Editor’s note: In anticipation of what we all believe will be a stellar UHA conference this October 9-12 in Los Angeles, we are featuring Los Angeles as our theme this month. This is our sixth and final post; you can see others from this month as well as past pieces on the city here. In addition, check here for information on the conference, including accommodations.
By Kimberly M. Soriano
MacArthur Park continues to stand as a battleground between fundamentally opposed approaches to safety: punitive policing and harm reduction. Since the 1980s, this park has served as both a cultural hub for Indigenous Latinx communities and a laboratory for carceral experimentation. As Los Angeles politicians consistently deploy surveillance and criminalization aimed at cleaning up the park, street-based communities have developed harm reductive practices that challenge the premise that policing creates any safety for unhoused people. I examine how harm reduction emerged as a direct response to surviving in MacArthur Park as an unhoused person who uses drugs.
Constructing MacArthur Park
MacArthur Park is often referred to as the West Coast Ellis Island. This space has become a portal for Latinx immigrants who migrate to Los Angeles. Since the 1980s, Indigenous Latinx communities, specifically Maya and Zapoteco, have made significant cultural hubs in the area ranging from restaurants to non-profit organizations.[1] City officials and media constructed MacArthur Park as a deviant location.[2] Described by media as a hotspot for sex work, officials dubbed it an “open-air drug market,” and a site where you can find counterfeit identification sales. Street vending and day labor also surround MacArthur Park, fueling similar narratives about crime.
Street vending became a target as part of the Broken Windows Theory of policing, which viewed informal economies as signs of disorder that need to be sanitized to avoid larger crimes. Political leaders along with police attempted to regulate and criminalize vendors by confiscating products and ticketing vendors with hefty fines; while street vendors have won several gains they continue to face this treatment today. With the leadership of street vendors, Central American Resource Center (Carecen), and community organizers formed the Street Vendors Association in 1988.[3] The implementation of street vending zones and the municipality’s high registration fees began formalizing and regulating street vendors. City officials developed these programs in order to consolidate control over designated vending zones that are used to this day to control the landscape. Legalization of street vending ultimately became weaponized as a form of control over informal economies.
From CRASH to Community Policing in MacArthur Park
The local divestment of major retailer Bullocks Wilshire, which closed by 1993, followed in 1997 by the Otis Institute of Art, which left for “less blighted ground,” contributed to the increased policing of space. [4] The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) purchased a substation for $100,000: The Rampart Community Mobile Substation, a customized Chevrolet truck “equipped with a generator, police radios, television monitors, computer hookups, running water and everything officers need to set up shop whenever they feel a police presence is needed”.[5]
Even when new development funding emerged, it came with increased surveillance. By the late 1990s, construction of the new Alvarado and Wilshire brought new investment but also prompted more intense police crackdowns on informal economies by political leaders. [6] Street vending and other forms of public informal economies such as sex work and day labor are seen as barriers to the idea of modern city. In part due to the increasing importance of street vending in creating cultural and economic survival strategies practiced by Indigenous Latinx people, MacArthur Park became a hub for Maya migrants during the same decade.[7] LAPD’s formation of Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH) unit during this period criminalized communities by conflating Latinx youth (in particular Central American youth) with gang members.[8] CRASH would “disrupt” gang activity by infiltrating gangs and arresting alleged gang members. The city began using gang injunctions heavily, targeting 18th Street and MS-13, two organized gangs that exist around MacArthur Park. The City Attorney’s office passed ten gang injunctions within MacArthur Park alone.[9]
The park continues to be constructed as “deplorable” without any context of the organized abandonment of the area for the past 45 years.[10] Scapegoating gang violence and drug use serves as a justification for carceral experimentation projects like the Los Angeles Police Department Rampart Area MacArthur Park Revitalization Project, which won a prize in 1998 for excellence in Problem-Oriented Policing.[11]
The contradictions of emboldening a police force came to the public in 1998 with the FBI arrests of 70 CRASH unit members and Rampart Division police officers who engaged in “drug dealing, blackmail, torture, suspect framing, aggravated assault, and the deliberate wounding and murder of LA residents”.[12] Courts overturned over 100 convictions and Los Angeles paid $125 million in settlements.[13] This embarrassment for the LAPD brought about the era of community policing under the U.S. Department of Justice consent decree, which imposed reforms and frequent audits which attempted to monitor the department.
