Sacramento has a responsibility to keep its streets safe and clean, Thien Ho argues.
Sacramento has a responsibility to keep its streets safe and clean, Thien Ho argues.
S acramento County district attorney Thien Ho is determined to prevent California’s state capital from becoming another San Francisco, a city held hostage by left-wing ideologues who give free rein to the homeless. He’s filing a lawsuit against the city of Sacramento for creating a public-safety crisis and then ignoring it for years.
The number of homeless in Sacramento has increased by over 250 percent in the past seven years. “There are more homeless people in Sacramento than San Francisco,” he said at a press conference last week. San Francisco has 716,000 people, and Sacramento has only 528,000 people.
“It’s not compassionate to let someone die in the sweltering summer sun or freeze to death,” says the lawsuit, which is signed by Ho. “It’s not compassionate when someone in a wheelchair cannot use a sidewalk blocked by tents or a small business is forced to close forever due to repeated broken windows and vandalism.”
Indeed, in May during my last visit to Sacramento (where I lived for many years), I saw sidewalks often littered with needles and boarded-up businesses with the homeless squatting in the doorway.
Ho, who fled communist Vietnam as a child refugee in the 1970s, says the city has ignored his demands that it enforce a ban on daytime camping and issue citations to homeless residents in 14 encampments that are blocking access to property.
City officials throw up their hands and claim that in 2018, the liberal Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals held in the Martin v. Boise case that cities cannot enforce anti-camping ordinances unless the city has enough shelter beds for every person moved.
Ho rejects that reasoning, as does a group of business owners and residents who have filed an allied lawsuit together with him. “We are stuck in this never-ending Groundhog’s Day loop where nothing gets better and nothing improves,” Ho said at the press conference.
Ho fully expects to lead the prosecution team in any trial. “We will be calling 400 to 500 witnesses who will be testifying about the city’s actions and inaction,” he said. “Will it ruffle some feathers? Will it hurt some feelings? Unfortunately, yes. But our responsibility as elected officials is to make sure that we keep our streets safe and clean. And frankly, that hasn’t happened for years.”
Of course, it’s said that the wheels of justice grind slowly. The lawsuits that Ho and an allied group of citizens filed last week have been given a court date. But it’s eleven months away, on August 16, 2024.
Contrast that with a lawsuit taking an opposing point of view that was filed by the Sacramento Homeless Union in June 2022. It sought to bar the city from clearing any homeless camps, owing to extreme heat. That lawsuit got a hearing in three weeks, after which a federal district judge ordered the city to stop any clearances, and then reissued the order a month later. So much for priorities on what defines a “crisis.” The district attorney’s office is pressing the local state court for an earlier date.
Regardless of when Ho’s case is heard, it is heartening that an elected official in California has decided to do his duty. Give him a medal, shout his praises, and then get him to run for higher office.