It was billed as a guided tour for downtown residents, church and business groups and elected officials to see skid row for themselves.
As the group headed out on foot from L.A.'s Midnight Mission, it was confronted by demonstrators whistling, drumming and chanting: "You're not welcome here!" and "You're the problem!"
That was in June 2011. A year later, Deborah Burton, a community organizer who was once homeless, was charged with misdemeanor assault and battery on two tour leaders.
Her alleged weapon? An air horn.
A jury acquitted Burton. But she and her group — the Los Angeles Community Action Network — now have launched their own court action, filing a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city, alleging that police have conspired with business leaders to quash protest on skid row.
City Atty. Mike Feuer said the suit had no merit whatsoever, but the story of the noisemaker and the court cases it spawned illustrates the acrimony and mistrust as change comes to the 50-block district.
Once designated an official "containment" zone for homeless people, skid row now is home to a doggie boutique and craft cocktails. Nearby, an estimated 1,000 to 1,500 people live in the streets, and thousands of formerly homeless are in refurbished flophouses and apartments.
Both sides in the legal disputes are seeking many of the same things: safer and cleaner streets, for instance. But they also are in sharp conflict.
Activists want skid row preserved as a haven for poor people; business and political interests see it as downtown's shiny new frontier.
"While we have a common goal, eliminating homelessness," said Mai Lee, an executive at the Midnight Mission who was caught up in the case, "we don't have a common vision."
The skid row walks were launched in 2005 to help revive interest in the derelict neighborhood.
"When you tuck it away in an area few people experience, the rest of the city doesn't understand how chronic the problem is," said Orlando Ward, who worked at the time for the Midnight Mission and is now an executive director of Volunteers of America in Los Angeles.
As the walks drew attention to the area, they also brought its complicated factions to light.
Burton's group wants to preserve housing for the very poor and stop what it sees as the "criminalization" of skid row residents, and they believe police and business are gentrifiers bent on running the homeless and the poor out of skid row.
"You can't just herd us away," said Burton, 62. "We're not inanimate objects. We're people."
Some social service groups and business associations, however, want the homeless off the streets and in shelters or programs.
They backed a cleanup strategy, launched by the LAPD in 2006, that deployed 50 extra officers to the area — targeting crime and quality-of-life infractions such as jaywalking, urinating in public and resting on the sidewalk.
Many oppose expanding housing for the homeless on skid row, which they view as a toxic environment for people clawing their way out of substance abuse, mental illness and poverty.
They see the activists as ideologues and enablers for dysfunctional behavior. They're "advocates for everybody being able to use drugs, sell drugs, keeping skid row skid row," said the Rev. Andy Bales of the Union Rescue Mission.
Ward said both camps oversimplify.
Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang
The air horn heard around skid row
Dengan url
https://sehatgembiralami.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-air-horn-heard-around-skid-row.html
Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya
The air horn heard around skid row
namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link
The air horn heard around skid row
sebagai sumbernya
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar