Author: Nupur Tustin

While the Mayor, the City Manger, and their small band of  privileged, elitist supporters insist we have a “homeless crisis” and lecture us on compassion and morality, we on Globe Avenue have to deal with the consequences of criminal vagrants and the violence they leave in their wake.

They have been at least two previous shootings in the area under siege under the 405 overpass at Venice Boulevard. One in February 2019, the other in July of the same year.

This afternoon, January 11, 2020, there was a third such incident. LAPD received reports of a man with a gun in the area.

For the residents, our first hint of trouble was the low, insistent rumble of a police chopper that sliced through the quiet of a Saturday afternoon. When we went outside—I to drop off books at a nearby library—we were horrified to see yellow crime-scene tape cordoning off our street a few feet before it intersects with Venice and a second one blocking off an alley that leads to Sawtelle.

“There’s been a shooting. Someone has been shot,” the officer I approached informed me as he lifted the crime scene tape for me to pass through.

Out on Venice Boulevard, CCPD’s black-and-white SUVs blocked the eastbound lanes. A police vehicle was parked at the head of Globe where it intersects with Venice on the Culver City side and several more vehicles were parked alongside the vagrant encampments on the Culver City side of the 405 overpass.

Two Culver City Paramedic vehicles passed by, turning left to go north on Sawtelle.

It’s taken several conversations with officers to ascertain what exactly went down.

Was this an officer-involved shooting?

Yes.

Was it the officer doing the shooting?

Yes.

Was it a vagrant who got shot?

Yes.

We understand the vagrant had a gun and thought it a good idea to resist the LAPD.

He thought wrong.

He ended up dead at the Shell Station on the southwest corner of Venice and Sepulveda.

What if he had run down Globe? What if one of us or, God forbid, our children should have been caught in the crossfire? What if any civilians had been injured?

This is why we complain about vagrants camping in such close proximity to us.

 They are violent. They are armed—and, no, they’re not just exercising their second-amendment right to keep and bear arms. They are dangerous.

To call this a homeless crisis is an outrage.

I grew up in India. I’ve seen extreme poverty. I’ve seen people living on the streets and in slums. I have even, as a journalism student, visited with such people and spoken with them.

Not one of them was on drugs. Not one of them was violent. Not one of them was armed. Not one of them was encased in filth either. In a country that is hot and humid and without regular access to clean, running water, these people were still able to keep themselves clean and to retain their sense of dignity.

I’ve lived in four different Indian cities, visited quite a few others.

But I have never seen human feces on the streets, never seen people defecating in full view of the public, and never, as I walked through the streets, a lone woman, have I felt unsafe. Even in New Delhi, a notoriously unsafe place for women.

Here in Culver City, I hesitate to walk under the overpass. I would certainly never take my children—ranging in age from 4 through 8—through it to go to the store at the Shell Station or to walk to Vet’s Park as we used to before the bums—I don’t apologize for using that term because that’s all they are—took over our neighborhood.

To call this a homeless crisis is both an outrage and an insult to the residents who live here and are exposed to this situation every day of their lives. To suggest that all that’s needed is a shelter and a few services—and, of course, rent control—flies in the face of common decency.

And even if there really were a housing crisis, the city’s actions—enriching itself and its cronies—would certainly do nothing to alleviate it.  The Mayor has said—this in a letter in response to mine—that the city plans on spending $925,000 to study the situation.

Another $190,000 goes to pay the bloated salary of an official who will “coordinate services.”

None of this money goes toward actually providing services that those down on their luck might need—job training, job opportunities, for instance.

Why not? Because the people under the overpass don’t want a job. Nor do they want shelters. What they want is to be able to sell drugs and engage in illegal activities like drug-dealing and prostitution. Yes, we’ve seen this as well in Harry Culver’s city.

And our Mayor living in her privileged bubble is as well aware of this as you or I.

It’s easy to preach compassion when you don’t have to deal with or even see the situation on the outskirts of the city. It’s easy to tell other people what they should or shouldn’t do.

But I’m yet to see any of the people preaching compassion actually walking the walk.

Enabling drug abuse is not compassionate. Enabling young girls to be prostituted is not compassionate. And leaving the mentally ill to fend for themselves out on the streets is not compassionate either.

If anyone wants to preach compassion to the residents of Globe Avenue, let them volunteer to put up the violent, criminal vagrants under the overpass on their street—or better still within their homes.

Yes, that’s essentially what Mayor Sahli-Wells and City Manager John Nachbar told residents this evening at a meeting at the Police Station.

“Immoral?” expostulated one resident.

“Yes, immoral,” the Mayor repeated. With her hand over her heart and her features arranged into an expression of deep compassion, the Mayor told residents it would be immoral to get vagrants out from the area of Venice under the 405-overpass.

