He took on same-sex marriage. Now he wants to restore the right to clear homeless camps
LOS ANGELES - More than a decade ago, Los Angeles stopped putting people in jail for sleeping in the streets - a compromise laid out in a court settlement that halted police enforcement of laws barring encampments in public spaces until the city could build more housing for homeless people.
That 2007 settlement, commonly known as the Jones agreement, came the year after a ruling from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that found L.A.'s sweeps of homeless encampments on skid row were cruel and unusual punishment. Last September, in a case from Boise, Idaho, the same court issued a similar ruling, saying that prosecuting people for sleeping on the sidewalk when there are
