I was recently pushed off of a panel on LA Homelessness, put on by KPCC Radio here in Los Angeles. My guess was that some did not want to hear my views on homelessness in Los Angeles, especially regarding the effectiveness of LAPD’s Safer Cities Initiative. This is what I would have shared:
Much has been made of the good work of Common Ground and others in New York for reducing homelessness, specifically their work to clean up Times Square and get everyone experiencing homelessness off of the streets and into permanent supportive housing. It was, indeed, good work. However, to draw the conclusion that the good work that has taken place in New York some how discredits the effectiveness of the work being done through LAPD’s Safer Cities Initiative and other work here is extremely naïve. The circumstances leading up to the much touted success in New York need to be put into perspective. When the initiative to clean up Times Square was launched, there were 55 people experiencing chronic homelessness on the streets. In essence, Common Ground’s excellent work reduced the numbers from 55 to 0 or 1 or 2 occasional people on the street.
During a similar time period, Los Angeles made an effort to bring order, clean up, and reduce homelessness on the streets of Skid Row. A powerful series of articles by Steve Lopez of the LA Times titled “Life on The Streets” shed a much needed light on the desperate situation precious people were experiencing on Skid Row.
Part of the response to the desperate situation Steve helped all to see was the LAPD’s Safer Cities Initiative. 50 officers were added to the force to exclusively focus on crime in Skid Row, which at that time was accurately described as “Mardis Gras on Crack”! If you’ve seen the chaotic scene from the movie “The Soloist”, let me assure you that this was no exaggeration of the conditions on Skid Row at that time. Union Rescue Mission supported and still supports the Safer Cities Initiative. We helped train the officers on responding to people experiencing homelessness and dealing with mental health issues. We joined the officers and carried on outreach while they enforced the law. Before officers carried out maximum enforcement, we were sent ahead to offer folks the services URM provides. This was all an effort to change the culture of Skid Row from lawlessness to a culture of somewhat order. And it worked!
Before Safer Cities was put into action, I would often leave the building at URM and find myself needing to jump in to an altercation to save someone from being beaten to death with pipes or worse. One episode had me standing above a man with my feet on each side of his head to protect him from vicious kicks and hits with pipes coming from the 2 men and 3 women attacking him. I shouted “I think you’ve made your point. I think he gets it” as I ducked the kicks and the swings. This was not an uncommon occurrence.
Before Safer Cities, during the two times a year when 300 young volunteers from URM would deliver care packages, we call them boxes of love, to the surrounding SRO’s and hotel rooms they would be laced with racial slurs, cussed at, threatened, and see things that made them sick to their stomachs and cause them to return to URM early and retreat to their homes. After Safer Cities, the beatings described above became less common, and our young volunteers no longer get threatened, or called racial slurs, or see things that make them ill.
While there is still much work to be done, the culture of Skid Row has changed. Many other efforts along with Safer Cities have been carried out to bring about the change. Union Rescue Mission opened a place for women and children and Senior ladies, Hope Gardens Family Center, far away from the mean streets of Skid Row, and worked with others, including LA County and Beyond Shelter, to make sure there were no women and children living on the streets of Skid Row. URM doubled our capacity, moving from housing 500 to housing 1000 precious people. While some agencies and missions responded to the recession by reducing the programs and services they offered and cut staff, since the fall of 2008, URM not only increased capacity, but tripled the number of meals served each day. We opened a wing on a floor to assist two parent families and single dads with children and focused resources to help families experiencing homelessness for the 1st time. In fact, URM is the only mission in LA that serves men, women, single moms with children, single dads with children, two parent families with children, and accepts families with teenagers!
We have not been alone. Skid Row Housing Trust, SRO Housing, and Volunteers of America built permanent supportive housing – 100’s if not 1000’s of units – and housed some of the most vulnerable of people on Skid Row. URM played a key role, with the city, to stop the dumping of hospital patients and patients from mental hospitals on the streets of Skid Row. Stopping the faucet of people pouring into Skid Row has allowed us to focus on the folks who are already here. We also played a key role in bringing about an injunction against the top gang leaders and drug dealers on the streets of Skid Row. Removing the predators preying on the precious people of Skid Row also helps us to focus on helping the people already here.
In all, together we’ve reduced the number of precious people living on the streets of Skid Row from 2000 in 2005 to 750 today. That is remarkable! I need to ask, what is more remarkable, going from 55 to 1 or 2, in Times Square, or going from 2000 to 750 on Skid Row? Don’t you think that LA should receive some credit for this transformation…at least as much as New York does?
