is one of last week’s most popular searches that directs people to MPM. Before this, MPM’s blog stats showed that people were finding the site with searches specifying “MacArthur Park Fake IDs.” Some of the other goods and services sold illegally here include, but are in no way limited to: drugs, sex, metro day passes, tamales and other street foods, drugs, fake security cards and MICAs. We’re fine if people search for any and all of these things and wind up at MPM. Whatever it takes!
Drive-By at the Pan American/Shooting in MacArthur Park
Sunday, September 20th, 2009JUST last night, my neighbor Alex and I were looking at our street’s crime map, taking note of where to park our cars (not 6th and Westlake) and where to walk at night (not Vermont: side streets in this area, though unlit, are much less frequently the scene of personal theft and/or aggravated assault). Among the many incidents noted on the map over the last week — theft, rape, burglary (property), robbery (violent), grand theft auto — none of them were homicides and only a few of them were assaults.
The crime map for the neighborhood from 9/9 to 9/16. Personal theft is by far the most common crime noted.
Then, last night, some guy goes to the Pan American on Temple, gets in a fight, and shoots and wounds three men outside the club. Soon we will have more blue dots to mark the occasion. The police don’t know yet who the shooter was, and all we know about the men who were shot is that they were between the ages of 20 and 25. The police told an independent news crew that one man was shot in the back, another in the chest and the other in the arm.
I’ve never been to the Pan American, but I do frequently stare at it when I drive by. Mainly I am mesmerized by the six-inch, jelly platform heels the women wear and the signage, in classic Spanglish. I did once suggest that a few friends and I go there after bookclub (we read They Shoot Horses Don’t They? about dance marathons and it seemed the most relevant spot in the area to tie the theme in), but my friend Molly said we no, because we’d need bodyguards.
update, 9/22 — Not so fast on the no yellow dots. Two men were shot yesterday in MacArthur Park, one of them fatally. The men were apparently sitting, chatting on a park bench near the corner of 6th/Alvarado at 10:30 in the morning, when another man approached them and started shooting at them in the head and all over their body. From the LA Times:
TheĀ incident at MacArthur ParkĀ marked theĀ first shooting there since January 2008 and the first fatal shootingĀ at the park since August 2006, [LAPD Deputy Chief Sergio] Diaz said.
Once considered a magnet for violence, drug dealing and other crimes, the park has undergone a revival in recent years as the LAPD beefed up patrols and city leaders invested in the site. Among the features of the revived park is a new soccer field that has been popular with Westlake District residents.
“Anytime we are talking about a crime in MacArthur Park, there’s an added dimension,” Diaz said. “It’s pretty bold to do this in the day when there’s lots of people around.”
Not entirely by coincidence, today is also the day I ordered Pepper Spray to carry with me on my key chain.
Not in Kansas Anymore
Sunday, August 23rd, 2009There are Latinos in Kansas. I saw them on my way to interview a farmer in Lakin, one of those towns on the Plains so disparate and spread-out that the only cross street the farmer could give me to his house was a mile-marker off the highway in between the fields. We drove through Dodge City and Garden City and Holcomb to get to Lakin from Topeka, and here, where the meat-packing industry and coal plants are, Latinos are as well.
And they are everywhere — carnicerias all along the street (real dives with peeling paint and misspelled signage written in Spanglish, not restaurants with cactus murals painted on the front), stores advertising SE CAMBIAN CHEQUES/WE CASH CHECKS, dried chili peppers in the market — this is not a marginal population in this prairie town, population 24,000, but the driving cultural force.
