New LA Mayor Karen Bass Declares State of Emergency on Homelessness Transcript

On this first day of the Karen Bass Administration in the City of Angels, Mayor Bass declares a state of emergency to tackle homelessness. It’s a promise she made during her campaign and delivered today. Phil Shuman was with the mayor this morning as she announced Project Inside Safe.

Phil Shunan is there. He joins us live from downtown with the latest. Phil.

Well, LA’s new mayor Karen Bass on day one went to the city’s emergency operations center to talk homelessness before she even came to her office in City Hall, calling this a new, urgent and sustained approach to our greatest challenge. And it’s clear from anybody that drives around Los Angeles has a lot of work to do. Asti Cisco spends his days in a makeshift encampment above the 101 freeway in downtown LA.

It’s not too bad. I don’t do anything bad.

Happy, he says to fix bikes, cut hair. This 39-year-old from Ohio tells me he has a drug problem, is estranged from his family. He’s also said no to repeated offers of shelter.

Maybe I am looked at in a negative sense, but I’m also the same person that will get out in the rain and go change your tire because you won’t want to change it. I’m that guy.

He’s one of some 40,000 homeless just in the city of LA that Karen Bass, just like her predecessor, has promised to get inside with services and eventually housing.

My mandate is to move Los Angeles in a new direction with an urgent and strategic approach to solving one of our city’s toughest challenges.

With city and county officials by her side, Bass, at LA’s Emergency Operation Center said this new declaration means do more faster. It will expedite new development, centralize leasing and purchasing, say of motels for shelters, increase the supply of temporary beds and suspend regulations that, for example, require someone to have an ID. It does not however mean overnight change.

But if there’s an encampment on my block today, what are you doing today that’s going to get that person into housing faster?

In the next couple of days, we will be unveiling the program that will deal with that encampment and it’s called Inside Safe. So stay tuned, give us a couple of days and we will let you know about the next part of it.

The challenge though, is less about helping those who want it than it is about getting people like Cisco, service resistant, off the streets when they don’t want to go.

Seems like almost jail like or penitentiary like almost. So I don’t know. I don’t want that. And there’s a certain type of freedom of being homeless.

A certain amount of freedom in being homeless. Christine and Marla, we’ve done so many stories on this, and that is the challenge for everybody with best intentions if you are homeless and you have no desire to come in off the streets and you’re not committing crimes, there’s very little that can be done right now to force you to accept services. So what Karen Bass’s approach to that is going to be, well, as you heard her say, give us a couple of days and we’ll roll out the details this week. Live downtown, I’m Phil Shuman, Fox 11 News.

Know it’s going to take more than days to fix this crisis. All right, Phil, thank you so much.