Without question we have a long way to go. There are still too many precious vulnerable people on the streets. We should not rest while there is even one precious human being on the streets of our city. We need to live up to our name, the City of Angels. We need more services, in and out of Skid Row. We need to regionalize services so that each neighborhood, each city, each region provides opportunity for their own neighbors who are experiencing homelessness. We need more well run, permanent supportive housing, in and out of Skid Row.
URM is transitioning from emergency beds that can be merely enabling to a Gateway Program that is much more empowering, holding guests accountable for sobriety, offering case management, allowing them to pay a portion of their way rather than frittering away all of their resources and allowing them to rest in their bunks at any time and offering a place to store their valuables in return.
We need stronger law enforcement, not less. We need the officers of the LAPD to get out of their cars, off of their megaphones, and walking a beat on Skid Row and dealing with precious people face to face, community policing. We still have too much drug trade and too much violence on Skid Row. I want to share an example from this past Saturday. I was sitting in the URM lobby and I overheard a man coaching another man on how to collect money from the girls working on the streets. His advice was “to be tough and firm, brutal to those girls.”
I recognized him as muscle for the gangs on the streets. He was using the foulest of language and I could not believe he was even in our building, let alone coaching another man on how to be a strong arm debt collector. I’ve seen he and other guys chase down folks who owed them money and beat them into submission and rescued a camera crew from a beating a couple of months ago by stepping in between them. I said to him, “You can’t talk like that in this mission. You can’t talk about that in this mission.” He answered, “I have a 1st amendment right to speak to my friend.” I said, angrily, “Maybe on the street, but not here. What are you doing in here? GET OUT!” I chased him and his friend out the front door. On his way out, he said with expletives, “Life is a @#^*&#, and then YOU die!” Stuff like this still goes on every day on Skid Row. People are preyed on. Gangs take over the SRO’s, occupy corners, prey on people’s addictions, and violently collect debts. It will take even more remarkable and herculean efforts and a stepped up Safer Cities with strong community policing and an intolerance of mistreatment of human beings by all of us to move to the day when we live up to truly being the City of Angels.
Blessings,
And what do you, as a “mission,” do if it’s a 2 parent family of the same gender?
Rogi,
Through our secular subsidiary, Eimago, we would voucher the family to a hotel and connect them with case management and services. Blessings, Andy B.
A ONE SIDED PANEL
I am not writing this as a police officer. I am writing this as a human being ho happens to be a law enforcement officer. I was disappointed at what I witnessed during the panel discussion, because the panel seemed to be one sided. There was a reoccurring theme throughout the discussion. Every panelist followed the same exact script and tactic. That tactic was “Promote Harm reduction and peg SCI as failed initiative.” What the public did not get to hear was that the people being interviewed in the series and on the panels were members of or had ties to a local activist group who job is to demonize the police department in spite of the great strides we have made. I was disheartened as one by one each of them took jabs at the initiative and purposely mischaracterized it to bolster their cause.
If I would have been allowed to speak to the issue, I would have clearly pointed out the contradictions and misconceptions of the statements made by many of the panel members. As I listened to the 1st half of the story upon my arrival to the station, I listened to Dogon engage in a rant about how he was raised in Skid Row, and got a job in Skid Row, as well as how Skid Row was safer than Beverly Hills prior to SCI. At some point he said that skid row was much safer prior to the Safer Cities Initiative. Yet where he contradicted himself, was when he acknowledged being a part of the same criminal element that he said did not exist before going to prison. These statements, in my opinion and anything he said after that should have discredited him. In the world view of men like Dogon, criminality was relative to one world view or optics. If you were involved in the criminal element or raised around it, you may not see it as a problem. But Dogon knows better. For people like Dogon and many of the panelists to make the inaccurate statements they made, shows a complete disregard for the people of Skid Row who were raped, robbed of their government checks by gang members, or overdosed over the years in Skid Row.
If provided a fair shake, I would have been able to explain the direct link of so called “innocuous” crimes, and the violent crime spurned from it. What people do not know about Skid Row is that prior to SCI, the criminal element within it was able to get away with what they wanted mainly because of a lenient justice system and a lack of resources for the department to handle the overwhelming amount of crime. What created the violent environment was a sense of entitlement by the criminal element of the Skid Row community due to the lack of enforcement that in their minds gave them permission to break the law because of their poor social status.
