Beach Blankets Ease the Pain of Homelessness

Two Long Beach Marine Patrol officers took a small step toward easing the pains of homelessness one day last week when they wrapped a brown blanket around the shoulders of 43-year-old James Edward Bruce.

Bruce, legally blind, his feet red and swollen out of his shoes, had spent the night on a bus bench at Pine Avenue and Shoreline Drive in 40-degree temperature when the automatic sprinklers soaked him.

He was still sitting there, damp and disoriented, when officers Gino Acuna and T.J. Marshall drove past hours later.

As part of the city’s Marine Patrol Bureau, it is their job to clear the Long Beach coastline of humanity from dusk to dawn and guard a 10-mile stretch of beaches and marinas. Now, they have found a kinder and gentler way to carry out that duty.

This month, independent of any city policy, Acuna began collecting new and used blankets and stocking the back seats of the bureau’s four white patrol cars. Acuna reasoned that if he and his colleagues have to run the homeless off the beach, they can at least make an effort to keep them warm.

The blankets have come in handy even during this week’s unseasonably warm weather, when temperatures still turn chilly at night in beach communities.

“We’re not trying to encourage homeless people to come down to the water at all,” said Acuna. “What we are trying to provide, especially at the holidays, is a little warmth.

“These are not all bums and transients. It is not unusual to come to a car and find four or five kids sleeping in it. There is the spirit of the law and the letter of the law. A lot of the guys go by the spirit.”

Acuna’s official task is to tell the homeless to move on and refer them to a shelter. The reality is there are not enough shelters in Long Beach to house an estimated 5,000 people who live on the streets. At least half of them are believed to be addicted to drugs or alcohol, mentally ill or both, said the city’s homeless services coordinator, Sheila Pagnani.

The shelters that take single men do not always take women. Those that take women might not take children. Those that take children will not take the mentally ill or the inebriated, Pagnani said.

One of the largest shelters in town requires that homeless people take part in a religious service in exchange for a meal and a bed, and many refuse to take part, officials say. Meanwhile, their numbers grow.

“It is getting worse everywhere.” Pagnani said. “We are going nuts trying to figure out what is going to work in Long Beach.”

While the city researches low-cost housing and life-transition programs, Marine Patrol officers have passed out 40 blankets since Thanksgiving, Acuna said.

There was some concern that Long Beach residents and boat owners would protest charity for the homeless, as did some in Redondo Beach when a church was barred from feeding and clothing them in a city park, in Santa Monica, where free meals were cut back when businessmen complained, and in Venice, where the homeless have been chased away for spoiling the boardwalk.

Instead, Long Beach boat owners began bringing in spare blankets. One of the boat owners, who owns a nearby mattress factory, has promised to donate 50 new blankets. And a can set out by Acuna to collect money to deliver sandwiches and fruit to street people on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day quickly filled up.

“You can refer them here and refer them there, and before you know it they are back on the street. It kind of hurts you inside,” said Acuna, 29. “We may run out of blankets, but we will never run out of homeless people.”

One day last week, on routine patrol with six blankets in the back seat, Acuna stopped to check on Ronald Churchill, who has been homeless for 15 years. Acuna found him in his usual ocean-view spot at the east end of Shoreline Drive with a ladened shopping cart and his dogs of 10 years, George and Mac.

Dark clouds were collecting in the late afternoon sky and the wind was cold coming off the ocean. In a few hours Churchill, 56, would huddle up somewhere with the dogs for the night. Shelters won’t admit all three of them, and after a decade he is not about to give up the dogs.

“You don’t give up your brothers, your kids,” he said.

Churchill is articulate and obviously intelligent, neither drunk nor mentally ill. But he cannot hold a job without a place to live and he cannot find a place to live without a job.

It is clear no one is going to solve his dilemma today, so Acuna pulls a donated child’s comforter from the back seat. It is covered with kittens.

“Uh oh, cats! I don’t know how long this will last,” Churchill said to the dogs, and shook the officer’s hand.

Down the road, Acuna found his colleague, Marshall, sitting on the bus bench next to a still-disoriented James Bruce. It was apparent that Bruce was unable to walk. Acuna took a brown quilt from the back seat and a dry pair of pants and tennis shoes from the trunk.

The shoes would not do any good; Bruce’s feet were swollen and covered with sores. He says he has a home in Torrance and just can’t get there, but his soiled sweater and hair matted into strings say otherwise.

Acuna headed back to his office for the shift change and Marshall stayed on the radio. He would spend the next half-hour searching for a bed for Bruce, only to find that no shelter would take him.

Finally, a state-funded ambulance took Bruce to a county hospital for treatment of his feet. In a few days, he would likely be back on the street, the officers acknowledged.

But at least he’d have a blanket.