San Bernardino County, like the 3,143 other counties in the United States, committed considerable resources and manpower to its just-concluded point-in-time count of the homeless within its 20,105-square mile confines.
Point-in-time counts, annual surveys of homeless people in all 50 states and U.S. territories, have been conducted since 2005 by local agencies called continuums of care on behalf of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Point-in-time counts are coordinated throughout the country to take place over the course of a single night and during the following day, traditionally at the beginning of the year within the span of two winter weekdays in either January or February, an approach which limits the potential for undercounts since the weather encourages hunkering down and discourages movement on the part of those targeted for the tallying.
The data obtained from the point-in-time count assists the Department of Housing and Urban Development as well as a multitude of federal, state and local agencies focusing on social benefit and welfare programs by establishing the dimensions of the homelessness problem, identifying changes in the homeless population over time, tracking progress toward ending homelessness and providing a baseline for an effective and equitable distribution of resources.
The 2025 Point-in-Time Count took place on the night of Wednesday, January 22, 2025 and during the day on Thursday, January 23, 2025.
In San Bernardino County, the effort to ascertain the number of people within the county limits experiencing sheltered or unsheltered homelessness at that circumscribed time involved the San Bernardino County Homeless Partnership, the San Bernardino County Office of Homeless Services, the Institute for Urban Initiatives, the San Bernardino County Department of Behavioral Health, the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, county employees, community groups, homeless service providers and more than 500 volunteers, including members of the board of supervisors and San Bernardino County Assessor/Recorder/County Clerk Josie Gonzales.
For reasons that are not entirely clear and which have been given contradictory justifications in the past, the county generally waits roughly three months before disclosing the results of the survey. Accordingly, the precise number of homeless counted on the night of January 22, 2025 and day of January 23, 2025 have not been released.
There is concern among a wide range of those participating in the surveys as well as among some of those depending upon the data the survey provides that the counts are in many locations and respects inaccurate because of the fashion in which they are conducted, which in an unknown number of cases involve the nearby presence of San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department deputies.
In a substantial number of instances throughout the county over the past 30 to 40 years, there has been a hostile, indeed antagonistic, relationship between a significant number of the county’s homeless and members of the sheriff’s department, as well as other local law enforcement agencies. Those law enforcement agencies, most notably the sheriff’s department, have been utilized as a tool to limit the proliferation of homeless within the county, to actively discourage those homeless who have taken up residence at various places within the county’s far-flung confines to leave and to ward off any homeless who are contemplating establishing themselves in any of more than a thousand locations throughout the county.
Sheriff’s department employees, primarily its deputies, routinely and with impunity utilize force, violence and the power of arrest or the implied threat of force, violence, arrest and prosecution in their encounters with the homeless to get them to comply with their demands, which in many cases entail orders to leave the area they are inhabiting. In a good number of such cases, the sheriff’s deputies utilize their authority to intimidate the homeless to depart from the areas of the county where the deputies have primary authority, which extends to some 96 percent of the county’s land area, consisting of the unincorporated county areas and the cities of Chino Hills, Rancho Cucamonga, Adelanto, Grand Terrace, Loma Linda, Victorville, Hesperia, Highland, Big Bear, Yucaipa, Twentynine Palms and Needles and the towns of Apple Valley and Yucca Valley, the municipalities in which the sheriff’s department serves as the contract police department.
There is no explicit policy or stated intent that the law enforcement authority of the sheriff’s department is to be used to prevail upon the homeless to leave those jurisdictions where the department serves as the primary upholder of the law. The general idea is that such a diversion of the department’s power is to be effectuated in a way that preserves plausible deniability of any suggestion the department is seeking to prevail upon those who do not have title to or a mortgage on a home or are renters that they leave town. Still, one of the department’s de facto functions is to prevail upon the homeless to make a sensible decision to go elsewhere to subsist. For hundreds of the destitute who found themselves living on the streets, in shantytowns or camped out in parks or riverbanks or dry riverbeds and alleyways and abandoned buildings and parkways and under railroad trestles or freeway overpasses or open fields who were told to leave by a sheriff’s officer or officers and defiantly or even passively rejected those advisals, things did not go well for them. In virtually all clashes of wills that have taken place between sheriff’s deputies calling upon those they encountered to move on and those who were being told to go elsewhere, it has been the sheriff’s deputies who have come out on top, even when those deputies ratcheted the situation up a notch or two or three or four and resorted to outright physically assaulting the homeless to emphasize their seriousness. There is no record of the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office filing charges against a sheriff’s employee or any law enforcement officer over the use of force against any unhoused individuals, ever. There have been, however, times when criminal charges were preferred against those with no standard domicile who retaliated in kind when they were set upon by deputies.
