EDITORIAL DUMPING GROUNDS ROCKY'S SHOWBOATING DOESN'T MAKE HIM THE HERO OF THE HOMELESS.

THERE was something cosmically appropriate about the spontaneous commentary by an actual homeless person at a politician's self-serving press conference Thursday.

Here was Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo grandly acting the part of hero of the homeless in front of the media in a perfectly staged event that he correctly guessed would get national attention. With the Union Rescue Mission as a backdrop, Delgadillo castigated Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Bellflower for dumping a patient on Skid Row.

O, the shame; O, the inhumanity. His office would make sure the hospital would pay for its terrible crime and had already filed criminal charges.

Then David Bush, the homeless man who listened to the press conference, chimed in. But what about the city's own treatment of the homeless?

Good point.

Delgadillo was doing an awful lot of finger-pointing when his very own city has its own figurative hands just as dirty: Decades of total neglect, LAPD's Skid Row sweeps, arresting people for the crime of being poor. And now chasing thousands of street-dwellers into other neighborhoods where there are even fewer services, shelters or sympathies.

The interruption by the real-live homeless man underscored how the issue of homelessness has become just the latest score in the political opera of Los Angeles. Everyone's jostling to be the hero of the homeless.

It seems the whole outrage by the city attorney was just more fancy stagecraft. Yes, Kaiser Permanente had been caught in a particularly outrageous case (sending a woman in her hospital garment to Skid Row by taxi). Of course, it's the same thing the Sheriff's Department, other hospitals, jails and practically every government agency has been suspected of: ``dumping'' homeless people on Skid Row.

In fact, Kaiser officials and the regional hospital association had been trying to work out an arrangement with city officials about how to end patient dumping, but Delgadillo preferred to grandstand rather than fix the problem.

The truth is that there's no evidence Kaiser Permanente is any more or less guilty of mistreating homeless people than the city itself. Is it worse to release patients to the one spot in the area where the city's meager homeless services are concentrated, or to roust them wholesale from Skid Row? Would it be less criminal to keep people in jail because they have no place to live?

The real crime is how everyone's jumping on the ``Let's Help The Homeless'' bandwagon as a way to advance their political aspirations -- but doing more to hurt individual homeless people than they help. This sudden concern for the is driven by the opportunity of landowners and developers to cash in big on downtown's boom -- if they can clean the streets of the homeless and helpless.

When it comes to homelessness in L.A., there are no heroes -- just a bunch of equally culpable villains.