The big shuffle: Some homeless people in LA being shuffled from block to block

The block of El Centro Avenue at the Hollywood Walk of Fame remains free of tents, nine months after LA's Inside Safe program dismantled an encampment there and offered motel rooms to the unhoused.

But just a block away from that success story several new encampments have sprung up since then.

Homeless people in the area interviewed by the NBC4 I-Team say LAPD officers sometimes shuffle them from one block to another, and no one has offered them housing.

"The cops came and said, 'You need to move your tent,'" recalls Scott Marshall, who says he's been shuffled from block to block in Hollywood since he came there from Medford Oregon without any explanation. 

His tent had most recently been pitched on the west side of Gower Street, a block from where that El Centro encampment was cleared, until he says the LAPD told him to move it.

"So I just moved my tent and my stuff across the intersection," Marshall told NBC4.

Across LA, our viewers told NBC4 about examples of officers telling the homeless to move their tents from one area to another, rather than offering them shelter and services. 

"I call it 'whack a mole,'" says Adam Johansson, who lives near West Hills Hospital, where there had been numerous homeless RVs parked until neighbors complained and officers told the unhoused to move.

"It is shuffling. It is taking an encampment and telling them, 'You can't be here.' Neighbors have complained, so they just go down the block or a few streets over," Johansson told NBC4.

That's what Barry Glickstein says happened to him when he became homeless after a bitter divorce and ended up living in his RV near West Hills Hospital.

"A police officer told me to move," Glickstein told the I-Team. "He said, 'Do me a favor and move from here somewhere else.'"

Glickstein showed the I-Team a text message from an LAPD officer telling him to move his RV to Valley Circle Boulevard and Valerie Street in a quiet residential neighborhood across from a school and a church. 

The city has made a dent in the population living on the streets through Mayor Karen Bass' Inside Safe program, which has dismantled around 40 encampments and offered the unhoused their motel rooms with the promise of eventually getting apartments.

But close to those former encampments, thousands of people remain on the streets, sometimes being moved by the cops from block to block.

Neighbors near Grand Boulevard in Venice gave the I-Team home surveillance video of a homeless woman setting up camp in front of someone's garage, so they called the police.

The video show two LAPD officers showing up, informing the woman that neighbors are complaining and telling her, 'You can't stay here.'" 

The cops didn't offer the woman housing or services, and once she moved her belongings two houses down, the police left.

"It's a very challenging situation for us," says CMDR Giselle Espinoza, the LAPD's homeless coordinator. "The LAPD is not even the lead agency that is supposed to address this matter initially."

In fact, the lead agency in LA on homelessness matters is the office of Mayor Karen Bass.

In addition to her Inside Safe program budgeted for $250 million dollars this fiscal year, Bass announced increased funding in January for the "Circle Teams" which stands for Crisis and Incident Response through Community-led Engagement program.

Circle Teams respond to non-emergency calls about the homeless and are supposed to refer them to housing and service options.

A Circle Team showed up in that Venice alley to talk to the homeless woman resting in front of the garage even before the cops came. 

"They keep calling the police on you," one Circle officer told the woman. They didn't get her into shelter or services, but told her to "just move a little down the alley."

"That is not a solution to the problem," says Allan Parsons, who lives in a house nearby. "The promise was for these outreach workers was to get them [the homeless] into housing, but they are woefully failing at that mission."

NBC4 asked Mayor Karen Bass to address residents' concerns that the city was sometimes just shuffling the homeless around instead of getting them into housing.

"We'll never solve the problem that way," Bass told NBC4.

Adding to that, Zach Seidl, Bass' Deputy Mayor of Communications, issued the following statement"

"Moving people from block to block with no offer of housing is simply not a part of the Inside Safe program. Sometimes new city efforts get conflated with old programs. Inside safe has brought thousands inside including hundreds who were sleeping on the streets of Hollywood. This is an ongoing program and as we ramp up services and make housing more available, this will all become cheaper as more Angelenos will come inside. Lives are being saved and we will not stop this work."

Bass' office says the city will have 4,000 new units of housing for the homeless over the next year. That's a lot more than is available now, but not nearly enough for the more than 40,000 unhoused people still on the streets of LA with some of whom being shuffled from block to block.

"We have got to get people housed. And I understand there might be instances where you move people along … And that's not a way to deal with the problem long term," Mayor Bass says.