The division welcomed its new police chief, William Bratton, in November 2002. During the 1990s, Bratton championed the adoption of data-driven policing while serving as commissioner of the New York Police Department (NYPD). Data-driven policing sells the idea of eliminating bias using analytics, prediction and data to guide strategy.[14] However, as I argue in my book manuscript, the code and data used for data-driven policing depends on racist policy that increases spatial policing across the city such as gang injunctions. This is policy that criminalizes entire working/poor communities of color without contextualizing these spaces. Due to Bratton’s enforcement of Municipal Code 41.18, a policy effectively making homelessness illegal, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued, arguing it violated the Constitution’s provisions against cruel and unusual punishment, and succeeded in placing a hold on the code enforcement.
As a proponent of Broken Windows policing and as a way around the municipal court’s ruling, Bratton launched the Safer Cities Initiative (SCI), which brought in more police patrol cars to enforce a “zero-tolerance policy” in high crime areas “in need of police.” Police gave particular attention to Skid Row and MacArthur Park. Deploying rhetoric arguing for the reclamation of public space from informal economic activity such as sex work and drug traffic, Bratton began the Alvarado Corridor Initiative (ACI).[15] In 2007, the ACLU reached a settlement with the LAPD that allowed people to sleep on city sidewalks overnight but also resulted in a ban on sleeping in cars or sitting on sidewalks during the day.
Urban planning and revitalization frameworks for public places, such as the manipulation of architecture and spatial design for “crime prevention” and the increasing surveillance of fellow community members and their use of the park, influenced the ACI. The LAPD implemented the ACI in September 2003 and manipulated the environment to “reduce crime,” employing strategies like increased street lighting, often with bright white lights that were uncomfortable to the gaze, trimming shrubbery, and cutting any trees that obstructed camera views. The initiative increased the number of police officers that directly patrolled the area and emphasized the prosecution of all “quality of life” offenses, no matter how minuscule. In addition, the LAPD created a “Mica Task Force” to combat counterfeit identification (colloquially called micas), began an undercover narcotics operation, and placed closed circuit television cameras (cctv) around the park. In 2005, the FBI formed a task force to specifically target alleged MS-13 gang members.[16]
Down 6th street towards downtown, development projects such as Food 4 Less, Starbucks, and Home Depot, were approved in 2004 and brought a large sector of day laborers to solicit work around the area. Carecen worked with the city council district office to create a day laborer center due to overpolicing and exploitation of day laborers by Home Deport customers.[17] Authorities targeted another sector of the informal economy: los miqueros, who sell counterfeit identification papers to undocumented immigrants seeking employment.
My current book manuscript, Gendered Carcerality and Feminist Refusals in Latinx Los Angeles, argues that creative methods of alternative world-building stem from communities that have never found safety under the state, thereby forming their own life-affirming collective in response. For example, in 1992 a small group emerged from the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) Los Angeles chapter that worked to bring awareness to the deaths of people living with HIV. This group took their organizing from ACT UP and formed Clean Needles Now (CNN), a needle exchange program that provided clean syringes, bleach, and cotton balls to people who use drugs to decrease transmissions.
