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 
Actually, it’s a lot more simple than more taxes – it’s called lest spending on things that SHOULD be lesser priorities than police. There’s plenty of fat and plenty of money already in the City and County of LA budget (ironically, the free housing budget goes to subsidize some of thos committing crimes and going unpunished for lack of police). Unfortunately, when you live in a city of liberals run by liberals, your personal safety and insurance rates will suffer accordingly.
As for homelessness, yes, it is a crime. Not literally, but it is quite difficult to be homeless and no commit a crime of some sort – loitering, trespassing, indecent exposure, etc., all of which should be enforced to make the streets as inhospitable as possible. Why? A, for the benefit of taxpayers and homeowners. B, for the benefit of the homeless themselves – if they are forced by police “harassment” into the LA Mission, there they will find free shelter, food, educational programs, job help, and the like – all in a near palace setting. Do they want the help? Most of them, no, which undercuts the don’t harass them, leave them alone attitude. If they choose homelessness, they also choose to live with the consequences of whatever laws they break in the process. – Anon Studio City, ex-Van Nuys
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Naybe we should all stand up and insist on things be done? Pick a day and time and then broadcast it to as many people as possible. I’m all for it.
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I agree that being homeless is not criminal in the sense that other street crime is. But the violence inflicted on oneself is not something society can ignore, and allowing people to live in unsanitary and public places is wrong and must not be tolerated.
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“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.”
Since when is being homeless illegal? I agree something needs to be done, but locking them up for the crime of being down on their luck is horribly misguided.
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All of that might be valid and make sense where it not for the mayor and city council urging the expense of over $100 million dollars a year to give people free and discounted housing.
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Copyright 2006 Philadelphia Daily News
All Rights Reserved
http://www.Philly.com
Philadelphia Daily News
September 11, 2006 Monday
SECTION: LOCAL; Pg. 09
LENGTH: 994 words
HEADLINE: 9/11 has upset America’s to-do list
BYLINE: WILL BUNCH, bunchw@phillynews.com
BODY:
AUG. 27, 2006, was an unusual day in Philadelphia:
No one was murdered.
On average more than one person a day is slain. Maybe it was the steady rain that Sunday, but more likely it was just plain luck – considering that a bedridden woman and her 21-year-old daughter were shot multiple times in West Philly by thugs, while bullets flew in a shootout in a motel parking lot on Roosevelt Boulevard.
But luck was in short supply in Lexington, Ky., that same morning. There, in the pre-dawn darkness, 49 people died because of a tragic mistake – a Comair commuter jet tried to take off from the wrong, too-short runway and slammed into the ground.
As you reflect today on the deadly terrorist attacks that took place on Sept. 11, 2001, and on other developments that have occurred in America and around the world in the five years since, you probably don’t think of Philly’s soaring homicide rate, or of a commercial aviation disaster caused by human error.
But maybe you should.
Because one of the many effects of 9/11 – seldom mentioned – is that when the White House declared a “war on terror” and America made that the No. 1 priority, other issues began to get short shrift, some that had dominated the national agenda during a very different 1990s.
On Sept. 12, 2001, the Daily News, in a story written by this reporter, predicted that “America would never be the same again.” That prediction was right, but in ways both large and small that no one anticipated. Did you predict that Americans would still be fighting and dying halfway around the world in five years, that there would be curbs on civil liberties or that a nation that came together in tragedy would now be torn asunder by political rancor?
This isn’t about those changes – which this very moment are being dissected by everyone from TV talking heads to pajama-clad bloggers on this grim anniversary. This is about how the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath caused America to ignore problems that were once atop the national to-do list – with lethal consequences in some cases.
“They’re not dealing with a lot of things,” said Mary Ellen Balchunis-Harris, political-science professor at La Salle University, rattling off a long list that included health care and Americans’ high credit-card debt.
And so while President Bush has been traveling the nation giving almost daily speeches on terrorism, there has been one topic that has dominated our local headlines: Philadelphia’s out-of-control murder rate, and gun violence.
Killings fell here through the 1990s, from a peak of 500 in 1989 to 288 in 2002, but then began rising again and are on a pace to surpass 400 in 2006. There are similar trends in large- and medium-sized cities from Orlando to L.A.
Mayors and police chiefs say they don’t have enough cops, and the single-minded emphasis on terrorism when it comes to federal dollars is a big reason.
Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton recently told National Public Radio America that he added 100,000 new officers and built new prisons in the 1990s when there was a major focus on urban crime.
“Unfortunately, starting after 9/11, we converted the money to terrorism, which was important,” Bratton said. “But we started neglecting old-fashion crime. You gotta fight both wars at the same time.”
Experts say that municipal-police staffing has fallen nationally by 8 percent since 9/11. Here, Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson moved in late 2004 to take some of the manpower he’d reassigned to a terrorism unit and move them back into urban crime, adding in frustration, “We haven’t seen the Taliban in Philadelphia.”
It’s not hard to understand why federal grants for new cops – a staple of the 1990s – have been slow in coming. Since 9/11, America has invested a whopping $207 billion on homeland security, about $60 billion in 2006 alone. Add that to the $368 billion spent for the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and related costs. Those dollars have to come from someplace, especially in an era of tax cuts.
Also, the changes in government mind-set that came about after 9/11 meant more money for some programs to reduce newfangled terrorism risks – some real, some hypothetical – while programs that tackled old-fangled, known risks were reduced.
Since 9/11, Washington has hired thousands of new airport screeners to check baggage and suspicious passengers, increased federal air marshals, and hardened cockpit doors. Yet at the same time, the number of air-traffic controllers has fallen by 1,000.
When the Comair jet crashed late last month, there was only one controller on duty in the Lexington tower, but two are required for the overnight shift. The one working controller had slept only two hours, and investigators are probing whether short staffing and fatigue were factors in the crash.
America’s infrastructure has been one of the many casualties of the 2000s. The American Society of Civil Engineers says it would now take $1.6 trillion over five years to bring America’s roads and bridges, power grid and related systems up to snuff.
Nothing drove home the serious consequences of infrastructure neglect more than last year’s Hurricane Katrina, which claimed nearly 1,900 lives along the Gulf Coast. Although we now know that the levees in New Orleans were flawed beyond any reasonable repair, it was also apparent that Washington hadn’t viewed them as a priority.
“It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay,” Walter Maestri, emergency-management chief for Jefferson Parish, La., said in June 2004, 14 months before Katrina. “Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us.”
In the end, Katrina was one big example of a lesson that’s come over five years and at a price of $600 billion – that safety is in the eye of the beholder.
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Instead of mentioning the republicans, why not mention the current and past los angeles city leadership.
The question to be asked the los angeles elected officials is why year after year taxes are going up and services down.
Please leave your hate for bush/republicans checked at the door.
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