Yesterday, a 16-year-old teen male was shot dead near the allegedly safe Birmingham High School in “Lake Balboa”. The shooting appeared to be gang related. When the police say: “appears to be gang related” Los Angeles breathes a sigh of relief. “I’m not in a gang. I’m probably safe.” Wrong.
This city is pitifully policed. We only have a little over 9,000 officers to patrol the nation’s second largest metropolis, with a land area of 469 square miles. New York City has 40,000 police to patrol 309 square land miles.
Everyday experience living in Van Nuys is testament to the fact that the law is disobeyed. We have red light runners, graffiti, prostitution, speeding, dumping, loitering, homelessness and illegal immigrants. Sherman Oaks, whiter and richer, has armed robberies and shootings. The public parking garage in Sherman Oaks near La Reina is covered with graffitti and stinks of urine. Who enforces the law around LA?
On my street, I see a patrol car pass by about four times a year. I have called to report burglaries and violent incidents and have waited for over an hour for the police to show up.
Yet I don’t blame the police. I have the highest respect for the men and women of the LAPD. They suffer from the lack of money available for proper law enforcement. Some of this is due to the Republican push for homeland security which robs local cities of traditional tax dollars for fighting local crime.
The infuriating part of this story is that the money is available. We need to put a nickel tax or a dime or quarter or whatever it takes on every gallon of gas. We can call it a “Security Tax” and every time we fill up our car, these tax dollars will fund the hiring of another 20,000 Los Angeles police officers.
It’s so simple, but we lack the political will to tell the people that fighting crime is worth paying for…especially on the day when we come home to find our house burglarized, our car stolen, or God forbid….
Here in Van Nuys 