampments without widespread arrests.”
When asked if the mayor was satisfied with the current number of prosecutions, spokesperson Rachel Laing wrote that Gloria has “no authority over the City Attorney” but has “given clear direction to the Police Department to enforce this and all other laws on the books.”
At the same time, the crisis continues to grow.
January was the 22nd straight month where the number of people losing a place to stay for the first time (1,385) exceeded how many homeless people found housing (966), according to the Regional Task Force on Homelessness.
The Downtown Partnership also found that numbers have ticked back up in the urban core. There were nearly 1,020 people living downtown without shelter at the start of the year, the first increase after months of decline, although that total was still one of the lowest counts since late 2021.
