How’s This for Justice? : Punishment to Fit the Crime Might Be Jarring Enough for Earthquake Opportunists

By now, you’ve heard a lot about the folks who have taken advantage of the effects of the Northridge earthquake by occupying or stealing from abandoned buildings. But there have been many examples of people-turned-parasites that have received much less attention. Some are emerging through the court system; and a bill that would protect consumers from other kinds of disaster-related abuse is slowly making its way through the Legislature.

Just this week, a federal judge found an appropriate way to deal with a Carson woman who claimed to be a resident of the Northridge Meadows Apartments, where 16 died. Denise Jones now has eight days to produce a cashier’s check for $2,300 for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the same amount that she illegally obtained in aid.

She should also be assigned to clean up the quake-related rubble that remains there--with something as inadequate to the task as a child’s sandbox shovel.

And if those folks hired by FEMA to conduct earthquake damage inspections--at $39 each--are found to have truly fabricated several dozen of those reports, we have an idea for them. They ought to be assigned to write out the next federal budget--in longhand. In some presidential administrations, that document is about equal in size and depth to three very thick copies of the Pacific Bell Yellow Pages. Talk about writer’s cramp.

Meanwhile, a bill by Assemblyman Richard Katz that would outlaw outlandish price gouging during natural disasters will be considered by the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. Too bad it can’t include a provision that would allow the gouging victim a free five-minute shopping spree in the offending merchant’s place of business. That would be a splendid punishment for those who tripled the price of plywood, quintupled the price of batteries and demanded a tenfold increase in the price of spring water.