Deadra Walicki has lived in the same spot for more than a decade: a cracked patch of asphalt in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley, squeezed between a boarded-up grocery store and Amtrak tracks so close that passing trains shake the ground beneath her tent.
The air carries the scent of diesel fumes from busy Van Nuys Boulevard below and rotten food from the dozens of garbage bags piled up near her mattress, baking in the summer sun.
She stays put so that friends, family members and case workers can always locate her. But that consistency has also made Walicki, 51, a target for the police officers who patrol the area.
The Los Angeles Police Department cited Walicki for violating the city’s camping ordinance at least 34 times between August 2023 and December 2024.
“They drove through today and I waved at them,” said Walicki, her smile revealing cracked porcelain veneers. “The cops come here Monday through Friday and give tickets for being in the zone of the shelter. It’s whatever they want to do.”
It’s been 12 months since a groundbreaking U.S. Supreme Court decision rewrote the playbook on homelessness, allowing cities in California and beyond to make homeless encampments illegal, even when no shelter is available.
Before the justices ruled in Grants Pass v. Johnson, Los Angeles and other cities generally had to offer someone a shelter bed before punishing them for sleeping on the street. But that went out the window when the justices upheld an ordinance by the Oregon city of Grants Pass that banned camping on all public property.
Since the ruling, camping-related citations and arrests have soared in cities throughout California — everywhere from Sacramento to Los Angeles to San Diego and beyond.
In each of those three cities, police are citing many of the same people again and again. And while some have managed to move indoors, many others are still camping in the same places, racking up citations that ultimately make it more difficult to find housing.
We tracked down a few of those people. Here are their stories:
Los Angeles: 10 citations in six months
Walicki motions across the train tracks to what looks like a giant rubber bubble. It’s a transitional homeless shelter that opened in 2020.
While L.A. does not have a blanket ban on public camping, the city’s main anti-camping law allows enforcement in select sensitive locations chosen by council members, including near schools, parks and homeless shelters.
L.A. Municipal Code 41.18 says people camping within 1,000 feet of a shelter can be cited. That’s what the majority of Walicki’s citations are for, but she claims the shelter is about 2,000 feet away, as the crow flies.
Hope the Mission, which operates the shelter, did not dispute her distance assessment when contacted for comment, but the citations keep coming.
City-led cleaning and enforcement at homeless encampments makes outreach work harder, according to the nonprofit. Outreach teams build rapport with participants only to lose track of them.
“When they do this cleanup, we go back the next day, that same day,” said Hope the Mission outreach worker Armando Covarrubias. “Where can we find ’em? We can’t contact them because they have no phones.”
In recent years, L.A. city leaders have used the ordinance to designate more and more areas for anti-camping enforcement, creating a patchwork of hard-to-follow rules for unsheltered Angelenos like Walicki.
Last March, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Agency released a report showing L.A.’s anti-camping law has not been effective at getting people into housing or keeping encampments away: It found 94% of people targeted for removal under the ordinance wanted shelter, but only 17% were able to get it.
Los Angeles hasn’t changed its enforcement as a result of Grants Pass, according to the City Attorney’s Office. But LAPD data show the department made 68% more camping and homelessness-related arrests in the second half of 2024 than the first. Those include non-custodial arrests, where the violator is released at the scene.
Walicki received 10 camping citations in the latter half of 2024, according to LAPD records obtained by CalMatters. She was even cited for camping two mornings in a row that October, at the same intersection.
“ People are being targeted every day in the city through enforcement, through resolutions to get them to move,” said Shayla Myers, senior attorney with Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, a nonprofit providing free legal services for poor Angelenos. “That’s the very definition of criminalization.”
When patrol cars arrive — usually in the morning, Walicki says — officers give people about 10 minutes to pack up. Anything left behind disappears into the back of sanitation trucks. Over the months, she’s lost bags of recycling she’d collected for cash, sleeping bags, clothes, even dental tools for her veneers.
Walicki lives in the encampment with her partner Steve Maroulis, a 57-year-old man with mental disabilities. The two of them want to go at the same time into two separate gender-segregated shelters, but haven’t had any luck.
“It would just be nice, for safety reasons,” she said. “And I don’t want either of us to be alone out here.”
