Column: MacArthur Park vendors are shut down to quell violence. What’s next?
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On Alvarado Street, where the vending corridor across from MacArthur Park has long been a defining feature of the neighborhood, something is missing.
The vendors.
For years, they’ve been setting up tables on neighborhood sidewalks each day and stacking them with clothing, electronics, medication, toiletries, laundry detergent and other goods. But almost immediately after an early morning gang-related shooting on Jan. 22, in which six people were shot, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass called for city workers to erect barriers and for police to step up patrols.
Steve Lopez
Steve Lopez is a California native who has been a Los Angeles Times columnist since 2001. He has won more than a dozen national journalism awards and is a four-time Pulitzer finalist.
“LAPD surged resources into MacArthur Park at the direction of the mayor — increasing a visible foot-beat presence and making arrests for suspected gang-related activity,” Bass spokesman Zach Seidl said Friday in a written statement. “The fencing has helped disrupt the illegal sales of drugs and weapons along with halting the associated violence in the area. The mayor looks forward to working with community leaders and Councilwoman Hernandez on a safe and legal way for vendors to vend in the MacArthur Park community.”
The Westlake neighborhood has been the center of a raging drug and homelessness epidemic that has driven families out of the park and affected the quality of life for thousands of impoverished, working-class residents. Gutters are littered with trash and syringes. Drug-ravaged people buy and smoke fentanyl in full view of those on their way to work or school. Sirens wail as LAFD Station 11 responds to overdose calls.
Bass told me back in August that the situation was unacceptable and called for an urgent response (she’d said essentially the same thing a year earlier). In the fall, more sanitation teams were sent to the neighborhood, long-broken streetlights were fixed, and additional crews of medical and mental health outreach teams worked the streets and parks, along with overdose response units.
But the main problem — the open-air drug market in which narcotics are sold and used in public, and users who are slumped half-conscious in an alley, collapsed in the park or staggering about with festering sores from drugs spiked with veterinary tranquilizer — remained a part of the daily scene. It created the perception that disorder and lawlessness had become so normalized, nobody at City Hall was alarmed enough to do anything about it.
Behind the scenes, a police crackdown had been in the works for months. It was delayed a few weeks ago when the Palisades fire diverted police and fire resources. But the Jan. 22 shooting, which occurred long after vendors had shut down for the night, was “the tipping point,” according to LAPD Assistant Chief Dominic Choi. He told me there was fresh tagging and other signs of a possible escalation of warfare between rival gangs.
Police said a gang dispute sparked the shooting, in which an assailant and five bystanders — four men and a woman — were wounded and hospitalized. One man who had two prior felonies was charged with five counts of attempted murder.
Choi said the new barriers — two parallel rows of fencing that create a corral of empty sidewalk space where the vending tables usually sit — were intended to “make sure there aren’t more gang shootings and people getting hit. … Let’s try to hold the ground so criminal activity dissipates.”
Choi and Bass made a point of saying they are not targeting legal vending. But Choi said police believe some vendors were “selling stolen property, selling narcotics and even firearms.”
When I visited on Jan. 31, two LAPD vans were parked on the vending corridor, with officers monitoring the scene. A security guard at a fast-food restaurant told me things had quieted down considerably, and as we spoke, a passerby thanked him near the new fence, perhaps thinking he was a police officer who had something to do with the crackdown.
A man approached, looked confused by the empty spaces where vending booths had been, and asked the security guard where he was supposed to go to buy crystal meth.
The guard shooed him away.
The vendor shutdown happened as President Trump was preparing to launch
deportations that could target industries critical to the California economy, including agriculture, food service, healthcare, domestic services and construction. A Times story on how the federal roundup has sown fear in the undocumented workforce quoted a vendor who said, “The street vending community is shaking. This is the era of fear for us.”
Sidelined vendors have been protesting now and then near the Westlake/MacArthur Park Metro station. On Jan. 31, I met vendors Sabrina Medina and her mother, Elizabeth, who had gathered nearby with other frustrated vendors. Behind them was a sign, in Spanish, urging Bass to let them go back to work.
The amount of homelessness, drug use and criminal activity is outrageous, Medina said, but that has “nothing to do with vendors. That’s what I want people to understand. We’re here working to feed our families. We’re here to, like, survive.”
Medina told me she buys her goods at a discount warehouse, paying “$5, $10, $15” for shoes or apparel, “and then I sell it for $10, $15, $20.” She said a vendor near 6th Street was caught selling drugs, but that doesn’t mean everyone is peddling narcotics or stolen goods from vending tables.
“We’re not like that. We’re willing to cooperate with LAPD,” Medina said. “We want to be good with them so they can be good with us.”
When the fences first went up, I heard from residents who wondered if the barriers were part of a broader strategy, or just a temporary chain-link Band-Aid. Members of community organizations told me they felt left out of a conversation in which they should have participated.
“We have no clue what will be next,” said one.
What’s next, Bass said, is more collaboration with police and prosecutors and more social services.
Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez told me she’s working on options to relocate vendors and has been in discussions with Metro on a planned vending arena outside the Westlake/MacArthur Park station. She also wants to make vendors a key part of a large-scale redesign she’s promoting for MacArthur Park.
Hernandez, who was elected a little over two years ago after calling for less police funding and greater investment in reducing poverty and crime, told me she understood why the barriers went up. But she said it’s no answer to the neighborhood’s many needs. The area is “heavily gang-impacted,” she said, and some vendors have been extorted or otherwise controlled by criminal elements.
“I refuse to put the crisis occurring in MacArthur Park on the backs of our vendors,” Hernandez said.
It’s hard not to be cynical about familiar-sounding vows to transform MacArthur Park, given a long history of oft-repeated promises that produced only temporary improvements. Bass is right in saying a police surge is a must, and Hernandez is right in saying the needs go far beyond law enforcement. But will this time be any different from cleanup efforts of the past? They’re both going to have to deliver more, now and for the long haul.
On a positive note, on Feb. 1, a few blocks from MacArthur Park, Hernandez celebrated the opening of a new playground at Hope and Peace Park and told me yet another playground, the one that had suffered fire damage in MacArthur Park, would reopen soon.
In densely populated Westlake, thousands of families live in apartment buildings with no yards, so safe outdoor space is critical. At Hope and Peace Park, kids arrived on foot, in strollers and wagons, and some of them climbed the multi-colored contraption and tested the new slides as smiling parents looked on.
That’s what normal is supposed to look like in a city park, and Hernandez called it a win for families who “have been asking for this for years.”
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