(See Gale Holland’s excellent story in the Times on Mitchell v. LA as well as our other stories on the subject for the background to this post).

Recall that last month Judge Otero issued a preliminary injunction forbidding the City of Los Angeles from confiscating the property of homeless people in and/or around Skid Row without following required due process. Today the City filed a motion asking Otero to clarify what he meant. They also filed a proposed order for the Judge’s signature which, I imagine, is mostly of value here as it shows what the City wishes the injunction means.

Additionally the city filed a map of Skid Row, a copy of LAMC 56.11, and a declaration of Scott Marcus, the assistant chief of the Civil Litigation Branch of the City Attorney’s office. Marcus’s main point seems to be that he met with Carol Sobel for four hours in the company of Magistrate Judge Carla Woerhle and they couldn’t come to a common understanding about what the order meant.

You can read the stuff for yourself, but the upshot seems to be that the City wants to know the exact boundaries within which the order applies, they want to know if the order allows them to pick up abandoned refrigerators, the famous small houses,¹ and such-like items,² and they want to know something about the “community caretaking” function of the LAPD, the details of which I’ll have to leave for you to read about on your own.

1. They don’t actually mention the small houses, but they do talk about things like a “…small shed or similar structure sometimes seen on the sidewalk.”
2. Although God knows they’re not picking them up now. There’s a refrigerator right down the street from my house that’s been there for a month, and more than one person has called it in. Maybe if I told them there were homeless people living in it they’d come get it.