L.A. Councilwoman Calls Los Angeles ‘A Failed Social Experiment’: Is the City Safe For Tourists?

I was just watching the local news and was only half listening while I was working. The top story was that the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) arrested a 29-year-old man in San Diego after he attacked two women in Venice Beach, a suburb of Los Angeles. RELATED: If You Visit California Don’t Make These Huge Mistakes, Otherwise the California Dream Will Become a Nightmare

According to Patch, “LAPD officials said earlier the first attack occurred around 10:30 p.m. Saturday in the 2700 block of Strongs Drive, where a woman was approached from behind and struck with a blunt object, leaving the woman unconscious. The suspect similarly attacked another woman about an hour later as she was walking near the Sherman Canal.”

Sadly, unless it’s raining, the top story on the news here in L.A. is always a horrific crime, which I think we’ve all become almost numb to it. However, when Los Angeles City Councilwoman Traci Park took the microphone at a live press conference, she caught my immediate attention when she said: “I am just going to come out today and say what needs to be said. People in the city of Los Angeles are sick and tired of feeling unsafe. No woman, no visitor, no family should be unsafe walking in any neighborhood in the city of Los Angeles, much less our city’s number one tourist destination.”

Venice Beach is one of the city’s top tourist destinations and in fact, I used to love to take visitors there when I first moved to L.A. in 1990. It was one of those places that you had to show people and then eat at one of the great restaurants.

But thanks to the city’s homelessness and crime, I have stopped going to the beach and to the restaurants, especially after one of our babysitters was mugged at gunpoint at 7:30 on a Saturday morning while walking to the beach. According to AP, violent crime in Los Angeles decreased in 2023, though the public may have a different perception.

As Traci Park said in her press conference: “Our businesses are being pushed to the brink and consumers are paying for it. Unstable potentially dangerous people are roaming the streets and it’s kids walking to school who are paying the price for it. Our city is getting a bad reputation, and hardworking everyday Angelenos are the ones suffering because of it.”

There’s no doubt about it. I’ve been all over the world and whenever anyone asked me my favorite place, I would always tell them specific areas of Los Angeles. However, it’s getting increasingly difficult to recommend visiting without issuing a warning.

Traci finished her remarks with, “It is time that we get serious about Public Safety in Los Angeles. As the councilwoman for the 11^th District and as a resident myself, I am sick and tired of living in the middle of a failed social experiment. We have all had enough. Enough with the ridiculous soft on crime, defund the police, catch and release, harm reduction. Criminals are the victim’s policies that got us into this mess. Enough. I stand with the victims of these horrific crimes, my friends my neighbors and my constituents in Council District 11 and calling on our city’s leaders to continue investing in public safety and ensuring that our police department has all the personnel and every tool and every resource that it needs to keep Los Angeles safe.”

This isn’t a political hit piece. For the record, I’m a registered Independent but I lean to the left on social issues however, like all of my friends and everyone I know, not when it comes to crime. With Los Angeles about to be the center of the world’s attention come the 2028 Summer Olympics, the time is now for L.A. and California to turn things around and reclaim being one of the best cities in the world.

You can watch the press conference below:

Believe me: I wish this wasn’t the case. I love Los Angeles. I always have but the city needs to get tough on crime.

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