Needle exchanges are one aspect of harm reduction, defined by the National Harm Reduction Coalition as incorporating multiple strategies “including safer techniques, managed use, and abstinence to promote the dignity and wellbeing of people who use drugs. A framework for understanding structural inequalities like poverty, racism, homophobia, classism etc. Meeting people ‘where they are’ but not leaving them there.” As a politic, harm reduction is aimed at minimizing harm from everything, whether that be institutional racism, disordered eating, drug use, or sex work.[18]
Both a politic and practice, harm reduction aims to reduce harm associated with drug use, sex, and sex work. Criminalized people have innovated these practices because they cannot seek help from the state and instead support each other.[19] CNN, like many syringe exchanges, now provides safer supplies for drug use and sex to reduce the risks of contracting HIV and Hepatitis B and C. CNN began its first needle exchange in MacArthur Park on June 30, 1992, when the law still criminalized needle exchange.[20]
During the 1990s Carmen, a drag queen played by CNN member Marcus Kuiland Nazario, taught health education at MacArthur Park. Carmen conducted these informal seminars at bus stops or tables. Carmen’s seminars cut across demographics by including moms, men playing chess, and any other spectators in range, describing how to clean needles and advocating the importance of condom use. Marcus Kuiland Nazario writes, “The dominant culture thinks working-class Latinos are not ready for that kind of street performance. We proved them wrong.”[21] Carmen is a direct contestation to discourses that construct communities of color as inherently more homophobic and transphobic than white communities, a myth circulated to favor predictive policing forces as an adjudication for spatial policing practices in the name of queer safety.[22]
Municipal Code 41.18 and Encampment Sweeps
Los Angeles municipal code 41.18’s original language outlawed a variety of actions that proponents believe obstructed the free passage of pedestrians on sidewalks, tunnels, and bridge overpasses. It was first drafted in 1963 as an anti-loitering law and has continuously been contested by homeless rights advocates. Its current iteration reads no “sitting, lying, or sleeping or…storing, using, maintaining, or placing personal property in the public right of way.”[23] In 2003, the ACLU of Southern California and National Lawyers Guild filed a case on behalf of Edward Jones, an unhoused man. The court upheld that 41.18 was a violation of the Eighth amendment, citing cruel and unusual punishment. The settlement required that Los Angeles provide 1,250 units of permanent public housing before the city could enforce 41.18.
In 2019, Mike Feuer, the city attorney who pushed for a gang injunction in Echo Park in 2013, developed an ordinance to reform the law. It was signed into policy on September 24th. The municipal code was immediately enforced after the violent displacement of encampments in Echo Park Lake in March 2021.[24] The use of spatial carceral policies, such as the enforcement of the revised municipal code, laid the legal framework for neighboring counties such as San Diego to expand violent sweeps of informal housing of unhoused communities.[25] Municipal Code 41.18, along with other carceral strategies implemented at MacArthur Park after the sweep, increased the police presence for already criminalized community members such as sex workers and people who use drugs. Encampment sweeps continued even after the Center for Disease Control (CDC) directly warned cities about the dangers of such actions, which forced unhoused people (many who already have pre-existing health precarity) into congregate housing amidst the COVID-19 global pandemic.[26]
On October 5, 2021, led by LA City Councilmember Gil Cedillo, the city constructed fencing around MacArthur Park while the LAPD conducted encampment sweeps. The main difference between Cedillo’s action and the Echo Park sweep demanded by Councilmember Mitch O’Farrell earlier that year was the lack of opposition from the local community. In a leaked audio, Gil Cedillo and Nury Martinez discussed the encampment sweep as a success. Nury Martinez said, “MacArthur Park…it got good press…” and Gil Cedillo replied, “Not one person left behind. Not one cop, not one bike, nothing. 10:30 was the deadline, 10:50 it was done”. Nury Martinez snarkily commented, “I wanted him [Gil Cedillo] to arrest protestors.” MacArthur Park fenced off its southern section, displacing unhoused people and multiple economies for a $1.5 million upgrade to lights, lawns, repairs to irrigation systems, and new park benches.[27]
The park reopened after a four-month closure, ten days after being televised for Super Bowl LVI, which was hosted in Inglewood. Signage for the municipal code filled the park and as did numbered cameras surrounding both sides of the park. Participants in my book project describe how 41.18 and its enforcement displaced several people from the park and into alleyways or other further underground spaces.[28]
Fentanyl and Harm Reduction
MacArthur Park has recently become a focus of renewed attention from Los Angeles city officials attempting to address the same issues they claim to have tackled since the 1980s. This time, instead of crack cocaine it’s fentanyl.[29] News outlets proclaimed the space a fentanyl hub where the substance is bought, sold, traded and used.[30] Media linked street vending with drug use, arguing that people who use drugs steal items from stores such as Target and in turn sell them to street vendors who can then turn a small profit. Increased policing and penalization will not stop substance use or theft but only incarcerate already vulnerable people navigating poverty.
