In the days just ahead of a jury in a federal civil case originating out of San Bernardino County awarding a man crippled by the aggressive response of a sheriff’s deputy $27 million, the sheriff’s department elected to roll the dice by escalating the intensity of its operations in clearing the homeless out of the county.
While a fair number of county employees have expressed concerns that the heavy-handed, indeed ruthless and sometimes oppressively violent methods applied by the sheriff’s department are increasingly likely to result in dire or fatal consequences, those at the middle and command levels of the department are intent on resolving the homeless issue to the satisfaction of an increasingly callous public frustrated with the growing presence of the homeless population and the county’s political leadership, who measure progress on the issue in the reduction of its visibility.
Most of those involved are confident the indigent being encouraged to leave do not have the wherewithal to bring federal suits that might possibly cost the county any money.
The three highest ranking members of the county who are detailed to managing the county’s homeless crisis, Department of Behavioral Health Director Georgina Yoshioka and her assistants Jennifer Alsina and Marina Espinosa are said to be personally disturbed, in one case acutely emotionally to the point of tears, by the way in which the sheriff’s department employs brutality and violence against the county’s homeless population, most notably males between the approximate ages of 17 to 55, but are unwilling to offer resistance to what is occurring out of the belief that in doing so they would incur the wrath of the board of supervisors, Assistant Executive Officer Diane Rundles, Deputy Executive officer Victor Tordesillas, risking their employment status with the county.
Official homeless figures in San Bernardino County have varied over the last decade and a half. At the behest of the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, local governments carry out what is referred to as a point in time count of the homeless living within their jurisdictions, traditionally, with some fluctuation, on a single day during the final two weeks of January.
Data from the 2025 Point-In-Time Count identified a total of 3,821 homeless individuals countywide. That figure reflects a decrease of 434 individuals, or 14.2 percent, compared to 2024.
In January 2024, there were 4,237 adults and children counted as homeless during the 2024 24-hour long survey. In January 2023, officials gave varying counts of 4,194 and 4,195 people located and tallied as homeless.
In 2022, the point-in-time count found 3,333 total homeless in the county, including 944 who were sheltered and 2,389 who were unsheltered.
In 2021 the point-in-time homeless count for San Bernardino County was not conducted due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
A total of 3,125 individuals were counted as homeless in San Bernardino County during the 2020 point-in-time count.
In 2019, 2,607 homeless individuals were counted in San Bernardino County during the annual poin-in-time count.
In 2018, 2,118 people were counted as identified homeless in San Bernardino County.
In, 2017, 1,866 homeless people were tallied in San Bernardino County.
According to the point-in time count conducted in 2016, there were 1,887 homeless within the confines of San Bernardino County in 2016.
In 2015, there were 2,140 homeless counted in San Bernardino.
In 2014, there were 3,821 homeless counted during that year’s point-in-time count.
There were 2,321 people cataloged as homeless during the 2013 point-in-time count in San Bernardino County in 2013.
There were 2,876 homeless in San Bernardino County counted in 2012.
In 2011, the number of homeless counted throughout San Bernardino County was 3,431.
There are multiplicity of factors contributing to the differing totals, year-to-year and opposite trends, up-and-down. A major factor consisted in the actual fluctuation in the number experiencing homelessness within the county’s 20,105-square mile confines at different times. Another factor consists of the intimidation factor employed by the county’s various law enforcement agencies in the day of or days and weeks prior to the count. Raids and sweeps of homeless encampments, including “clobbering time” operations in which law enforcement officers would rough up those living in parks, on sidewalks, in alleyways, in abandoned or vacant buildings, in landscaping along freeways or near freeway on-ramps, beneath overpasses and train trestles, in drainage channels, on river banks and river beds and other obscure areas have taken place at all times of the year, including in January in the days and weeks prior to the homeless counts being conducted. Often accompanying those carrying out the point-in-time surveys are law enforcement officers. In the cities of Chino, Montclair, Upland, Ontario, Fontana, Rialto, Colton, San Bernardino, Redlands and Barstow, each of which has its own municipal police department, those officers are generally police officers. In all other cities and incoporated towns in the county, which contract with the sheriff’s department for the provision of law enforcement service, and in the unincorporated county areas, the officers accompanying the surveyors are almost universally San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department deputies. County officials and the sheriff’s department insist that 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 sheriff’s department, and any suggestions that the deputies are interfering with the accurate compiling of the survey data “is unsupported by any evidence.”