Police records capture the chaos of tracking someone arrested so frequently. Her name appears as Deadra, Dedra, and Debra. Her last name is spelled five different ways across case files.
Each citation adds to a growing pile of legal paperwork she largely ignores. She hasn’t paid any fines because she doesn’t have the money, she said. Court dates blur together. Walicki said she’s tried to show up to court for some of her infractions, but she’s never gone on the right day.
Others have dealt with more serious consequences for camping. David Cerritos, 46, has lived in Skid Row for five years, his tattered tent on a sidewalk flanked by wholesale smoke shops in the shadow of downtown L.A.’s skyline.
Cerritos was cited at least 12 times last year, including six times after the Supreme Court decision.
Unlike Walicki, with her repeated citations, Cerritos has been handcuffed and temporarily detained for violating the ordinance several times, he said.
“If you don’t comply, you’ll just be arrested,” he said. “And then even if you get cited out, hours later or whatever, by the time you get back, you’ve lost everything.”
If someone resists, refuses to comply with or obstructs camping ban enforcement, LAPD can submit the case to be charged as a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail. Otherwise, LAPD will designate it an infraction punishable by a $250 fine, according to the department’s guidelines.
Several of Cerritos’ arrest records include mention of disorderly conduct. For him, these arrests usually mean spending 6 to 12 hours in jail while everything he owns disappears. Cerritos said he’s lost barbering clippers, tattoo equipment, bicycles, tools, laptops and more.
LAPD submits misdemeanor cases to the L.A. City Attorney’s office for prosecution consideration, and that office ultimately decides whether to file misdemeanor charges or knock them down to infractions.
The office said it filed charges in 87 camping violation cases in 2024 — 8% of the 1,034 enforcement actions LAPD made under the ordinance last year.
For Cerritos and Walicki, the citations and fines don’t mean all that much. For them, any interaction with police or city workers feels like enforcement, whether a charge is issued or not.
Cerritos feels like he’s getting harassed more than usual recently, but he’s not interested in moving. Like Walicki, he has a case manager but no phone.
”Now if they were forcing me to move away from here, and I went even just a block over, you might never find me,” Cerritos said.
After years of frequent arrests and citations for camping, neither Cerritos nor Walicki are any closer to leaving their spots, for permanent housing or anywhere else.
Sacramento: Go to jail, or go to a tiny home
Over the past three years, Jerry Carter could often be seen biking around Sacramento’s Midtown neighborhood, his brindle bull terrier, Zaddy, riding in style behind him on a homemade trailer he built special for the beloved pup.
Music followed him as he zipped past trendy bars and restaurants, playing R&B, jazz or reggae (never rap) from a small speaker. Sometimes he played his all-time favorite: Prince, who he saw perform at Arco Arena in 1997.
Local businesses and other homeless people who slept nearby knew him by sight, if not by name.
The police knew Carter, too.
Over the past year, they gave him at least seven citations for camping, storing his belongings on public property and blocking the sidewalk.
Each encounter with police followed a similar playbook, Carter said. Officers showed up and told him he had 10 minutes to pack up all his belongings. Anything he couldn’t pack in time, he had to abandon.
Carter said he lost a lot of possessions that way: bicycles, clothes, tents and more. Losing bikes stung the most: Getting hit by a car a few years ago left Carter in constant pain, making it hard to walk. But biking is easier.
Sacramento bans camping or “using camping paraphernalia” on public property. Police can cite or arrest someone if they are using a sleeping bag, or even a piece of cardboard as a mattress and a tarp as a blanket — but not if they are sleeping on a bench with no camping materials, according to a police training bulletin.
Enforcement of that ban, as well as related ordinances, spiked after the Grants Pass decision. The number of arrests made and citations issued nearly tripled, from 96 in the first half of last year, to 283 in the second half. From January through May of this year, that number jumped to 844.
In most of those cases, the person was cited and released, not taken to jail. Violations led to an arrest 199 times in 2025.
Despite the frequent tickets and attempts to push him out of the bustling shopping and dining district, Carter never moved far from his preferred spot, around 21st and K streets. All of his citations over the past year were issued within about a two-and-a-half-block radius. He felt he had to stay central if he wanted to eat: That’s where his friends were, and where passersby would stop and give him money or food.