Mostly I saw men who appeared to be in street gangs, so many of them. In MacArthur Park we have a mix — we have men who wear cowboy hats and cowboy boots and belts with large buckles on their way to what seems to be the ranch, but is actually the 99Ā¢ store, and we have men in MS 13 and the 18th Street Gang and the Crazy Riders and more. Here there seemed to be only the latter. Sixteen, seventeen year-olds with the red, backwards baseball cap in very, very low-riders with thin mustaches and many, many tattoos that often reference a recent death: RIP BAM BAM. They looked extremely familiar to me, and then upon coming home, I see that they are more or less a part of the same affiliations as some of the men in LA. Active gangs in the small heartland towns of Garden and Dodge Cities include: Surenos, Brown Pride Villians, Brown Pride Gangstas, Brown Pride Aztecs, Latin Kings, South Side Orphans, Folk Nation, KBC, TSV, Norte. None of this is very new; The New York Times reported in 1993 that there were 3,100 gang members in the state, most of them kids in between the ages of 11 and 21 involved with drug dealing, gun smuggling, theft, even murder. (The man I spoke with at KBI said that they do not have numbers on the amount of gang members currently in the state.) When I mentioned this at Ferret Camp (really) a few days later, it was old news to the Kansas State biology students as well. Oh yeah, they said, we have drive-bys.
The farmer in Lakin was white, his wife Latina. He admitted that it was almost impossible for him to find white people willing to work, anywhere anymore, that they would rather stand around and get paid to watch other people flip burgers. The only kids he could find to hire to help on the farm were the ones with Mexican parents or grandparents, he said, as they are only one or two generations removed from real work.
Still Settling The Rampart Scandal
Wednesday, July 8th, 2009
Javier Ovando, Officer Rafael Perez, Officer Nino Durden
Shortly after Javier Ovando won his first settlement, in 2000, against the City of LA and the LAPD, for $15 million, he sued the County of LA and public defender Tamar Toister for malpractice. It was announced this week that he has finally settled, for $750,000.
Ovando was shot, paralyzed, and then framed by police officers later disgraced in the Rampart scandal in October of 1996. In his trial a year later, he was charged with felony assault on a police officer, assault with a deadly weapon with the intent of committing great bodily injury, and exhibiting a firearm in the presence of an officer and sentenced to 23 years in prison. He would have likely served all 23 years, had Officer Rafael Perez — one of the officers whose false testimony had put Ovando in prison — not been caught stealing a million dollars of cocaine from an evidence locker in the LAPD property room. Perez’s arrest implied a serious and lengthy sentence that he bartered his way down by offering to testify about a number of cases officers in the CRASH unit had “put on” people, one of which was Ovando’s. (These allegations of widespread police misconduct effectively broke open the Rampart scandal, in which more than 70 police officers were implicated in everything from unprovoked shootings to drug-dealing, perjury to bank robbery. The scandal is one of the most widespread cases of documented police misconduct in US history.)
Ovando’s conviction was overturned two-and-a-half years into his sentence, in 1999. Not long after, he sued the County of LA and his prior public defender Tamar Toister for malpractice, alleging that she represented him incompetently during his trial. He claimed that Toister did not call two witnesses who could have confirmed that he was unarmed the day he was shot. In Toister’s defense, County lawyers said that she had used “reasonable litigation strategy” and that if she had called the witnesses Ovando wanted, damaging evidence about his gang affiliation would have surfaced.
When the case originally went to trial, a jury found in favor of Ovando and awarded him $6.5 million. But this decision was overturned — one of the jurors failed to disclose in the selection process that she was an actress who had starred in “Gang Warz,” a movie about the Rampart scandal, and the judge felt it unfair that all blame had been placed on Toister, and not on Perez and Durden. Ovando’s lawyers appealed this to the State Supreme Court and lost. They were set to start trial again on July 22nd, but will no longer have to since the case was formally dismissed, after the settlement agreement was reached, on the 3rd of last month.
Epilogues:
Rafael Perez was sentenced in 1998 to five years in prison for stealing cocaine from the LAPD. He served three years, and was released on parole in 2001. According to PBS, federal prosecutors have cut a deal with Perez’s former partner, Nino Durden, whose testimony may now be used to bring further charges against Perez.
Nino Durden was sentenced in 2002 to five years in prison, and served less than three.
Tamar Toister is still a public defender. She wrote her account of what went wrong at the trial, in 2000, here.
Javier Ovando has other cases in the works. He was arrested last year for apparently making criminal threats to the new couple that bought his Topanga Canyon mansion. And in that same week, he lead police officers in his Hummer on a high-speed chase from Glendale to South San Gabriel. The case is still open.
May Day Cops Keep Their Jobs
Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
LAPD officers near MacArthur Park on May Day 2008, a year after the Melee. Photo by Tom Andrews.
