When Shacola Thompson returned from a trip recently, she noticed that someone had graffitied the front of her house. The homeowner checked her Ring doorbell history and made the unpleasant discovery that a homeless man had been camping out regularly on her front porch.
Since then, the vagrant has haunted Thompson’s front porch, coming and going without warning. On one occasion, she left her home early in the morning to go to work and was startled to find the man on her porch. She’s counted at least ten visits over the past month.
“I was, you know, really bothered by the fact that someone had the nerve [to] be that bold to sit there and go to sleep, you know, on someone else’s property,” Thompson told Los Angeles CBS affiliate KCAL9.
Last Thursday, her doorbell camera alerted her to the creepy porch squatter’s presence just before sunrise. Thompson called the police, who came and shooed him off her property. But he returned before noon, and she had to call them again. When an officer asked the bum if he lived there, he said, “Yes.” But he couldn’t produce a house key, so the officer told him to shove off, warning him, “If we get another call here today, you’re gonna go to jail, all right?”
Thompson said she would love to see her Van Nuys neighborhood get “cleaned up.” She said there are “a lot of homeless people or people with mental disabilities that’s just kinda hanging around this area. I want the police…to really take action.”
She showed the KCAL reporter a burn mark on one of her chair cushions. “Right here, you can see, it’s a big old burn mark from where he was smoking.” She also pointed out the graffiti on her wall.
“When I go outside and I sit there and I have my tea or drink my coffee, I shouldn’t have to worry about, oh, somebody’s coming around the corner.… Can they potentially hurt me?”
Thompson, who lives alone, also spoke to local news KTLA. “I don’t feel safe when I come out here and try to enjoy my coffee or sit and do my yoga,” she said. “I had to take up my rug for him not to lay here, but that didn’t stop him.” She added that she hopes “LAPD will do their job and take this individual away from this community. Take him somewhere so he can be evaluated.”
The frustrated woman reached out to her homeowners association, advising them to send a warning to her neighbors and asking if anyone else has seen the vagrant. And she spoke to KABC, saying, “I’m concerned about my safety.”
Thompson is frustrated that police aren’t doing more to keep the man from returning to her door. She worries that he could become violent.
“I just feel like they’re not taking this serious,” Thompson said of the police. “They’re not taking my safety seriously. I live here. I’m alone.”
“He could come in. He could harm me,” she said. “He could bogart his way into my house. It’s not fair.”
Thompson is right: It isn’t fair. A property owner shouldn’t have to live in fear of the mentally ill vagrant who camps out on her porch. She shouldn’t have to wonder how he will vandalize her pretty furnishings the next time she goes away for a couple of days. And she shouldn’t have to startle at every noise at night, wondering if some weirdo is breaking into her home.
Related: King County Plans a Massive Homeless Shelter in Seattle’s Chinatown
California is among the worst blue states that are run by pro-crime-and-disorder Leftists. And the American Left’s garbage institutions have been busy transforming several generations into irresponsible socialists, creating an ever-increasing supply of unstable vagrants who don’t respect property rights. Ms. Thompson’s tribulation is so predictable under these conditions that it’s almost boring, and we can expect more of it unless something changes.
What would you do if a homeless man moved in to your porch for days and wouldn't leave? That's the dilemma for a frightened #VanNuys woman who's pleading for help. Why can't the #LAPD keep him from coming back? Tonight at 11 from ABC7. https://t.co/JxL9S0VRHh pic.twitter.com/gPTjEQ00At
— ABC7 Eyewitness News (@ABC7) September 24, 2022
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