“I could survive there,” he said.
Carter became homeless about three years ago, after he says a property manager stole cash from his apartment while he was in the hospital. Carter moved out to avoid a physical confrontation. After that, Carter admits he “gave up a little bit.” He didn’t have the money to get a new apartment, and, focused every day on survival, he didn’t have the energy to start the process of getting back on his feet.
Initially, when the cops showed up wherever Carter was sleeping, an outreach worker would come too and put Carter on a waitlist for shelter. But nothing ever came of that, Carter said.
Then, at the very end of December, Sacramento County opened a new tiny home community for homeless residents. The Stockton Boulevard site, which was part of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s 2023 promise to build tiny homes throughout California, has 155 small cabins with room for a bed (or two beds if it’s for a couple) and a few belongings. Residents share communal bathrooms with plumbing and showers. Case managers meet regularly with residents to try and help them find permanent housing.
As the tiny homes gradually filled, one police officer started urging Carter to move in. Carter said no multiple times. He’d spent a few days in a different tiny home site last year. He hated it, he said.
Finally, the officer gave Carter an ultimatum: Go to jail, or go to a tiny home. Carter knew getting locked up meant he might lose his dog. And he’d heard the new tiny homes were actually kind of nice. So he said OK.
“I guess he was actually a caring officer,” Carter said. “It didn’t seem like he was a caring officer, because he kept on writing tickets and everything. But he kept on just pushing me.”
Carter moved into his tiny home about two months ago, where, when he finally got to shower for the first time, it felt like he stood under the hot water for hours. He no longer has to worry about police waking him up at 6:30 a.m. and demanding that he move, sometimes only minutes after he’d finally managed to fall asleep amidst the noise and chaos of the street.
“That’s wonderful,” Carter said. “I can actually sleep in. I can take naps.”
But the police actions that got him there also took a toll. Each time officers wrote Carter up, they gave him a piece of paper that said when he had to appear in court. But Carter invariably lost the papers. It would rain and they’d get wet and ruined. Or they’d get mixed in with the items the police tossed out the next time they told him to move.
He didn’t think it was a big deal. After all, camping is a misdemeanor. There’s no way the court would issue a warrant for such a small offense, Carter thought.
He was wrong. Now, at 53 years old, he has warrants out for his arrest for failing to appear at multiple court dates. It makes him worried that he could be biking down the street one day, minding his own business, and get arrested and taken to jail.
“I’m just too old to have any type of trouble like that,” he said.
Carter’s hardly the only one in that position, said Terra Hennefer, the case management supervisor for the tiny home site where Carter lives.
“We see a lot of people that end up with the tickets,” she said. “Then it makes more work for us trying to clear their warrants and stuff before we get them into housing.”
Landlords often conduct background checks and won’t take someone with a warrant, Hennefer said. The county also runs background checks on people applying for subsidized housing vouchers.
Hennefer’s team works with the probation office to help residents resolve outstanding warrants. The first step is to set a new court date, and make sure the resident doesn’t miss it.
Then a judge will decide on a penalty, which could be a fine. Her organization, a shelter and interim housing provider named First Step Communities, can help cover the cost. But it’s frustrating, she said, as that money could instead go toward helping more people get off the street. And it adds yet another hurdle to what for many is a seemingly endless list of tasks on the way to housing.
Carter has just started that process. His case manager, Matthew Burbridge, is working on getting his Social Security benefits restarted and finding him permanent housing through CalAIM, the state’s expanded Medi-Cal program.
The problem is, neither Burbridge, nor anyone else, knows how long that may take.
“They’re working on it,” he said. “It might be quick, it might be long. We don’t know. But we’ll be ready when the time comes.”
San Diego: Moving into a swamp
Micah Huff for a time lost touch with a San Diego case manager who was trying to help him move to a city-backed homeless campsite as he sought to avoid police and encampment clean-ups.
Huff, 45, moved to a boggy area near Ocean Beach bordered by brush, mud and city streets because it’s harder for the authorities to find him there. He had to hike in and out and said he’s already moved his belongings across the wetland once. Earlier this month, he said he expected to move again soon, as he’s done every couple weeks since the city stepped up enforcement.