Several of my participants, mostly queer and trans women, share that they use substances to be able to survive living in the streets. In an interview with Jen Elizabeth, Director of Street Engagement at the Sidewalk Project, she says, “you might think it’s weird but there’s a lot of benefits to drugs…Meth keeps you awake as a woman”.[31]
During my ethnographic visits to MacArthur Park, I volunteered with The Sidewalk Project to understand the conditions that unhoused people navigated in Los Angeles. The Sidewalk Project is a syringe service exchange program based in Skid Row that centers marginalized genders and sex workers. I began by handing out lunches and then after extensive training and shadowing colleagues I moved to harm reduction supplies, which included naloxone, pookies, straight shooters, hammers, foil, syringes, condoms, dental dams and clothes. Engaging in harm reduction outreach in MacArthur Park was how I learned about the Tree of Life, pictured below. The Tree of Life is a tactic that was innovated by Reilly, a Sidewalk Project outreach worker who lives in Skid Row. While helping staple Narcan to trees, several of our participants raved about how smart it was to provide overdose medication on trees, so it can always be available for those in need.
Pookies not Police
While scrolling on Instagram one day I come across S.C. Mero’s image of a giant meth pipe added to a statue in the park. The artist placed a guerilla plaque at the base of the original Prometheus statue, originally created by Nina Saemundsson in 1935. The god of foresight, fire, and crafty counsel gave humans fire, the plaque reads, “for the use of fentanyl, crack cocaine and methamphetamines.” The artist writes on her Instagram, “The sculpture’s fall from grace feels symbolic of [the park] itself…they all have a past life worth remembering.”[32]
The Los Angeles Times used the opportunity to cover the art piece and advocate for more police in the park.[33] The piece sparked conversations reminiscent of Marco Rubio’s tweet in 2022 critiquing a federal grant aimed at reducing health risks associated with drug use. He wrote, “[Biden] is sending free meth & crack pipes to minority communities in the name of ‘racial equity.’[34] The spectacle of the pipe has long been used to enable moral panics around the harm reduction approach of handing out clean pipes by multiple media sites such as Fox News.[35] Particularly pipes are used as dog whistles from reactionary narratives critiquing federal funding for these approaches.
Drug use becomes what Stuart Hall et al. discuss in their book Policing the Crisis, an “articulator of crisis,” in which the symptom is attacked while the larger issues of rising rents and people sleeping without shelter continue to be ignored.[36] The pipe and other paraphernalia become riddled with exaggerated symbolic power and erase the research-backed benefits of harm reduction. Handing out pipes promotes a shift from injection to smoking, which lessens the risk of overdose, a harm reductionist approach to using substances. For example, people who smoke opioids usually use take small hits throughout the day as opposed to injecting larger amounts in one sitting.[37]
Most media coverage continues to talk about MacArthur Park as a site of excess and drug use, reifying narratives about a space in need of enclosure and sanitation while positioning punitive approaches as common sense. Nuanced discussions of poverty, race, gender, addiction, and public space get reduced to calls for cleaning up the park. My book project centers geographies of suciedad, spaces that are deemed dirty and a threat to processes of modernity yet ripe for creative and unique coalition building and innovations, such as the Tree of Life, that stem from lived experience.
Over time, the Sidewalk Project cultivated relationships with local street vendors. I distributed Narcan several times to some señoras who told Sonya, Director of Operations at the Sidewalk Project, “at hours the kids come running out asking for help.” Sonya adds, “it’s community taking care of each other”.[38] Although harm reduction practices are highly stigmatized and constantly under threat, Fremont’s legislation criminalizes being outside with “camping paraphernalia” without written permission from city officials or property owners, and this law has been weaponized to target harm reduction practitioners in the Bay Area.
Policing has failed to answer issues stemming from poverty and has continuously showed communities that LAPD serves as a blackhole for funding that could be allocated for strengthening communities with other resources. My research shows that displacement of unhoused people who use drugs creates violence and harm that lead to death and debility.