As with almost all issues pertaining to the nexus between the homeless and various governmental entities in San Bernardino County, there is a variance between the official version of events and the unofficial one. It becomes a matter of social orientation, philosophy or status as to which version one considers to be closest to the truth.
Officially, government officials say they have nothing against the homeless and they are actively engaged in efforts to help them. At the same time, many elected officials are under the gun by some very pushy residents to take measures to get the homeless out of their communities. In some places, the tension between those who have a place to live and those who do not comes down to what is seen as the homeless horning in on public facilities and public amenities such as street parkways, sidewalks and parks where they have set up a household, sometimes consisting of tents, lean-tos, cardboard structures and other makeshift means or simply mats, blankets and/or sleeping bags directly exposed to the open air. Oftentimes, the dispossessed have stoves that use wood or propane to cook their meals. Most have little or nothing in the way of sanitation facilities. Complaints mount quickly that people are not intended to live in such squalor and that exposing a city or community’s residents to such a circumstance is both dangerous and unsettling. For that reason, what some might consider to be drastic tactics are used in persuading those who have no place to live to move on to a spot other than the city or community they are in and preferably to a place, if it is within San Bernardino County, other than those patrolled by the sheriff’s department or, more preferably still, outside San Bernardino County altogether.
As a beard, or cover, for what it is doing in this regard, the sheriff’s department has created a couple of different programs by which it ostensibly renders assistance to the county’s homeless population and makes a plausible case that it is dealing humanely with those who don’t live in a wood, brick and mortar, stucco or dry wall structure with a foundation and roof. Some of those programs are Project H.O.P.E., which stands for Homeless Outreach Proactive Enforcement; Operation Shelter Me; Operation Inroads; and the department’s SOP effort, with SOP being an acronym standing for solution-oriented policing.
Typically, law enforcement officers assigned to Project H.O.P.E., Operation Shelter Me, Operation Inroads or the SOP team arrive at homeless encampments, where they insist that layers of cardboard used as insulation from the ground as well as blankets, bedding, sleeping bags and tents which the impoverished use to make it through the night are declared, in the deputies’ words, “debris.” The deputies then insist that the debris be thrown away along with whatever trash happens to be lying around. When the target population proves uncooperative and is unwilling to part with bedding, tents or cooking/eating utensils, cookware and the like, the deputies will engage in a heavy-handed showing of force in which they will set hands upon the homeless, rough them up or beat them, ultimately seizing their property, which is then thrown away.
The ground is an excellent conductor of heat. As such, those who must sleep on it without a layer or two or three of cardboard, blankets or sleeping bags can be very cold and very uncomfortable at night. Being subjected to such sleeping arrangements can go a good way toward convincing the homeless to move on to some other location.
On one hand, for public consumption and while news outlets like NBC or the Los Angeles Times or even the San Bernardino Sun are around, the department touts itself as being chock full of bleeding hearts who are falling all over themselves trying to “help” the homeless by getting them off the streets. When no one else is looking on and the deputies find themselves face to face with the homeless, any pretense of concern for the indigent ends and the message the law enforcement officers deliver to those they are confronting is that it would be best for them to go someplace else. In certain cases, the homeless are told that some form of assistance or shelter is available to them. These offers of help occasionally succeed in having the targeted population willingly or of their own accord allow their possessions to be discarded. Occasionally, the deputies will follow up with delivering the homeless to an actual shelter or homeless assistance facility where they can make an application for inclusion in some type of program aimed at assistance. On rare occasions, the individual might be provided with a voucher that is good for an overnight stay at a motel. More often these are empty assurances that are not real but are useful in getting the homeless to cooperate in giving up their belongings.