As officers were unable to curb minor violations, narcotics dealers and gang members became aware of our impotence in establishing order (not from a lack of effort) and more heinous forms of crime began to form.
As an agency, we were relegated to being an after the fact entity. So in a sense the harm reduction theory was already in place before SCI was enacted, as we were forced to try to stay available with a skeleton crew of patrol officers and specialized units and simply investigate crimes after they happened instead of the crimes that drove it. There were many officers who did the best they could through arresting drug dealers and violent criminals, but due to a very lenient justice system, and a realistic fear of retaliation for victims of crime to report it to the police, the majority of our arrestees were out of jail before we finished out police reports.
This further promoted the idea within the criminal and lawless element of the community that Skid Row belonged to them, and there was absolutely nothing we could do as a law enforcement agency to stop their activities.
As our efforts continued to be in vain, we took a serious look at what was driving the crime in the skid row area. We discovered that what drove the gang activity and violence was the narcotics sales and abuse. What drove the narcotics sales and abuse was the plethora of willing participants who engaged in it, some of whom were also trying to rehabilitate within the many drug programs in the area. What drove the participants was an “It’s just Skid Row” attitude that permeated not only within the Skid Row community, but with supporting agencies that were supposed to assist us in keeping the community safe as well. Which is why parolees and people on formal probation not just from LA but all over were dumped into this once dubbed “containment zone” called Skid Row so other cities would not have to deal with their homeless, poor, and mentally ill.. From that people believed that they could sit, sleep, use drug, stand in the street, fight, steal from each other, because that just the way it was, and because it appeared that no one seemed to care. This was also clear indication of another major factor for why Skid Row was what it was; Extreme political ideologies also created the Skid Row as we knew it years ago.
The extreme conservative thought was the typical nimbyism (not in my back yard) world view. These individuals did not want to create programs in their own cities to assists the poor or house their own violent criminals, so they simply put them on a bus, a squad car, or stuffed them in a taxi cab, or kicked them out of an ambulance into Skid Row even when still in need of medical attention where they were open to being victims of crime, as well as engaged in crime to survive or support their addictions. They closed down mental health facilities and thought it was okay to sprinkle pills on them and release them into the streets under the guise of “civil rights” with no support system.
The extreme liberal thought was a world view that truly believed that we as law enforcement should simply look the other way as people used narcotics, sold it or caused harm to themselves or other based on the activity. The believed that because these men and women were poor, minority and disenfranchised that we should just let them do their thing, because theory lives were hard enough. They truly believed that narcotics sales and addiction were victimless crimes, when on the contrary; the majority of assaults, extortions, robberies, and property crime in Skid Row were fueled by all aspects of the narcotics trade. They also viewed the criminal and lawless acts as a “civil right” because they had no homes to commit their crimes in private.
These two extreme ideologies were equally responsible for what Skid Row became, as it went from being a place where winos ambled down the streets, to a crack fueled version of mad max thunder dome.
I was rendered helpless for the most part in assisting addicts and prostitutes as they were assaulted physically and sexually, on a routine basis by South end street thugs, as well as overdosed on their drug of choice as in porta potties that were placed in Skid Row against our warnings. Gang members took over the toilets, and began charging the homeless to use the toilets, unless they were using their products or prostitutes. As a result, there was more fecal matter and urine on the sidewalks and streets than in the toilets.
People with good intentions as well as gang members were providing the homeless with tents to store their contraband in. Compounded with that were the skid row feeders who engaged in what they believed was good work, but left the area looking like a city dump further promoting the attitude that Skid Row did not matter to the people who lived there and as well as those viewed Skid Row from the outside in.
I arrived at the height of this in 1997, and was in awe of what I realized I was going to have to deal with. Back then, as soon as I logged on and hit the streets, my buffer would be filled with calls for service of assaults in progress, overdosing, rapes, and robberies. I am the one who looked into the frightened faces of these victims who were too terrified to tell me who their assailants were. I was the one who had to hear from Skid Row (not skid row activists) that we did not care because we were unable to stop all of the tragedy in the area or respond fast enough to stop it. I am the one that pulled them out of tents and porta potties near death as injected themselves with a strong dose of heroin, or called the coroner when it was too late as other addicts stepped over their dead bodies and continued to use the same needles and contraband that caused the decedent’s fate. I am the one who responded to hotels that believed in an irresponsible version of harm reduction, and entered the hotel room to find a rotting corpse with a needle still hanging out of their arm as the drug dealer that provided him with the drug that killed him would walked past me smiling as he went into his own hotel room.
