Photo Essay: Los Angeles City Government is a Sanctimonious Death Cult Led by a Dimwitted Sociopath

I walked and drove around MacArthur Park, late last night and then again this afternoon. Yesterday, morally insane Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass calmly explained that the park was full of happy children just minutes before Trump’s vicious ICE stormtroopers suddenly shocked all the happy families by launching their terror raid and destroying the innocent fun; soon after, in a local television news interview, she doubled down on a firm description of the park as clean, safe, and well-policed. “And so what problem were they here to solve?” she asked about the federal raid. Screenshot:

There’s the argument: situation under control, children playing happily in a safe park, no problem to solve.

Today, with ICE long gone, here are the children playing in MacArthur Park on a summer day:

There are several playgrounds, and I took pictures of them all.

These are on the other side of the park, to the south, by the lake:

Anticipating the argument, someone is going to say that the children aren’t there anymore because the ICE presence scared their families out of the park. The problem with that is that Bass says children were playing there yesterday when ICE arrived, and everyone in the neighborhood already knew yesterday that ICE was coming:

These signs are everywhere, in a ring around the park:

If you watch TV news footage of ICE agents arriving at the park, you’ll see these signs in the background. They were there before the raid. The park got advance notice.

So the neighborhood knew that ICE was coming, and the neighborhood is terrified of ICE and won’t come to the park if they know that ICE might be there, but the park was full of children when everyone knew that ICE was coming. Something isn’t quite working, there.

The reality is that MacArthur Park is a terrible place for children, dirty and dangerous, and families avoid it. Not invariably, and this is a densely populated neighborhood surrounded by apartments. But MacArthur Park isn’t safe for families, and everyone here knows this. Note that Bass posted footage (screenshot below) of ICE entering the park, taken from a city security camera at the north end of the park, and she said that children fled right ahead of ICE entering the park….

….but she didn’t post footage from the same camera of the children she says were playing in the park. She carefully showed half the supposed evidence.

As for the reality of the park, the entrances look like this:

With groups of people, mostly young men, gathered just inside:

On one of my trips through the park, a skinny young idiot in a wifebeater pulled out a ridiculous kind of homemade hardware store gun and showed it to me, making insistent eye contact, until I left. I was debating whether it was a Potemkin gun or a real single-round zipgun, and you’ll have to forgive me for not getting a picture.

On the east side, along Alvarado Street, the sidewalks across the street from the park look like this, and they’re fenced off from the street for two full blocks:

Just south of this stretch of fence, the Metro light rail station that serves the park was closed.

A cluster of Metro security guards at the entrance declined to explain the closure, but said it might last “all day.”

Meanwhile, the county coroner’s office was on scene:

I’ve emailed the medical examiner’s public information office to ask what they were doing there, but they haven’t replied yet. But the transit station was closed for a long time, and the people who come get dead bodies were there. Clearly, ICE destroyed the usual peace and safety of this delightful urban paradise.

Inside the park, near the playgrounds, homeless sleeping areas nestle in the bushes:

And the benches offer a clean and pleasant place to sit and enjoy this sylvan paradise where happy children run and frolic.

At night, it was much worse, and the stretch of Alvarado between Wilshire and 6th Street was a scene from a horror movie. My pictures don’t capture it. Here’s a sort of vague image of someone doing the fentanyl nod in oncoming traffic:

And there were the usual pirate RVs, with no license plate and plastic bags for side doors:

I was trying to be sort of careful about being noticed while taking pictures, which is hard to do successfully. One thing I did notice, circulating through the densely populated zombie apocalypse for a couple of late-night hours: I didn’t see any signs of an LAPD presence. At all.

Karen Bass: “What problem are they trying to solve?”

What an interesting question for a mayor to ask.