All the police officers accused of using excessive force in the 2007 May Day protests will keep their jobs, the LA Times reported this morning:
Of the four officers Bratton sent to the boards, one received an official reprimand for being guilty of unauthorized force but was found not guilty of misleading statements. A second officer charged with seven incidents of unauthorized force was found guilty of two of them and given a 12-day suspension. A third officer was found guilty of unauthorized force, conduct unbecoming an officer and misleading statements and given a 20-day suspension. A fourth officer was found guilty of two of seven counts of unauthorized force and received an official reprimand. Citing police personnel privacy rules, the department has not named the officers. Deputy Chief Mark Perez reported the panels’ decisions to the Police Commission. He said that officers repeatedly defended themselves by citing a “lack of training.” An internal investigation into the incident that left more than 200 demonstrators and journalists reporting injuries blamed poor leadership, overly aggressive tactics and lack of training.
Since both the investigators and the officers mentioned “a lack of training,” I asked a spokesperson at the LAPD what sort of new training will be given to officers who work with large crowd-disperal situations. I’m told it will take 10 days to get a response.
She’s Not a Very Nice Person
Thursday, June 25th, 2009
Olga Ochoa, Ender Betelcourt.
news spot on the conflict, produced for kpcc:
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The students who turned their back on LA Unified School Board President Monica Garcia last week, while she spoke at their 8th grade culmination ceremony, were not slackers or troublemakers, but students-of-the-month, honors kids, kids who very much took to heart the lessons they’d learned in their Social Justice small learning community at school. And so they were unprepared for the backlash, the school’s response, summarized in a statement from Principal Jeanette Stevens, dated Monday, June 22 –
During any school event, Liechty Middle School expects students to demonstrate respectful behavior. We have postponed distribution of approximately 15 eighth grade certificates until we are able to discuss the culmination events with those students and their parents.
Originally 65 students were denied their diploma; 50 of them later refuted any involvement in the head-turning and picked up their certificates the Monday after culmination. The final 15 did not deny turning their heads and they did not apologize for doing so. In fact, they — and many of their parents, also there Tuesday morning for the protest — wanted an apology from Ms. Stevens for the apparent humiliation she caused in withholding their diplomas. All over their signs were demands, “Respect our children” and (roughly, in translation from Spanish) “Apologize for Violating Our Rights.” Some of the signs also revealed assumptions not totally justified; conclusionsĀ prematurely reached. Ms. Stevens was not fired from Berendo, for example, but, a district official said, “appointed by Mr. Alonzo (Local District 4 Superintendent) based on her leadership abilities.” When I asked Ender (pictured above) how he knew Ms. Stevens had been fired, he said, totally confidently, “I used to be at Berendo and so did she.” I asked another 8th grader who Monica Garcia was, what her role was with the pink-slips and the threats of larger class sizes. I was expecting a job title. Instead he said, “She’s not a very nice person.”
John Liechty Middle School is new, open in 2007, and so is its staff. More than half of them have been pink-slipped in the last couple of months to make room for displaced teachers and bureaucrats from Beaudry who have the right-of-return to the classroom. It’s an issue in many ways outside of Monica Garcia’s hands, and hardly one she had time to deal with on Tuesday. The School Board was meeting to approve the final budget for the 2009-2010 school year, and all the budget cuts that go with it.
Less Ellis Island, More Back of the Yards
Thursday, June 25th, 2009
The Meades, from Ireland. I'm related to them on my dad's side, through many greats. Photo courtesy of my cousin Kate Browne, in Maryland.
Originally, this site was to be called MacArthur Park Media: Stories of a Modern-Day Ellis Island. This didn’t end up working out, mainly because MacArthur Park really isn’t a modern-day Ellis Island. (Maybe Tijuana or Nogales can make this claim, but MacArthur Park can’t: it isn’t an entry point.) I know and admit this to be true now. A couple of weeks ago, I still wanted to imagine I lived amidst legacy, so I asked the guys of Backstory With The American History Guys what was for a long time the central question that moved me to start MPM: assuming that culture of Ellis Island impacted the melting pot that European immigrants assimilated into in pre- 1920’s US, how will starting-points like MacArthur Park impact the current cultural climate in modern America? For example, I know that my however-many-great grandparents arrived from Ireland and Sweden and Germany and France to an Ellis Island in which their cultural identity was quickly and easily erased. Long names with many syllables were cut in half. My German ancestors said they spoke Deutsch; the immigration official nodded and marked them down as being Dutch. No one spoke their home language to their children, no one went back to their home country. Ties were cut right away. My dad said that he knew he was Irish as a kid only because he looked at the Italians and the Polish boys at his Catholic school and knew for certain he wasn’t either.