Most of the individuals on that panel other than the law enforcement, and the one’s on the panel who hid the truth, truly understood what Skid Row really was before we were finally allowed to combat violent crime, and the lawless attitudes that were the catalyst for it. You must understand that for many people, their world view or agenda is far more important than the people they claim to be trying to help. So they will embellish or purposely provide misinformation to the public, or engage in the demagoguery of the police department to get gain support for their pet projects. The reason for this is that no one outside of the debate will research the things they say. They simply trust it, because of the degrees behind the name of or title in front the person spewing false information for self centered reasons. What was even worse is that because the deck was stacked against us, we were not allowed to respectfully rebut the things that were said.
I truly hope that one day, we can show the world that the SCI program is working in a tangible way. As a law enforcement agency we are not allowed to operate from a world view or agenda. We must operate from the truth outward to invoke change in the communities we serve, while our detractors who may indeed mean well, operate from their world view or ideology inward to get to a desired truth that suits their unproven theories.
As it relates to harm reduction, I am not against responsible forms of it, but when irresponsible anti police based forms of it exists, it usually results in what happened on Easter Sunday in 2009, when a local drug dealer was allowed to take over a local harm reduction hotel and flooded it with narcotics, was shot to death along with a skid row advocate/recovering addict, who ironically made the same claims as Dogon, who stated that Skid Row was a safer before SCI was in place in the name of activism. Prior to the murders and after, residents within the hotel as well as case workers at related off cite facilities confidentially expressed their fears and concerns about the rampant crime within the facilities run by a director who believed in an extreme and dangerous form of harm reduction. The case workers expressed a deep sense of hopelessness in their ability to help others break their addictions as gang members who flooded the streets with narcotics were allowed to seek refuge in these facilities. Some e-mailed me pictures of staff members who were asleep on duty, and would allow drug dealers and addicts to run in and out of their facilities without pause to hinder the rehabilitation of those with a true desire to change their lives. For their sake, I had each of them meet with people who had the capacity to assist them. Each one was allowed to explain the negative effects of a “hands off” harm reduction philosophy as it related to treating drug addiction. These brave souls were responsible for bringing change to this particular organization, which is now working with the police to keep their patrons safe. They along with other service providers saw what SCI was doing outside of their doors, and wanted the same thing within them.
This organization wasn’t the only one, as other hotels in the area with the same philosophy, dealt with the same issues as many recovering addicts who slipped back into their addiction to strong temptations with the Skid Row area, allowed themselves to be willing and unwilling conduits for the crime syndicates in the area that thrived from the vices of the many. As SCI and other entities within Central Division reduced crime in Skid Row over the past five years, more people desperately trying to get their lives backs well as the dedicated men and women who provided services to them in the Skid Row area began to support us as they got over a reasonable skepticisms about our motives, based on an excellent smear campaign from college professors, civil liberties groups, and radical activists that truly saw nothing wrong with the blight and hopelessness that reigned before. As far less people were being victimized by criminals thanks to SCI, positive grass roots programs began to spring up from the Skid Row community in the form of the Skid Row 3 on 3 basketball league, and Operation Face Lift. Each of these programs were and still are supported by our department.
As talks of closing down low income hotels loomed, our department was one of the many voices that spoke out against this potentially devastating action, as 720 formally homeless residents and over 30 employees would have been put out into the streets which I’m sure would have delighted many of our detractors who would have seen this as red meat to further blame our department or the gentrification of Main Street(which has no effect on Skid Row) or the entertainment district. Though this hotel corporation had its share of issues related to crime in Skid Row, no one wanted to see these people thrown out into the streets. These are things that our detractors refuse to share with others, though they were a witness to them.
As far as my thoughts on the house first harm reduction philosophy, I am not in agreement with the concept of allowing one to continue to harm themselves and calling it harm reduction, yet if it is done in a responsible way it is something I can get behind, because I too want to see the street dwellers get off of the streets and into a home rather than be exposed to the dangers of the streets. In closing I will say this: Do not knock what we are doing. We must continue to fight crime until ideas to house the homeless come into fruition. We must keep the people of Skid Row safe in the meantime.
Sincerely, Deon Joseph
Deon,
I spend about half my nights each week in the skid row area and watch as the folks from Central Division dispatch cars what seems like a few times each hour on calls.
I have photos of four an five cars responding to an incident.
I don’t know how you folks do what you do but as some of your co-workers know, I have a deep admiration for the job you do every single day.
