Policing Skid Row: Is the Safer Cities Initiative the Right Approach?
Eric Richardson
[Flickr]
DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — The Manhattan Institute is holding a morning conference on policing Skid Row at the Marriott. I'm doing light updates over on blogdowntown's twitter. We'll have a real write up later in the day. Feel free to follow along or to wait for real text.
Update (11am): We're at the first break, following a session that included Commander Andy Smith and author Heather MacDonald, whose City Journal article on the Safer Cities Initiative sparked a lot of conversation in the fall (and was excerpted for the Wall Street Journal and L.A. Times. The two tended to have a common focus in their comments: Safer Cities is about restoring a sense of order to the community. Also on the panel, Mark Kleiman from UCLA and Carol Wilkins from the Corporation for Supportive Housing.
A full write-up was posted this evening.
Eric Richardson writes:
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I look forward to detail about this event. Heather McDonald's article was both thorough in historic detail and thoughtful policy recommendation. The focus being on what works. After reading her article, for once I thought, "Hmm, the LAPD seems to be on the ball." As a taxpayer and a local resident, I wish I could think that a lot more.
For too long, ACLU ideology, the institutional self-interest of service-providers for the 'homeless', and a shared desire of citizens and civic leaders to warehouse the problem have trumped common sense in Skid Row. The consequences for the people living there have been horrendous. Downtown's development has been retarded for decades by the breakdown of law and order in Skid Row. Hopefully, some new more humane consensus can be reached so Skid Row is reformed. Clearly, the status quo is indefensible and morally bankrupt.