“MacArthur Park has been self-sufficient for so long”, says Sonya, who grew up in the area. She describes how many community members, her family included, accessed medication through street vendors along Alvarado Blvd. MacArthur Park has faced criticism for street vending, unhoused communities, and drug use. Yet any proposed solutions just respond by “clearing everyone out.”[39] Sonya’s reflection comes after the city installed fencing all down Alvarado Street, blocking several street vendors from setting up and earning a living.[40]
The battle for MacArthur Park has become a struggle for survival. This unique fight for the right to the park brings fertile opportunities for coalitions that go beyond redemptive narratives of dignified work and highlight how racial capitalism squeezes subjects against each other in this geography. And still, where life is precious, life is precious. Street vendors and señoras carry naloxone and stand ready to provide this life-saving medication when supplies run low. It’s time to reimagine safety for those most affected by state violence and criminalization. What would it look like for street vending señoras to become safety ambassadors trained with life-saving skills and given a stipend for the care work they are already engage in with people who use drugs? Lifesaving expertise in harm reduction is developed by those who have been discarded by the state, with direct experience in the streets working within the confines of racial capitalism to survive another day together.
Kimberly Soriano (she/they) is a queer Oaxacan and Guerrense ethnographer, organizer and educator. Born and raised in the Westlake and Echo Park area of Los Angeles, she organizes with sex workers against displacement, policing, and gentrification. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Kimberly is currently working on her first book titled, Gendered Carcerality and Feminist Refusals in Latinx Los Angeles.
Featured image (at top): MacArthur Park, Los Angeles, CA, November 2013 courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
[1] Leila Miller, “Zapotec in 90006, K’iche in 90057: New map highlights L.A.’s Indigenous communities” Los Angeles Times. July 7, 2021 https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-07-07/la-me-indigenous-map-los-angeles
[2] Stephen Braun. “Fear Sets the Tempo of MacArthur Park” Los Angeles Times. Dec 3, 1989 in Los Angeles Times Archive (1923-1995)
[3] David Helps. “The ‘world city’ At Work: How Street Vendors Transformed Global L.A.” The Metropole.
[4] Judith Freeman and Anthony Hernandez. “The Afterlife of Detritus: MacArthur Park.” Airlight Magazine, Issue 3, September 2024. https://airlightmagazine.org/airlight/issue-3/the-afterlife-of-detritus-macarthur-park/#:~:text=It%20looked%20like%20detritus%20when,has%20worn%20into%20the%20times
[5]Leslie Bernstein. “Westlake: Mobile Substation Has Crime on the Run” Los Angeles Times. Feb 12. 1995
[6] Gerardo Sandoval. Immigrants and the revitalization of Los Angeles. Cambria Press, 2010.
[7] Estrada, Alicia Ivonne. “Claiming Public Space and Place: Maya Community Formation in Westlake/MacArthur Park.” In US Central Americans: Reconstructing Memories, Struggles, and Communities of Resistance, 166-187.
[8] Steven Osuna, Transnational moral panic: neoliberalism and the spectre of MS-13. Race &. Class, 61(4), 3-28. 2020.
[9] Sandoval, 2010: 162
[10] Ruth E Wilson Gilmore. Golden Gulag: Prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing California University of California Press.
[11] Los Angeles Polcie Department, Rampart Area MacArthur Park Revitalization Project. https://popcenter.asu.edu/sites/default/files/library/awards/goldstein/1998/98-38.pdf
[12] Luis Daniel Gascón, and Aaron Roussell. The limits of community policing: Civilian power and police accountability in black and brown Los Angeles. NYU Press, 2019. Pg 60
[13] Paul J. Kaplan “Looking through the gaps: A critical approach to the LAPD’s rampart scandal.” Social Justice 36, no. 1 (115 (2009): 61-81.
[14] Andrew Guthrie Ferguson. The Rise of Big Data Policing: Surveillance, Race, and the Future of Law Enforcement. New York,: New York University Press, 2017.
[15] William H. Sousa and George L. Kelling, “Police and the Reclamation of Public Places: A Study of MacArthur Park in Los Angeles”. International Journal of Police Science & Management. March 2010. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1350/ijps.2010.12.1.156
[16] Paula Preda. “Community, Politics, and Policing in Macarthur Park.” Aleph, UCLA Undergraduate Research Journal for the Humanities and Social Sciences 21 (2024).
[17] Gerardo Sandoval. Immigrants and the revitalization of Los Angeles. Cambria Press, 2010.