At least since the tenure of John McMahon, who became sheriff in 2013 and remained in that post through two election cycles in 2014 and 2018 until voluntarily resigning upon maxing out his pension in 2021, the department has made a practice of assigning generally young and physically fit deputies to its Project H.O.P.E., Operation Shelter Me, Operation Inroads and SOP teams, ones who engage in body building practices involving the use of anabolic steroids. The reason for this is three-fold. The overt physicality of the deputies serves as an intimidation factor which heightens their command presence and in most cases results in compliance with their demands without the need to actually use force. The second reason is that one of the side-effects of steroid use is “roid rage,” which is a state of irritability that accompanies the prolonged use of anabolic substances and will manifest in an outburst of anger, aggression, or violence on the part of the user if he encounters a challenge, frustration or any difficult situation. In this way, a homeless individual’s refusal to depart with, for example, his sleeping bag or blanket or tent, might trigger an act of aggression on the part of the deputy that is then normally resolved with the homeless person being convinced or forced to part with his or her possessions or, as the department terms it, “debris.” The third reason is that by employing young deputies who use anabolic steroids in assignments in which they deal with the homeless as opposed to encountering more economically and socially well-adapted individuals, the department minimizes the liability risk that can arise from the aggression of those deputies and the excessive force they are prone to using, given that the homeless generally do not possess the wherewithal to retain, hire or obtain an attorney to make a legal issue over their treatment by a member of the department.
In recent years, some homeless have adapted to the approach and tactics of the department by using wheeled containers such as shopping carts, baby buggies, strollers or wagons onto or into which they load their possessions, including tents, sleeping bags, blankets, stoves and the like. When confronted by deputies who insist that their sleeping gear or other possessions are debris, the homeless can simply load those items into their movable containers and pull or push it away, thereby not being forced to surrender their possessions. Deputies, however, have come up with a counter to this, consisting of the department’s canine units. The dogs kept by the department’s handlers consist primarily of detention, apprehension and tracking dogs. There are multiple types of tracking dogs, ones which are used to sniff out drugs or weapons or cadavers or to locate those who are either lost in wilderness area or seeking to elude capture. Apprehension dogs are a specialized type of tracking dogs used to capture fugitives, including ones who might be armed. Detention dogs are ones used to, essentially, confine individuals to a circumscribed space of the department’s choosing. In dealing with the homeless who have a wagon, stroller, baby buggy, shopping cart or similar movable container, deputies will bring in a detention or apprehension dog which can be used to tear through the contents of the wheeled container while the deputy holds the homeless individual at bay or the dog can be used to hold the homeless person, who is predictably reluctant to be bitten or mauled, in place while the deputy takes hold of the wheeled container and its contents to dispose of them.
Elected officials in those cities in which the sheriff’s department serves as the police department oftentimes encourage the sheriff’s deputies in their effective campaign to rid the jurisdictions those politicians oversee of the bane of the homeless, but they do not do so publicly, reserving their praise for private conversations in which they compliment the law enforcement officers for their diligence. For the most part, elected officials such as mayors and council members do not want to be openly associated with what some might consider to be draconian measures to hold the homeless in check.
In public statements, sheriff’s officials and municipal officials, in remarkably similar language, will seek to emphasize the degree to which they are “helping” or “assisting” the homeless population they encounter “get the services or any resources they need.” Privately, sheriff’s personnel will brag about, and municipal officials express gratitude to the department for, getting the homeless to leave the area. In at least one San Bernardino County city, however, municipal officials have found themselves in open admiration for how ruthless sheriff’s deputies have shown themselves to be in letting the vagabonds that have decamped in their domain know how unwelcome they are.
Whereas elsewhere the sheriff’s department comes across as two-faced – schizophrenic – with regard to the homeless, at once claiming it is trying to help those reduced to living on the streets at the same time it wants to banish them, in Yucaipa there is no mistaking that the sheriff’s department wants those who do not own or rent a house or apartment there to get out of town. In Yucaipa for the last several years, the go-to guy for handling the homeless detail is a husky deputy who threatens those he is dealing with as if it is second nature to him, doing so in the most profane manner. The deputy is famous, or infamous, among much of San Bernardino County’s homeless population, which is itinerant and is on the move from community to community. Those living under the stars at night as far west as Rancho Cucamonga, as far north as Victorville and as far east as Yucca Valley are conscious of who the deputy is and are very wary of him. In a word, he is the most effective weapon the county has in its war on the homeless. He likes to, in his own words, “beat the fuck out of” those he encounters and he does so with the confidence of knowing that his fellow deputies aren’t going to stop him and that the members of the Yucaipa City Council and top ranking city staff members want him to continue doing what he does and that if any of the homeless he assaults have the audacity to resist him, the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office will back him up by prosecuting his victims for obstructing a peace officer.
