Skid row

[chuckles]

Skid Row.

Skid Row, man.

And we talked about it before.

I remember we, um...

Polo put on.

He put on for the DTGs.

Well, DTG was not mentioned in this Skid Row indictment case, but it says here, "23 Skid Row drug dealers arrested as part of Homeland Security task force takedown." And I'm gonna read this article, but I do have one...

He's not really allowed to do his job because the police chief answers to the mayor.

And if the mayor doesn't want you enforcing drug laws in Skid Row, then they're not going to enforce drug laws in Skid Row.

Oh, well, we'll go after the drug dealers.

But forget going after the drug users or, God forbid, the people that are torturing animals on Skid Row.

No, no, no, no.

It would not be sensitive to go after those people.

But they're going to need to do that over and over and over and over again.

What did Hugo Soto Martinez get for his endorsement of Karen Bass? Well, as soon as he won his reelection outright in the primary, he announced that he was no longer going to enforce clearing homeless encampments in front of schools and daycare centers in Hollywood and Echo Park and Silver Lake.

which is not generally the attitude of the people that work in the system.

No, it's kind of the Skid Row phenomenon that people talk about.

We have lots of money flowing into that area, but the problem is exploding.

I don't know how many blocks Skid Row is now, but we have NGOs making money and we have social service workers making money.

But who's actually getting off of drugs off of the streets? The problem is getting worse, not better.

Well, yeah, Skid Row, it's about 50 blocks.

Wow.

And it's, you know, close to the worst I've ever seen.

And even more so.

She came from Skid Row.

She sure did.

The real one.

I live in Los Angeles.

I have been going to Skid Row to observe and do some reporting for the last many months.

I'm completely appalled at the refusal of people, elected officials, people in media, activists and others to acknowledge reality about this situation if there is any place where one in four people are being assaulted at any given time, it would be homeless encampments.

In fact, it's probably even higher than that.

I mean, this is a criminal enterprise.

Right, that's absolutely true.

Yeah, what goes on in those tents in Skid Row is, is absolutely terrifying.

And I just, you know, the LA Times recently had a piece that I tweeted about of the dog abuse.

And even though most of us approve of Jim McDonnell as police chief, he's not really allowed to do his job because the police chief answers to the mayor.

And if the mayor doesn't want you enforcing drug laws in Skid Row, then they're not going to enforce drug laws in Skid Row.

Oh, well, we'll go after the drug dealers, but forget going after the drug users, or God forbid, the people that are torturing animals on Skid Row.

No, no, no, no.

It would not be sensitive to go after those people.

But they're gonna need to do that over and over and over and over again.

What did Hugo Soto-Martinez get for his endorsement of Karen Bass? Well, as soon as he won his re-election outright in the primary, he announced that he was no longer going to enforce clearing homeless encampments in front of schools and daycare centers in Hollywood and Echo Park and Silver Lake.

What did Isabelle Herrado get? She, who has been a complete disaster on everything that's going on in Skid Row, just got appointed to the head of the Homelessness Committee.

So that's one thing.

Then cities started looking at these skid row neighborhoods and thinking, oh, this actually might be some worthwhile property to develop, right? Like the Bowery in New York City, which was a city's skid row for years and years and years, is now like a pretty pricey place to rent.

And so there's a lot of like housing destruction and just redevelopment that contributed to it.

And urban revitalization, right? The gentrification of, you know, in the 70s, American cities were in trouble and then suddenly there's this kind of rebirth of them.

There were these high profile abuses and one flew over the cuckoo's nest.

And we like thought and there was also the advent of psychological drugs like that we thought would be able to cure a lot of the mental illness that we were seeing.

So those hospitals, as they emptied out their beds, people start to notice that the people on the street seem anecdotally to be more mentally disturbed in general than the quote unquote bum that they saw inhabiting Skid Row before, where maybe that guy's problem was alcoholism, but you're starting to see people muttering to themselves, kind of the textbook behavior of people who seem mentally disturbed.

Actually, there's this interesting thing I came across in my research where librarians started to have conferences with each other to discuss the disturbed patron because that was starting to be a thing.