[18] National Harm Reduction Coalition. Foundations of Harm Reduction. https://harmreduction.org/issues/harm-reduction-basics/foundations-harm-reduction-facts/
[19] Shira Hassan. Saving Our Own Lives: A Liberatory Practice of Harm Reduction. Haymarket Books. 2022
[20] Dont Rhine. “Below the Skin: AIDS Activism and the Art of Clean Needles Now.” X-TRA Online. March 23, 2023. Accessed September 12, 2024. https://www.x-traonline.org/article/below-the-skin-aids-activism-and-the-art-of-clean-needles-now
[21] Dont Rhine. “Below the Skin: AIDS Activism and the Art of Clean Needles Now.” X-TRA Online. March 23, 2023.
[22] Ren-yo Hwang. “Don’t Count on Us Dying: Carceral Accuracy and Trans-of-Color Life Beyond Hate Crimes” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, vol 9, no3. Fall 2022.
[23] Ordinance no. an ordinance replacing section 41.18 of the … Los Angeles City Clerk. (2021, July). https://clkrep.lacity.org/onlinedocs/2020/20-1376-S1_ord_draft_7-02-21.pdf
[24] Kimberly M Soriano. (2024). Carceral Enclosures and Feminist Fugitivities in Latinx Los Angeles: Aesthetic Refusals, Deviant Care Webs, and Public Bodies in Layered Geographies of Surveillance. UC Santa Barbara. ProQuest ID: Soriano_ucsb_0035D_16744. Merritt ID: ark:/13030/m5sv95gw. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9796n3qx
[25] Jonny Coleman, How Los Angeles Created the Playbook for a Nationwide War on the Unhoused. The Appeal. May 26, 2022
[26] Oneto, Alyse D. and Batko, Samantha. Why Homeless Encampment Sweeps Are Dangerous during COVID-19. Urban Institute. May 12, 2020. https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/why-homeless-encampment-sweeps-are-dangerous-during-covid-19
[27] Jon Peltz. “Council President Martinez on DA Gascon: ‘F*** That Guy…He’s With the Blacks.’” Knock LA, October 9, 2022.
[28] Kimberly M Soriano. (2024). Carceral Enclosures and Feminist Fugitivities in Latinx Los Angeles: Aesthetic Refusals, Deviant Care Webs, and Public Bodies in Layered Geographies of Surveillance. UC Santa Barbara. ProQuest ID: Soriano_ucsb_0035D_16744. Merritt ID: ark:/13030/m5sv95gw. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9796n3qx
[29] https://calmatters.org/commentary/2025/04/los-angeles-restore-macarthur-park/
[30] Clara Harter. In LA’s fentanyl epidemic, MacArthur Park community bears the heavy burden. Los Angeles Daily News. September 18, 2023 https://www.dailynews.com/2023/08/28/macarthur-park-community-pays-heavy-price-in-las-fentanyl-epidemic/
[31] Interview with Jen from Sidewalk Project
[32] S.c.mero. Prometheus’ Pookie Pipe. Instagram. November 18, 2024 https://www.instagram.com/p/DCha4MDSQN-/
[33] Richard Winton. Why did someone add a giant meth pipe to MacArthur Park’s Prometheus statue?. Los Angeles Times. Nov 20, 2024. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-11-20/macarthur-park-prometheus-statue-meth-pipe
[34] Bayliss Wagner, Fact check: False claim that Biden administration is distributing $30M of ‘crack pipes’. USA Today. February 11, 2022
[35] Stephen Sorace. Los Angeles nonprofit handing out clean meth pipes to homeless on Skid Row: report. FOX News May 10, 2023. https://www.foxnews.com/us/los-angeles-nonprofit-handing-clean-meth-pipes-homeless-skid-row-report
[36] Stuart Hall, Critcher Chas, Jefferson Tony, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the state and law and order. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017.
[37] California Department of Public Health, Office of AIDS. Issue Brief: Smoking upplies for Harm Reduction
[38] Interview with Sonya from Sidewalk Project
[39] Interview with Sonya from Sidewalk Project
[40] Steve Lopez. “MacArthur Park vendors are shut down to quell violence. Whats next?” Los Angeles Times February 3, 2025 https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-02-03/column-macarthur-park-vendors-shut-down-by-city-to-quell-violence-but-what-next
