Homeless Account for 12% of Fire Calls in Los Angeles

In a typical day in the city of Los Angeles, the fire department will go on about 1,500 calls for service.

That’s fires, medical issues, cats in trees and everything else.

Also on a typical day, the city’s homeless population of about 75,000 will account for about 180 of those calls.  That’s 12% of every fire department call.

For perspective, the homeless make up about 2% (a horrible number in and of itself) of the city’s population but are the cause of 12% of the fire calls for service.

Freddie Escobar of the LA firefighters union released the homeless statistics last week and appeared on KFI’s John Kobylt Show to discuss them (for whatever reason, repeated attempts by the Globe to contact Escobar went ignored.)

Annually, there are about 560,000 calls for service in the city and more than 66,000 are homeless related.  The freeway fires, the brush fires caused by homeless camps , and the various medical calls are using a vast amount of resources.  Considering the annual department budget is about $1.5 billion dollars, that equates to $330 million dollars being spent on homeless-related calls.

And it’s not just about the money – it’s about firefighter safety.

Last week, for example, a firefighter had his ear blown off when what appears to have been a propane tank exploded during an encampment fire in the Sepulveda Basin.   

“When we go to encampment fires, we don’t know what we’re going into … and that is 110% preventable,” Escobar told Kobylt.

Escobar railed against local officials, specifically calling out embattled progressive District Attorney George Gascon for failing to properly enforce the law.

For further comparison purposes to show the extent of the problem, the City of Lake Elsinore has about as many actual housed hard working residents as there are homeless people in LA – roughly 75,000.

(Full disclosure – I am a former mayor there and the city actually does a pretty good job on the homeless issue, I must say. Go visit and check out the restaurants and antique shops on Main Street. It’ll be nothing like LA or Santa Monica.)

Anyway, the city had about 6,700 calls for service last year.  That’s about 18 per day, one-tenth the number of calls generated by LA’s homeless.

For a more urban-ish comparison, the City of Hemet – population about 90,000 – had about 18,500 calls for service last year. That’s still only one-quarter of the number of calls generated by the homeless in LA.

And for further comparison, statistically 90% of the homeless in LA are involved at some point in the year in a fire department call for service for whatever reason.  If the “housed” population had the same interaction rate, that would mean there would be about 3.4 million calls for service each year, an increase by a factor of seven.

As reported previously in the Globe,  the United States Supreme Court Friday ruled that cities can in fact enforce “camping bans” and other ordinances as a way to lessen the homelessness problem.  This was good news for some cities, like Lancaster, whose mayor Rex Parris told the Los Angeles Times that the city will be moving much more aggressively to curb as soon as possible 

But Los Angeles firefighters should not expect the ruling will help ease their burden; Mayor Karen Bass called the ruling “disappointing” and said it will not change the city’s current “housing first” approach to the homeless problem.

And that’s working so well, Karen.  Anyway, what’s an ear among friends?