Despite that assertion, circumstances suggest that the other purposes to which sheriff’s deputies have been put creates an atmosphere, when they accompany those who are supposed to be tallying the number of homeless in a given area, that is less than consistent with obtaining an accurate count.
A degree of doublespeak attends the sheriff’s department’s interaction with the homeless in San Bernardino County. The department has used all the skill of a Madison Avenue approach in branding its effort toward “homeless outreach” in the most benign of terms, referring to its various programs, which are essentially indistinguishable, as Operation Shelter Me; Project HOPE, which stands for Homeless Outreach Proactive Enforcement; Operation Inroads; or presenting it as part of the department’s SOP effort, with SOP being an acronym standing for solution-oriented policing. In all of its public pronouncements, while CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN or Fox News cameras are rolling or in the presence of Los Angeles Times,San Bernardino Sun or other print media reporters, the department’s spokesmen and spokeswomen or its deputies emphasize how dedicated they are to 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, they default to what the department’s actual goal is, which is to adhere to what the politicians in the county and the cities where they work – the members of the county board of supervisors, 12 of the county’s city councils and two of its town councils – want, which is for homeless to simply go away. In the starkest of practical terms, the indigent are not going to be persuaded to leave by authority figures who are nice to them. The approach that San Bernardino County law enforcement agencies take is to dispense with the artificial show and pretense of compassion that takes place when the wider world is looking on and deliver the homeless the officers confront that it would be best for them to go someplace else.
Sometimes, 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 officers 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.
A central element of the strategy used by the sheriff’s department in particular in San Bernardino County to rid the various communities of the homeless is to take their possessions away, most particularly those possessions that make living under the stars bearable.
The ground is an excellent conductor of heat. As such, those who must sleep on it without at least one layer of insulation can become very cold and uncomfortable at night. Recurrently, the homeless utilize two or three such layers of makeshift insulation – cardboard, blankets or sleeping bags or a combination thereof – as their nighttime bedding.
Typically, sheriff’s department deputies assigned to deal with the homeless 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.” There is no arguing about this. The inhabitants must accept the deputies’ definitions or receive a sound thrashing. 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 escalate the matter and 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. This tends to result in any others at the encampment who have witnessed what befell the first set of the denizens of their community to either leave at once to go elsewhere or comply when the deputies turn their attention to them.
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 utilizing generally young and physically fit deputies very often ones who engage in body building practices involving the use of anabolic steroids, to deal with the homeless. The reason for this is four-fold. Younger deputies generally have less empathy and a higher disgust level for both older individuals and those in squalid conditions than do older deputies. Sympathy or empathy is antithetical to the sheriff’s department’s goal of simply disposing of the homeless. The overt physicality of younger 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 third 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 circumstances in which they encounter 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.
For all of these reasons, the county’s practice of having deputies accompany the point-in-time surveyors has resulted, in cases where the homeless see them coming, those who are intended to be counted making themselves scarce, hiding or otherwise seeking to avoid being confronted and thus eluding being included in that particular year’s tally, even though they might have been counted previously or subsequently. The degree to which this has contributed to the inaccuracy of the counts is, by definition, unknown.
In the aftermath of the 2026 point-in-time count, many of the county’s homeless had their guard down and were relatively confident that they would not have to concern themselves with being confronted by the community’s authorities until spring or at least late this winter.
In the City of Highland, the immediately adjacent section of northeast San Bernardino and the bordering unincorporated county area, primarily because one of the premier destinations for visitors to the county is located there, city and county officials are inveterately self conscious over the presence of the dispossessed milling about. The Yaamava’ Resort & Casino, with 7,400 slot machines, numerous table games, and a 17-floor hotel, attracts 14 million guests per year. The Yaamava‘ Casino, operated by the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, who also goes by the Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation, is, or at least has pretensions of being, a high class place. While at least 6 million of those who come into the gambling house on a yearly basis are repeat patrons, the Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation and both the county and the City of Highland have an interest in constantly putting their shared community’s best foot forward and making a positive first impression on those who come into the city and to the casino. Accordingly, those who really count in Highland do not want any riffraff around.
Last week, on February 6, two weeks and two days after the 2026 point-in-time count was conducted on January 22, the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s HOPE Team, in tandem with deputies from the Highland Sheriff’s Station, conducted one of its patented Operation Shelter Me confrontations with the residents of the city’s homeless encampments. The ongoing series of encampment-clearing operations aims to connect county staff members with unhoused residents, offering them housing and access to medical care and mental health services while addressing community safety concerns, officials said.