Apparently, they can deal drugs, use the neighboring streets as open-air toilets, engage in prostitution, and do drugs on our streets, and it would be immoral to prosecute them.

“What can you do?” residents repeatedly asked. “We’ve heard what you can’t do. But what can you do tomorrow to make us safer?”

“Well,” the City Manager exclaimed, “we can’t tell them to go—!”

“What can you do?” we asked again.

Residents had been invited to meet with city officials and the Chief of Police to figure out solutions to the criminal vagrancy problem that afflicts the borders of Culver City, but it turned out to be a waste of our time.

The Mayor’s heart bleeds for the criminals who do drugs and sell drugs. But not for the tax-paying residents who pay her salary.

According to her, it would be both IMMORAL and UNCONSTITUTIONAL to protect our rights against criminals.

Keeping residents safe and streets clean apparently goes against the constitution. One has to wonder what our founders would have thought of that!

To give him credit, the City Manager did have a solution. It was in the form of an annually recurring $190,000 payment to a Homeless Czar!

One presumes that for that kind of money the appointee in question will have more refined excuses as to why nothing can be done.

At any rate, the solution does several things:

• It enables the city and its council to act upon Rahm Emanuel’s advice to “never let a good crisis go to waste.”

• To throw good money at a crisis and insist to residents that they’re doing something

• And, best of all, it’s a lovely excuse to raise taxes

You see, the city’s declared a state of fiscal emergency. But somehow, despite the shortage, it did manage to find a spare $190,000 lying around. And it’s counting on having that spare cash available every year, with a little change to spare.

After all the Homeless Czar’s salary will need to go up every year. One hundred and ninety thousand dollars won’t go as far in 2021 as it does in 2020. The poor man—or woman—will absolutely need more each passing year to cope with rising costs.

Other than that City Manager John Nachbar was extremely candid in confessing he had No Answers. “I don’t know,” he repeatedly said.

Apparently, it never occurred to him to come prepared to the meeting or to do some research to figure out what our options are.

That would be too much to expect of an overpaid, underworked city official.

Some months back in August, parents of Lin Howe’s students received a note from CCUSD telling of an untoward incident that the children had been witness to. Naturally, the newly appointed principal of the school found herself bombarded with enquiries. What exactly had happened? What had the children seen?

To her credit, Principal Eva Carpenter provided a detailed response via email. Since the message was sent out to every Lin Howe parent, I have no hesitation reproducing it here:

I have gotten inquiries about the details of today’s events.  There was a man who was believed to be mentally ill walking down the street in front of our school acting erratically.  The police were called as he was also seen walking on to neighbors’ properties.  The police came and tried to quell the situation but had to subdue him forcefully.  Unfortunately some of our students saw what happened but were moved away from the area safely.  The suspect was taken into custody without incident, staff members who witnessed the event gave their eyewitness statements. I am working closely with CCUSD Security Director, Superintendent Lockhart and the culver City Police to ensure we keep all students safe. 

Note some key words and phrases here. The man was “mentally ill” and merely “walking down the street.” The individual, referred to as the “suspect” was “taken into custody.”

But being “mentally ill” isn’t a crime. Neither is walking down a public street. So, why was this person arrested? Why was he violently subdued when there were children watching?

Now Globe Avenue residents would never call about a “mentally ill” person simply “walking down the street.” There’s not much point calling about one of these individuals sitting on your property drinking from an open container, either.

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Police dispatch—who will rush one of CCPD’s finest to your home if your cat’s stuck up a tree or your neighbor’s using his camera and the flash disturbs your afternoon nap—invariably ask: “But what’s he/she doing?”

In other words, what’s the crime?

You can be mentally ill. And you can walk down the streets. Well, all right, as long as you’re not endangering either yourself or others. At any event, one doesn’t expect such people to be arrested. One merely expects them to be confined in an appropriate asylum and to receive the treatment they so badly need.

Now we have called about the mentally ill when we’ve witnessed them accosting passersby or relentlessly following pedestrians, while shaking their fists and acting aggressive. We’ve seen and called about the mentally ill violently reaching out and trying to grab moms walking their babies, growling at and clearly scaring them.

We’ve called because it was the civic-minded thing to do.

Do the police come? No. After dispatch has finished arguing with you about whether you’re well and truly a Culver City resident, you’ll find out—as my husband and I did on one occasion—that your call was never even relayed to the police department.

(In case, you’re wondering, dispatch is outsourced to South Bay, which handles both non-emergency and 911 calls for Culver City and a couple of other cities.)

