If a person acting on behalf of another government entity drops a homeless person off in Santa Cruz without any coordination with the city, they will now be charged with a misdemeanor crime, following a unanimous city council vote on Tuesday.
The new law is the city council’s response to a recent high-profile incident in which officials say two police officers from the city of Hanford, near Bakersfield, drove a disabled woman more than three hours from Hanford to the city’s Armory shelter in June. Santa Cruz officials said there was no prior coordination between the cities.
After a Sept. 5 press conference announcing the proposed law, a Hanford spokesperson said the homeless woman had “repeatedly refused local homeless resources” and asked the police officers to bring her to the Santa Cruz shelter.
Local officials took this incident as an explicit example of something that has been rumored for years: Other jurisdictions are dumping their homelessness issues onto Santa Cruz. Vice Mayor Renée Golder said she felt Hanford was exploiting Santa Cruz’s recent successes in reducing its own homeless population.
Had the law been in effect during the Hanford incident, the two police officers who dropped the woman off at the shelter could have been charged with a misdemeanor, punishable by a $1,000 fine or up to one year in jail.
The Santa Cruz City Council preliminarily approved the law during its Sept. 10 meeting, when it also approved a policy to prioritize its homeless services for people who lived in the city of Santa Cruz before they became homeless.
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