“Deputies focused on individuals with significant mental illnesses to link them with restorative mental health pathways,” according to a county statement.
Everyone arrested during encampment operations is contacted in jail by the Sheriff’s Transitional Assistance Reentry Team, or START, and are offered resources and reentry services, according to the county. Those reentry services include the provision of transportation in county or department vehicles and pick-up trucks free of charge if the homeless agree to be driven well into Los Angeles, Orange or Riverside counties to be dropped off to take up living there. In such cases, where the homeless have agreed to leave San Bernardino County entirely, the sheriff’s department is authorized to allow them to retain possession of their cardboard, blankets and sleeping bags and take those possessions with them to their next place of residence, if they have not already been separated from them.
According to the department, on February 6 its “deputies interacted with 43 people experiencing homelessness,” which “resulted in 15 arrests” with “outcomes” that included “seven individuals accep[ing] referral information to assistance programs, two individuals arrested for having San Bernardino County felony warrants, two people taken into custody for county misdemeanor warrants, five individuals arrested for misdemeanor possession of a controlled substance, two people arrested for misdemeanor possession of drug paraphernalia, one individual arrested for allegedly violating a restraining order, one person arrested for violation of probation terms and one individual arrested for allegedly bringing a controlled substance into a jail facility.” Further, according to the department, “Deputy Michael Castaneda arrested an individual for allegedly being a felon in possession of a loaded firearm.”
Neither the department nor the county was able to identify what “assistance programs” were made available to those individuals rousted from the encampment in Highland who were willing to avail themselves of them.
The department did not explain how the person arrested for possessing a controlled substance in a jail facility managed to get the controlled substance into the jail or what he/she had been arrested for to get him/her into jail and/or whether removal of those in the encampments encountered by deputies had been taken into the jail facilities as a routine element of the encampment-clearing operation, which was suggested by the circumstances surrounding and pertaining to the operation. The numbers provided by the department, extending to the enumeration and description of 15 criminal charges taken together with seven people having accepted referral information implies, or could at least be construed that, there was some overlap, that some of those picked up were charged with more than one offense or that all present at the encampment were arrested, perhaps for being on premises where they were not welcome.
Some of the deputies participating in the operation bragged to colleagues that the February 6 action had given them the opportunity to “kick the shit out of” two deserving bottom feeders who will now be likely to take leave of Highland.
County officials and the sheriff’s department cited the superseding nature of Proposition 36, also known as “The Homelessness, Drug Addiction, and Theft Reduction Act” passed by California voters in 2024, which set aside what social hardliners described as the mollycoddling of the indigent that was contained in Proposition 47, enacted by the voters in 2014 and which has been blamed by some for the explosion of homelessness, theft and drug addiction over the last decade.
Proposition 36 gives local government officials more options and tools, including laws and Health and Safety Code provisions “that deputies can apply during arrests when appropriate,” according to San Bernardino County. “These latest charges can carry enhanced sentencing and prevent offenders from being cited and released before their court appearance.”
The members of the board of supervisors are foursquare behind the get-tough policies the sheriff’s department is putting into effect.
The HOPE and Solutions Oriented Policing teams will redouble their efforts in conjunction with staff from other county departments such as that of behavioral health to drive even more homeless across the county’s boundaries into Riverside, Orange or Los Angeles counties. The board of supervisors has included in the ongoing 2025-26 budget so-called “Community Concerns” funding, which will pay for the use of deputies wherever they can be applied to convince the homeless to go elsewhere.
According to the county, the homeless are not only of a low social order, they are of a low moral character as well, and have brought their situation upon themselves. They deserve to be dealt with harshly, officials have said. It should go without saying, they say, that if the homeless resist or fight with sheriff’s deputies or police officers, they are in violation of the law and should be arrested and criminally charged. With many of the homeless, it was noted, they already have criminal records and are impervious to criminal prosecution. For that reason, allowing law enforcement to administer summary punishment in the field should not be looked down upon, county officials maintain.
Anyone who has observed the homeless living in proximity to or within his or her neighborhood is encouraged to call (909) 387-0623 or email hope@sbcsd.org to request a team of deputies to prevail upon those who are intruding on the peace of mind of decent people to leave and find somewhere else to lead their pathetic existences and not stink up the place.
-Mark Gutglueck