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Virginie Fayad
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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:
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.
I grew up thinking of the "inner city" as a byword for criminality, disrepair, inconvenience, and destitution. Only later did I realize that, outside the United States and much of the United Kingdom, the term and its international equivalents never picked up those off-putting associations. To most of the rest of the world, whose capitals' established centers didn't suffer the same extensive degree of postwar population drain, a city gets only more attractive (if exponentially more expensive) the farther in you go. But once-derelict downtowns all across America have enjoyed a renaissance of late, and Los Angeles' downtown, once among the most derelict, now looks among the most promising. Walk through most of its neighborhoods, and you may well believe the hype; walk through Skid Row, a substantial piece of the old inner city spread for blocks and blocks from about 5th Street and San Pedro outward, and you begin to wonder.
Or I think of an urban stroll vividly described by the usually fearless traveler Jan Morris: "Following the tourist signs towards the Old Town District and Chinatown, and expecting the usual harmless flummery of restored gas-lamps and dragon-gates, I crossed Burnside Street and found myself in a corner of hell. Suddenly all around me were the people of Outer America, flat out on the sidewalk, propped against walls, sitting on steps, some apparently drugged. [ ... ] They did not look exactly hostile, or even despairing, but simply stupefied, as though life and history had condemned them to permanent poverty-stricken sedation." Though she entered this scene in a troubled part of Portland, her words could just as easily describe Los Angeles' Skid Row, which takes up roughly 50 city blocks downtown, saturated with a proportionately greater feeling of despair.
The relative newcomers to Los Angeles I meet show, on average, more optimism about the prospects of downtown than do the natives. And indeed, to someone born and raised here, a witness to the past thirty, forty, fifty years, calling downtown the center of Los Angeles must sound only somewhat less plausible than predicting the rise of the next Manhattan in, say, South Gate. Going by the improvement of downtown in general over just in the past ten years, I tend to side, perhaps predictably, with my fellow non-natives and their confidence in the city's centripetal future. But the experience of Skid Row in particular, with its thousands upon thousands of street-based residents and their rickety battalions of shopping carts and wheelchairs, could turn anyone from bull to bear. It raises the question of whether and how a city can work around such a huge, indigestible chunk of destitution, one which sounds both critically important and unanswerable.
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