Since May 2024, records show police cited Huff seven times for offenses tied to his unsheltered status and arrested him twice.
Police data obtained by Voice of San Diego shows arrests and citations for violations tied to homelessness more than doubled in the six months after the Grants Pass ruling. Rather than the ruling, police attribute the increase to the new police chief assigning more officers to engage with community members and enforce crimes tied to homelessness.
A year before the Grants Pass decision, the San Diego City Council approved a camping ban that police began enforcing in summer 2023, while also continuing to enforce older ordinances, such as those that prohibit encroaching on the public right of way.
The city’s street homeless population fell last year, and Mayor Todd Gloria credits that reduction to approaches such as the camping ban, continued enforcement of existing laws and increased shelter offerings and more outreach.
Arrests can be traumatic: One of Huff’s arrests, which police records suggest may have occurred last September, has made a lasting impression on him.
Huff was meeting a friend he hadn’t seen in a while at a dog beach in Ocean Beach. The two fell asleep near a public restroom, Huff said, and were startled awake by police. Police arrested Huff for encroachment and possession of drug paraphernalia, though Huff says the supplies weren’t his.
Huff said his heart raced during his encounter with police. He heard an officer talk about a backpack with drug supplies. Huff’s blood pressure surged, a reaction that Huff said put him at risk of a heart attack or stroke due to a blood pressure condition.
Then he passed out.
Huff said police took him to Scripps Mercy Hospital in Hillcrest. Huff estimates the officers waited six or seven hours before finally giving up on booking him and leaving.
He left the hospital with medications that were stolen within a few days of his return outdoors.
Superior Court records show that Huff has yet to be charged for these offenses or other alleged homelessness-related violations over the past couple years.
The outcome of the city crackdowns, according to Huff, has simply been that he’s been pushed “further and further away” into remote areas — currently a literal swamp — to avoid enforcement or clean-ups.
But increasing enforcement in recent weeks and months at nearby Ocean Beach hasn’t convinced 38-year-old Ryan Taylor to move elsewhere. Taylor, who has been cited nine times and arrested five times for offenses tied to homelessness, continues to set up an umbrella and blankets at the beach.
One recent arrest came on Memorial Day, when Taylor was picked up on a warrant for failing to appear in court to address homelessness-related charges. He was relieved to find most of his belongings still at the beach when he returned the next morning.
More recently, Taylor’s case manager has been helping him work on addressing his criminal cases in court. He is set to appear at a July 24 hearing to start the process.
Taylor hasn’t left the Ocean Beach area he’s settled in for most of the four years he’s been homeless in San Diego despite the repeated arrests and citations, he said, because he’s “just accepted that’s the way that it is.”
Taylor also said he’s repeatedly accepted offers of shelter when police show up next to him at the beach, but said shelter has never been available when he agreed to it.
“To me, it seems like the people that need help or whatever don’t have money, giving them more tickets doesn’t help them, propel them to get them financially out of the hole or help them,” Taylor said.
San Diego police Capt. Steve Shebloski, who oversees the division focused on homelessness-related enforcement, and Denny Knox, executive director of business group OB MainStreet Association, argue that increased enforcement is having a positive effect, though both also said there’s more work to do.
Shebloski noted recent homeless census results showing a 4% drop in unsheltered homelessness in the city and less visible homelessness in communities including San Diego’s downtown.
But Dawn Contreras, a case manager for nonprofit PATH working with both Huff and Taylor, said the increased enforcement only makes homeless service workers’ jobs more difficult.
One day this spring, Contreras said she was picking up an unsheltered client for a required webinar to obtain housing when a beat officer — not assigned to the Neighborhood Policing Division that Shebloski oversees — ordered her client to clear his camp. Contreras said she implored the officer to allow the man to clean the camp later so he could head to his meeting.
“You’re not willing to bend for just one hour?” Contreras said.
The officer refused. With Contreras’ help, the unsheltered man later signed onto his meeting a few minutes late. Rescheduling it would have added another logistical hurdle for both Contreras and her client as they prepared to move him off the street.