The immediate past mayor in Yucaipa is Justin Beaver. Beaver is currently employed as a corporal with the Azusa Police Department but until December 2013 was a deputy with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department. He was a professional colleague of the sheriff’s deputy who is now being unleashed upon Yucaipa’s homeless population. While he was mayor, Beaver touted the “aggressive” approach the city was taking to send the homeless packing, while insisting that a zero tolerance of the homeless was both morally and politically justifiable, as such a strategy is what the citizens of Yucaipa, who had put him and the rest of the city council in office, want.
Beaver likened the homeless to a disease that has to be eradicated. Referring to homelessness as an “epidemic,” Beaver said, “It’s spreading, and California has been hit the hardest. Unfortunately, the City of Yucaipa is not immune. For anyone driving the boulevard, shopping around town or trying to enjoy Center Park, you know. You’ve seen the problem grow. This brings with it inhumane and unsanitary living situations and crime that is eroding our city’s reputation as one of the safest cities in the state. In conversations in person and on social media, residents and business owners have made themselves clear: ‘Clean up the streets of Yucaipa.’ I’m here to tell you: ‘Yucaipa, we’ve heard you and we’re doing something about it.’”
Yucaipa City Manager Chris Mann, in a video posted to YouTube last year, stated, “The City of Yucaipa is no longer willing to be a passive spectator as we watch our community deteriorate due to the crime and blight that come with homelessness on our streets.”
Sheriff Captain Michael Walker, who serves as Yucaipa’s police chief, said, “The Yucaipa Police Department has been stepping up its enforcement efforts with the support of the city council.” That effort includes, according to Walker, a “crack down on aggressive panhandling and blocking rights-of-way.”
The Sentinel has obtained videos of sheriff’s deputies and Yucaipa city employees, who outnumber the homeless individuals they are confronting by a ratio of 5-to-1 or more, surrounding them and rifling through their belongings.
According to Mann, the City of Yucaipa has a five-pronged plan to end any manifestations of homelessness in the 28.39-square mile city, the centerpiece of which is “a crackdown on crime,” according to municipal officials. “Step one is to identify housing and other resources we can offer to our unsheltered population,” Mann said. “Step two is for our SOP [solution-oriented policing] Team to make contact with our unsheltered population. Day after day each homeless person will be contacted, and services will be offered. Step three: For those individuals who refuse help and are violating a state or local law, Yucaipa PD will enforce the law to keep our community safe. It will be made abundantly clear that public nuisances and violations of the law will not be tolerated. Step four includes reducing attractants. Vacant properties used as drug houses, the Omnitrans Bus System and well-meaning churches and other nonprofits distributing food and supplies have all been attracting homeless individuals to Yucaipa. Step five is to work with the community to achieve these goals. This includes educating the public on how to report homelessness and related crime, and how to avoid behaviors that enable and attract homelessness, such as giving money to panhandlers.”
Last year, Mann, stating that “the SOP Team aggressively enforces the law,” bragged that “This program has seen tremendous success in its first eight months of operations, having drastically lowered the number of homeless individuals on our streets.” According to the city, as a result of the aggressive enforcement program in Yucaipa, homelessness “has been reduced by 41 percent in the first three months of operation alone, based on the January 2024 annual point in time count results.”
Mann said, “We have been conducting monthly enforcement activities that we refer to as saturation operations. For one or two days each month, our public safety department has organized a large number of sheriff’s deputies, probation officers, code enforcement officers and other public safety personnel to flood the streets of Yucaipa, targeting known drug houses and serial offenders.” Mann’s reference to serial offenders includes the homeless who have not gotten previous messages that they should leave the city.
Beaver has now been succeeded as appointed mayor by Jon Thorp, who was originally elected to the council in 2020 and was reelected to the council without opposition in November 2024. Thorp is employed as a deputy with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department but is not currently assigned to Yucaipa.
The Sentinel inquired with Thorp about his attitude with regard to the intensified effort involving the sheriff’s department in persuading the homeless to depart from Yucaipa, including the actions by his heavyset department colleague who prides himself on beating any homeless who manifest what deputies refer to as “an attitude” upon being informed that their bedding has been deemed to be debris or trash that must be disposed of and there is an expectation that they will leave Yucaipa sooner rather than later. Thorp offered no response.
Yucaipa city officials were unable to provide any documentation or even the names of ten homeless individuals they claimed had been placed into shelters or homes.
The sheriff’s department has conducted its H.O.P.E. Team raids at homeless encampments in Loma Linda in July 2018, in Highland in November 2022, in Victorville in December 2022, in Rancho Cucamonga in March of 2023, in Loma Linda and Grand Terrace in May of 2023 and in Highland in June of 2023.