I wish that these panels would let people like Andy Bales speak. I wish these panels would let the officers from the street speak. I wish the smoke and mirrors of trying to spin the situation would stop.
People like you and Andy have a view of the real world. I don’t know how to get people to listen.
Many of our city officials have a political agenda that clashes with reality or reporting of reality.
I like what you wrote. I accept what you wrote. I only wish more people could see the truth.
Well, some folks prefer facts and data to a viewpoint so I will close with this. In the last week from January 20 through January 26, in the area of Skid Row covered by Central Division, this is the list of crime for ONE week:
Location Crime Date and time
200 block of East 5th Street Theft Jan. 26, 10:30 p.m.
6th Street and Stanford Avenue Grand theft auto Jan. 26, 10 p.m.
600 block of South Broadway Theft Jan. 26, 5:30 p.m.
8th and Figueroa Theft from vehicle Jan. 26, 3:45 p.m.
12th Street and San Pedro Theft from vehicle Jan. 26, 3 p.m.
800 block of North Alameda Street Grand theft auto Jan. 26, 2:30 p.m.
800 block of Wilshire Boulevard (Deleted) Theft Jan. 26, 12:20 p.m.
600 block of South San Pedro Street Theft Jan. 26, noon
900 block of Wilshire Boulevard Robbery Jan. 26, 10:46 a.m.
200 block of South Figueroa Street Burglary Jan. 26, 4:30 a.m.
5th Street and Ceres Robbery Jan. 26, 12:25 a.m.
1700 block of Trinity Street Burglary Jan. 25, 10:30 p.m.
700 block of South Flower Street Theft Jan. 25, 10:15 p.m.
300 block of East Washington Boulevard Aggravated assault Jan. 25, 8:45 p.m.
900 block of West Olympic Boulevard Theft Jan. 25, 8:20 p.m.
West Olvera Street and Cesar E Chavez Avenue Theft Jan. 25, 8:05 p.m.
3rd Street and San Pedro Theft from vehicle Jan. 25, 7:45 p.m.
300 block of East 5th Street Robbery Jan. 25, 6:45 p.m.
1300 block of South Figueroa Street Burglary Jan. 25, 4:55 p.m.
1600 block of Wall Street Theft from vehicle Jan. 25, 2 p.m.
Temple and Beaudry Theft Jan. 25, 1:05 p.m.
500 block of San Julian Street Theft Jan. 25, 1 p.m.
Spring and Temple streets Theft Jan. 25, 11 a.m.
500 block of South Main Street Aggravated assault Jan. 25, 7:15 a.m.
1100 block of South San Pedro Street Theft from vehicle Jan. 24, 5:30 p.m.
100 block of West 7th Street Burglary Jan. 24, 3:30 p.m.
500 block of West 6th Street Theft Jan. 24, 2:45 p.m.
500 block of East Washington Boulevard Theft Jan. 24, 2:20 p.m.
600 block of South Main Street Theft Jan. 24, 1 p.m.
1200 block of Long Beach Avenue Theft from vehicle Jan. 24, 11 a.m.
500 block of North Figueroa Street Theft from vehicle Jan. 24, 10 a.m.
200 block of East 6th Street Robbery Jan. 24, 8:20 a.m.
8th and Los Angeles streets Theft from vehicle Jan. 24, 1:30 a.m.
900 block of East 3rd Street Grand theft auto Jan. 23, 11 p.m.
300 block of South Figueroa Street Burglary Jan. 23, 10 p.m.
700 block of Gladys Avenue Robbery Jan. 23, 10 p.m.
Pico and Flower Grand theft auto Jan. 23, 9:30 p.m.
331 West Washington Boulevard Aggravated assault Jan. 23, 7:15 p.m.
Figueroa and Venice Theft from vehicle Jan. 23, 7 p.m.
200 block of West 5th Street Theft Jan. 23, 6 p.m.
6th and Los Angeles Theft Jan. 23, 4 p.m.
300 block of South Broadway Theft Jan. 23, 3:30 p.m.
1200 block of South Figueroa Street Theft Jan. 23, 3 p.m.
Hill and Temple Theft from vehicle Jan. 23, 10 a.m.
9th and Olive streets Robbery Jan. 22, 11:30 p.m.
800 block of South Figueroa Street Theft from vehicle Jan. 22, 9:30 p.m.
1200 block of South Broadway Grand theft auto Jan. 22, 9 p.m.
1st and Hill Street Theft from vehicle Jan. 22, 8:30 p.m.
