|
The
1974 classic Hollywood film “Chinatown” features
a scene
set on a picturesque lake in Los Angeles where J.J. “Jake”
Gittes, played by Jack Nicholson, spies on two characters, Hollis
Mulwray and Katherine Cross, snapping photos of them as he leans back
in a boat. The iconic location where this and many
other Hollywood movie scenes
were filmed was near the site of a violent confrontation by hundreds
of Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers against protesters
on March 24. Riot gear-clad law enforcement faced off against
protesters and bystanders, including residents of the surrounding
neighborhood, legal observers, and journalists, and violently
beat
some of them and arrested nearly
200 people.
The police officers were following the orders of City Councilman
Mitch O’Farrell to dismantle a large encampment of unhoused
people living by the lake.
The
clash between police and protesters in Echo Park is a microcosm of
our nation’s current economic system and the role that law
enforcement plays to preserve it. A decades-long housing
crisis in Los Angeles
has steadily pushed growing numbers of people into the streets.
According to the Los
Angeles Homeless Services Authority,
there were 41,290 experiencing homelessness within city limits in
2020—a 16.1 percent increase from the year before. Over the
past year, with the pandemic-related mass layoffs, resulting in
overdue rents and other bills, and a tenuous barely-there safety net,
that number has likely
risen even more this year.
Krithika
Santhanam is an attorney and mass protest defense coordinator at the
National Lawyers Guild of Los Angeles, which sent legal observers to
the Echo Park protest to document any resulting police brutality. She
explained to me in an interview
that the police response on March 24 was “no different than the
same sort of violent, militant response we continue to see over and
over when it comes to large-scale, predominantly progressive protests
demanding social justice.” Indeed, as this past year has
demonstrated, regardless of location and issue, American law
enforcement has applied violent police power against expressions of
progressive dissent while
openly tolerating
or even abetting the preservation of a white supremacist capitalist
order. The Echo Park sweep, taking place just as the high-profile
trial of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the killing of
George Floyd began, is disappointingly typical of law enforcement’s
role in policing the poor.
Like
many
other police departments
that were found to have engaged in serious misconduct during last
year’s Black Lives Matter protests, the LAPD, according to a
report
authored by former law enforcement and commissioned by the city
council, was found to have performed poorly. The report’s
authors lamented, “It is unfortunate that the same issues have
arisen again and again, with the Department being unable or unwilling
to rectify the problem.” According to Santhanam, the same
impunity that has led to the department paying out millions of tax
dollars to settle misconduct lawsuits was on full display at the raid
on Echo Park. The police have been “emboldened in some ways to
execute this form of policing,” she said. Ultimately the role
of the police is, according to Santhanam, “managing inequality
under capitalism.”
Among
the hundred or so people living at Echo Park Lake before the
encampment was destroyed was CC Luce, an organizer with Lotus
Collective and Street
Watch LA
who told
me that she has now lost her home and the sense of community and
family that the camp’s residents had built up. For Luce, “the
question of housing goes way beyond a structure or affordability.”
“A house is not a home; a house is just an object,” she
said. But to elected officials and state and local authorities,
individuals and shelters are simply pieces of a puzzle that can be
moved around to fit one inside the other to claim success at solving
the crisis of homelessness.
Luce
has no idea where her friends and neighbors have now been moved. She
told me that as far as she knows, they were moved into transitional
housing through Project
Roomkey
(PRK), part of a statewide program that the LA Homeless Services
Authority describes as “a coordinated effort to secure hotel
and motel rooms in L.A. County as temporary shelters for people
experiencing homelessness who are at high-risk for hospitalization if
they contract Coronavirus (COVID-19).”
As
of last fall, the $100
million program
ended up housing only a small fraction of the city’s unhoused
population. Seen as an innovative solution to the problem of
homelessness in a city where the cost of living displaces people from
their homes faster than authorities can provide them shelter, the
project is simply a band-aid and a deeply flawed one at that. One
journalist who interviewed people
placed in temporary housing through the program pointed out that
“punitive policies and practices are causing residents to leave
PRK or act in ways that get them kicked out,” and that strict
curfews and other harsh policies are “tools used by PRK’s
service providers to discipline their residents.”
The
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a set
of guidelines
for cities to tackle homeless encampments during the pandemic and
warned that “Clearing encampments can cause people to disperse
throughout the community and break connections with service
providers. This increases the potential for infectious disease
spread.” Councilman
O’Farrell’s justification
for destroying the encampment was to conduct repairs to the park as
if that could not be done while people were living in the area.
O’Farrell told the Hollywood
Reporter,
“my non-negotiable was that we would have housing solutions for
everyone before we closed the parks for repairs. We were able to do
just that.” And yet, a handful of those who remained in their
tents at Echo Park Lake was ultimately arrested
before the repairs commenced. Perhaps O’Farrell sees jail and
housing as interchangeable locations for the unhoused.
The
councilman claimed that razing the encampment had nothing to do with
Hollywood production companies’ use of the area for film
shoots. He said, “Filming at the lake is nothing that even
entered my mind.” And yet he added, “I’m very aware
that filming was really popular there, to film movies, commercials,
you name it. It’ll be, I think, available again, but the
primary focus is to get people back to enjoy the park.” By
“people,” he clearly meant those other than the
inhabitants of the encampment.
Santhanam
pointed out that the sweep was an indication of how we “continue
to prioritize and privilege the viewpoints, opinions, and preferences
of those who have access to housing and who have the financial means
to thrive under this system.” In other words, the wealthier
residents of Echo Park’s surrounding and gentrifying
neighborhoods have made clear that they will no longer tolerate the
sight of unhoused people at the edge of the lake. A petition
signed by 4,000 people warned, “WE — THE CITIZENS OF ECHO
PARK — WILL NO LONGER TOLERATE OUR LAKE BEING DESTROYED!”
One person living at the encampment countered that sentiment, telling
the Los Angeles Times, “Until you find and address the actual
problems and actual solutions, I’m sorry, but we’re going
to be here.”
And
therein lies the problem that the Echo Park Lake encampment and its
dismantling has symbolized so heartbreakingly well: our society would
rather spend money to violently clamp down on protesters who are
protecting an unhoused community than fund long-term solutions to the
housing crisis. It would rather displace those who created their own
community in the vacuum of affordable housing options and pour
resources into temporary and sterile solutions for transitional
housing than foster conditions where people can actually afford to
live in the places where they create their own communities. “Right
now all of us who lived at Echo Park Lake, might have roofs over our
heads, but we’re unsheltered because we can’t see each
other,” said Luce.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
|