The sheriff’s department carried out a Shelter Me operation in Hesperia and the surrounding area in September 2023
The department carried out combined H.O.P.E. And Shelter Me operations in the City of Victorville in October 2023, in the Morongo Basin in November 2023, in Yucaipa and surrounding areas as well as in Barstow and surrounding areas in December 2023, in Fontana and surrounding areas in January 2024, Rancho Cucamonga and surrounding areas in March 2024, in Chino Hills and Montclair and surrounding unincorporated county areas in April 2024, in Victorville and surrounding areas in May 2024, in the City of San Bernardino and surrounding areas in June 2024, in Fontana and surrounding areas and in the unincorporated areas of the Victor Valley in July 2024, in unincorporated county areas of the High Desert and Rancho Cucamonga and its surrounding areas in August 2024, in communities across the Morongo Basin in September 2024, in Victorville and surrounding communities in October 2024, in Barstow and surrounding areas in November 2024, in Adelanto and surrounding communities in December 2024, and in unincorporated Fontana and its surrounding area and Chino Hills and surrounding areas earlier this month.
During these operations, the homeless individuals are often handcuffed. Sheriff’s department personnel seemed to resent questions posed by the Sentinel as to the necessity of the handcuffing. A persistent response to such questions was that the handcuffing is done for “safety purposes” and “for the safety of both the officer and the subject.” None of the deputies was able to explain how handcuffing a person’s hands behind his/her back enhances his or her safety.
A standard element of the procedure during such operations to assist the homeless is to demand the names of those they are encountering and then run those names through the databases available to law enforcement agencies to ascertain if the subjects they are encountering have any warrants. Those who do are arrested and jailed. Those who do not identify themselves are threatened with arrest and, on occasion, beaten.
In the November 5, 2024 election, California voters passed Proposition 36, known as the Homelessness, Drug Addiction and Theft Reduction Act, which went into effect on December 18, 2024. Proposition 36 eliminated, reduced or altered multiple provisions of Proposition 47, which had recategorized certain crimes from felonies to misdemeanors and to which many attributed increasing homelessness, drug use and theft in California in recent years. Proposition 36 revamped several sections of the penal and health and safety codes. Those changes run in the direction of criminalizing vagrancy and give law enforcement officers greater license in dealing with the homeless than existed previously. The criminal charges specified under Proposition 36 widen the potential for making arrests on a number of grounds and allow for enhanced sentences upon conviction. Proposition 36 also prevents those deemed offenders from being cite released prior to their court appearance.
According to the sheriff’s department, having deputies present during the point-in-time count is “entirely appropriate,” as there are “valid safety concerns” with regard to county employees and volunteers making “unsolicited approaches” to a “sometimes volatile” element of the population. The deputies are on hand primarily for “security reasons,” according to the department, and any suggestions that the deputies are interfering with the accurate compiling of the survey data “is unsupported by any evidence.”
Some of those involved in San Bernardino’s point-in-time surveys have acknowledged that the presence or nearby presence of sheriff’s deputies during the tallying effort, which goes beyond making a simple count of the homeless in all 22 cities, both incorporated towns and 26 unincorporated communities or areas in San Bernardino County to include a series of demographic and other questions about the situational aspects of each homeless individual’s existence, renders a fair number of those being surveyed uncooperative. In an unknown number of cases, subjects of the survey have eluded or avoided contact with the surveyors altogether in what is surmised to be an effort to avoid coming into contact with or being confronted by uniformed law enforcement officers. It is not known to what degree this has impacted the accuracy of the surveys this and in past years.
Figures from the January 2024 point-in-time count showed the county’s homeless population at 4,237, a roughly 1 percent increase over the number counted in January 2023, compared to the 26 percent increase detected as having taken place during the last 11 months of 2022 and most of January 2023 and the 6.6 percent increase shown in the count conducted in 2022 over the county’s homeless population in 2020. Because of the coronavirus/COVID pandemic, no point-in-time survey was conducted in 2021. According to an official statement from San Bernardino County, “Ultimately, last year’s results indicate progress in addressing this issue.”
“The annual count is more than just about collecting data,” said San Bernardino County Office of Homeless Services Chief Marcus Dillard. “It’s also about connecting the homeless community to housing, healthcare, mental health support and other services to help them get back on their feet.”
“Addressing homelessness is among our top priorities,” said San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors Chairwoman and Third District Supervisor Dawn Rowe. “I am extremely grateful to have our county departments, community partners and volunteers come together to make the annual count a successful effort.”