300 block of East Washington Boulevard Robbery Jan. 22, 8 p.m.
300 block of East 1st Street Theft Jan. 22, 6 p.m.
400 block of East Washington Boulevard Theft Jan. 22, 5:15 p.m.
400 block of South Spring Street Burglary Jan. 22, 5 p.m.
400 block of South Spring Street Theft Jan. 22, 4:25 p.m.
1200 block of East 7th Street Theft Jan. 22, 3 p.m.
Olympic Boulevard and Maple Avenue Theft Jan. 22, 3 p.m.
100 block of South Central Avenue Theft Jan. 22, 1 p.m.
1000 block of South Flower Street Theft Jan. 22, 12:06 p.m.
San Pedro and 12th Street Theft Jan. 22, 6:30 a.m.
Hill and South Olympic Theft from vehicle Jan. 21, 10:45 p.m.
5th Street and San Pedro Theft Jan. 21, 10 p.m.
1300 block of South Hope Street Theft from vehicle Jan. 21, 7:30 p.m.
700 block of West 7th Street Theft Jan. 21, 6:30 p.m.
Olympic Boulevard and Hooper Avenue Theft from vehicle Jan. 21, 2:30 p.m.
Merchant and 7th streets Theft from vehicle Jan. 21, 2 p.m.
1600 block of South Flower Street Grand theft auto Jan. 21, 2 p.m.
1000 block of South Hill Street Theft Jan. 21, 2 p.m.
700 block of South Grand Avenue Theft Jan. 21, 1:20 p.m.
500 block of Crocker Street Theft Jan. 21, 12:30 p.m.
100 block of North Hope Street (Deleted) Theft Jan. 21, 9:30 a.m.
12th Street and San Pedro Theft Jan. 21, 9:30 a.m.
700 block of South Grand Avenue Theft from vehicle Jan. 21, 9:30 a.m.
700 block of South Grand Avenue Theft from vehicle Jan. 21, 8:30 a.m.
Washington Boulevard and Compton Avenue Grand theft auto Jan. 21, 6:05 a.m.
2nd and Beaudry streets Aggravated assault Jan. 21, 2:55 a.m.
2nd and Beaudry streets Aggravated assault Jan. 21, 2:55 a.m.
6th and Crocker Aggravated assault Jan. 21, 2 a.m.
3rd and Main Theft from vehicle Jan. 20, 8:30 p.m.
200 block of East 7th Street Theft Jan. 20, 8:30 p.m.
7th and Spring Grand theft auto Jan. 20, 8:30 p.m.
Gladys Avenue and 6th Street Aggravated assault Jan. 20, 8:25 p.m.
7th and Grand Grand theft auto Jan. 20, 8 p.m.
17th Street and Grand Avenue Aggravated assault Jan. 20, 7:20 p.m.
100 block of East 3rd Street Theft from vehicle Jan. 20, 7 p.m.
500 block of North Figueroa Street Theft Jan. 20, 6:10 p.m.
2300 block of East Olympic Boulevard Burglary Jan. 20, 5:30 p.m.
600 block of West 9th Street Aggravated assault Jan. 20, 4:30 p.m.
6th and Maple streets Theft Jan. 20, 3:50 p.m.
900 block of Santee Street Theft Jan. 20, 3 p.m.
6th and San Julian Grand theft auto Jan. 20, 2 p.m.
Washington Boulevard and Central Avenue Theft from vehicle Jan. 20, 1:20 p.m.
7th Street and Grand Avenue (Deleted) Aggravated assault Jan. 20, 11 a.m.
600 block of West 9th Street Theft Jan. 20, 10:50 a.m.
1100 block of Santee Street Grand theft auto Jan. 20, 7 a.m.
800 block of South Grand Avenue Aggravated assault Jan. 20, 1:15 a.m.
Thank you, Myles. Good work! Bless you! Andy B.
Thank you, Myles. Good work! Bless you! Andy B.
As extensive as the crime stats I posted are, I am only trying to illustrate that the LAPD has a very hard job to do. Things may have been worse in the past but they are still very bad today. I find it very difficult to understand or comprehend why our elected officials and our mayors office do not take their lead from the LAPD officers in the field. They are more aware and have real data and real experience and observation of the situation at ground level.
As I grew older I found that the fastest and most effective solution to a problem was to yield to expertise. It baffles me in an attempt to comprehend why so many of our elected officials and board members in various positions do not use the resources and expertise of the LAPD.
Thank you, Deon. Well said as always. Bless you.