The Santa Cruz city council recently passed a new ordinance that makes it a crime for out-of-town officials to drop off a person who’s homeless without first coordinating with the city.
The new law is in response to an incident in June, when two Hanford police officers drove a woman and her wheelchair 180 miles and left her outside the Santa Cruz Armory shelter.
Hanford police officers claim the woman had refused local homelessness resources and requested to come to Santa Cruz, but she told the city she had not consented.
“We are opposed to forced displacement. That's why I think this is so important,” said council member Sandy Brown right before the vote.
Evan Morrison, the executive director of the nonprofit People First of Santa Cruz County, currently runs the Armory shelter and other resources around town. He told KAZU that as far as he knows, the woman is still here. He expressed support for the sentiment behind the new ordinance.
“It's pretty reckless to just take someone who's homeless and put them in a new location…if all it does is serve as a deterrent, that's probably great.”
But Morrison added that it’ll be hard to enforce, and there are other, more pressing issues that need focus.
“As much as I'm glad this is happening, it's a tiny issue in all of the issues around homelessness,” he said.
At the most recent city council meeting on Tuesday, council members expressed interest in working through those issues together with other communities. Council member Shebreh Kalantari-Johnson asked other cities to join the discussion.
“Reach out to us,” she said. "I've talked to other mayors and council members from across the country about our framework and how we're trying to think outside the box with the very little resources that we have."
The city hopes those discussions and the new law will keep other officials from abandoning people in an unfamiliar place.
