LA Police: Hospital Dumped Homeless Patients on Skid Row

Sunday afternoon a Los Angeles police sergeant happened to see an ambulance pull up in front of the Volunteers of America homeless services facility, and a patient got out, and the ambulance drove away. Suspicious, the sergeant called for an LAPD videographer, and over the next few hours they recorded four more ambulances arriving at the homeless shelter and dropping off recently discharged patients.

Police have suspected for some time that several institutions in Los Angeles, including law enforcement agencies from outside the city, have been using the downtown area and homeless shelters as dumping grounds for homeless people and patients. The LAPD has never officially investigated the issue, but after the incidents were photographed on Sunday, a criminal probe was launched.

Police are investigating the Los Angeles Metropolitan Medical Center, where the ambulances departed from. In talking to the people who were dumped out of ambulances at the shelter, police learned that they had just been discharged from the hospital, but they did not want to be taken downtown. Authorities are looking into whether the patients were falsely imprisoned during their transfer to Skid Row, and whether the hospital violated any laws regarding the treatment of patients.

LAPD Capt. Andrew Smith told reporters, "This is the most blatant effort yet by a hospital to dump their patients on Skid Row against their will." Skid Row, which is home to a number of shelters and services to help homeless people, has one of the country’s largest concentrations of homeless people, with some estimates putting the number as high as 10,000 on any given night.

Hospital officials deny that the patients were treated improperly. "With all the issues, why would we send someone there who did not ask to go there? It is illogical," said John Fenton, president of Los Angeles Metropolitan Medical Center. Fenton said that three of the five patients in question had come to the hospital from the Volunteers of America shelter or the Lamp Community center nearby, and when filling out admission forms, they had given those addresses as their residences.

However, officials at Lamp Community and Volunteers of America stated that neither facility has any record of any of the five patients having been at their facilities. James Frailey, an ambulance driver with the private ambulance company ProCare, told investigators that the hospital had hired his company "on a regular basis" to transport recently discharged patients to Skid Row upon their release from the hospital.

There is currently no law that says hospitals cannot send homeless patients to Skid Row after they are discharged. But the city attorney is looking into whether taking homeless people to Skid Row violates federal laws against releasing medically unstable patients, and whether or not hospitals who engage in the practice can be sued for unscrupulous behavior.