We’ve also called about mentally ill people blocking traffic, erratically crossing from one side to the other on Venice Boulevard—at risk of becoming yet another statistic in a hit-and-run. But Dispatch has again wondered whether CCPD had jurisdiction or LAPD. Ultimately, no one has been sent out.

The compassion the authorities supposedly feel for the “unhoused” doesn’t apparently extend to saving the lives of the mentally ill and the “unhoused” they profess to care for. Who knows, maybe it’s more compassionate to let them die!

Why is there one law for Police District 1—the Mayor’s neighborhood—and quite another for the rest of Culver City?

The Constitution guarantees equality under the law and equal treatment by the law. But Mayor Sahli-Wells and her council are doing everything they can to undermine those constitutional guarantees.

Build more shelters, of course!

It’s a no-brainer. At least, according to Mayor Sahli-Wells and her brethren of four.

This past Monday, a neighbor spoke at the council meeting of receiving not one but three threats from the “unhoused”—to borrow Councilman Lee’s term—members of Culver City. (Never mind that many of these have never rented or owned a residence in Culver City. And for quite a few, their last residence was more likely than not to have been behind bars.

The city council proudly claims them all as residents.) Our neighbor has also narrowly escaped being attacked on two or three separate occasions. And she mentioned this as well.

I spoke of our children seeing people shoot dope; of seeing the “unhoused” openly selling drugs; of our children having to find human feces on our street—a quiet residential cul-de-sac—and used needles; of seeing “unhoused” men using our street as an open-air public restroom; of property thefts and seeing suspicious individuals of the “unhoused” variety peering into car windows and trying car-door handles to see if any of the parked vehicles were unlocked.

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To these complaints, the Mayor had but one response: “We have a housing crisis. We’re providing more services and we’re building a shelter.”

What, you might wonder, is the connection between death threats, property thefts, and the like to housing and the availability of shelters?

To be sure, these crimes are perpetrated by the vagrants whom the city council persists in referring to as “homeless.” But other than that what connection is there?

How does more and free housing keep our residents safe? How does it prevent us from receiving death threats?

How does more and free housing prevent substance abuse? What does it do to combat drug dealing?

How is more and free housing an adequate response to the fact that our streets are being used as vast, open-to-the sky toilets?

If the connection eludes you, don’t worry. We’re at a loss to understand it as well.

Some further questions might have occurred to you: Who will build these shelters? Where? How much will they cost? When will they be available?

More importantly: In the interim, what will be done to keep us safe? What is to prevent someone who issues a death threat from carrying it out?

And finally, when those shelters are built, what if the “unhoused” refuse to move into them, citing one reason or another? What happens, then?

We do have shelters and we do provide services—and the “unhoused” frequently refuse them. This happens often enough and poses a sufficiently troubling legal conundrum that many California cities and counties have joined to file a brief asking the Ninth Circuit to provide some clarity on the matter. If the “unhoused” refuse to go into an available shelter, can this be taken to mean that no shelter was available?

Not Culver City, however. Our city council seems largely untroubled by the issue. Who cares when the issue doesn’t touch Police District 1, where police officers can—and do—tackle the “unhoused” to the ground in front of watching children?

The rest of Culver City can just suck it up, pay their taxes, and go to hell!

When Harry Culver designed his dream city, he probably never foresaw that local politicians and activists would turn the once clean city that bears his name into a filth-ridden tent encampment that the Los Angeles Times has dubbed the West Side Skid Row.

Residents report—and both Culver City and Los Angeles Police Department officers agree—that Culver City’s skid row is home to drug dealers, who openly deal drugs in the neighboring residential streets, drug users who shoot dope in the open, oblivious to the hapless residents and children trying to enjoy a quiet Sunday in front of their houses, and prostitutes.

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No, it’s not. And no one is saying it should be.

But what is criminal is the city’s refusal to enforce basic city codes and laws that keep the streets and residents of Harry Culver’s dream city safe.

Things began to change in 2017, when Los Angeles our neighbor refused to enforce its vagrancy laws, allowing known drug dealers, felons, drug abusers, and severely mentally ill people to set up tents on the north—Los Angeles—side of Venice Boulevard under the 405 freeway overpass.

Residents of Culver City’s Globe Avenue on the south side of Venice Boulevard were already beginning to feel the negative effects of this decision. Residents reported their cars were being broken into, bicycles, tools, and other personal property stolen. Petty crime was on the rise.

On a couple of occasions gunshots were heard—some gang or the other protesting the vagrants’ encroachment of their drug turf.

As Culver City residents, we couldn’t appeal to our city. After all, this was an LA issue. But residents feared that before long the problem would spill over onto our side of the overpass.

But a failure to keep our streets and sidewalks clean is. As is a failure to keep our residents safe.