MacArthur Park has a culture in many ways opposite this — the neighborhood is about re-creating where immigrants have come from instead of erasing it. The markets are open-air and outside; everything is in Spanish (sometimes Korean), free English classes offered in the area are sparsely attended, since it’s so easy to be fully functional in other languages here. Of course the kids are crazy to assimilate — they’ve got Hannah Montana backpacks and the Nike swoosh buzzed into their haircut and they wear little socks with American flags on them — but the rest of the neighborhood, for better or for worse, seems completely content to imagine they are still in their home country even though many of them have gone to strenuous, expensive, sometimes death-defying lengths to get here. I know of course that there was Little Italy and Swedish pockets in Chicago and that plenty of Europeans were interested in keeping their cultural identity at least somewhat intact and maybe I’m just so many generations removed that I’m wrongly assuming that they assimilated with so little reservation. I also know that they came at a different time, when America wasn’t so totally in everyone’s face with Pizza Huts and MTV music videos all over the world, which I think rightly encourages people to hang onto whatever makes their way of doing things unique. Anyway, the point is, I don’t know, which is why I asked the Twentieth Century historian. He wrote back:
Devin,
What a thoughtful comment. Ā I am more inclined to think about the influence of the kinds of places that recent arrivals go to after the point of entry. Ā For all of its mythology, the emphasis on Ellis Island tends to obscure the varied settings that immigrants ended up in. Ā I am less familiar with the broad range of options today (I keep telling them that we need a twenty-first century guy!) but from anecdotal evidence, recent arrivals end up in a broad variety of settings. Ā I am also struck by how much more accepting our culturally pluralist society is today, than our Americanizing tendencies were one hundred years ago (not that there is not some residue.) Ā Thanks for listening and commenting.
Twentieth-Century Guy
What I should have asked him is to compare MacArthur Park to the chaotic and corrupt Back of the Yards neighborhood, vis a vis The Jungle. Which I think I probably like because then I get to imagine myself a modern Upton Sinclair.
Tamales On The Run
Friday, June 12th, 2009MacArthur Park Media’s first multimedia piece! Produced in collaboration with Anna Bosch of Ruido Photo. Starring Antonio Bautista. Also available en EspaƱol.
MacArthur Park Postcard
Monday, June 1st, 2009
I taught first grade at a public school here last year and we were lucky, really lucky, to have volunteers from 826LA visit us and write with us on mondays. The tutors were in fact so thoughtful and so kind that when one of them went away to New York for a couple of weeks, she sent all 22 kids in the class postcards. The postcards had pictures of all of New York’s most iconic monuments: Union Square, the Empire State Building, maps of NYC’s transit system. Later, when Elizabeth’s job demanded all of her and she could no longer come back, I asked the kids to make postcards of the neighborhood to send to her as a thank you. We reviewed what goes on a postcard: important, sometimes beautiful things in a place. I thought they were all going to draw the lake, maybe the park with the rose garden. But in fact, only a few of them did. Instead most of them completed the sentence frame The Empire State Building is to New York as ___ is to MacArthur Park with: the Food 4 Less. Since they had never really left the neighborhood, it hadn’t occurred to them that most of the stores in the area are chain stores, and are everywhere. Marlon, author of the postcard shown above, also drew the 99Ā¢ store, the bank, and five cockroaches, two of which are crawling on people’s heads.
Pleased To Meet You
Sunday, May 31st, 2009
photos by Louise Baker and Anna Bosch
MacArthur Park is a place many people come when they need immediately a fake ID and a tamale cart. They come from Mexico and El Salvador and mountains in Guatemala so rural and so remote that they do not even speak Spanish, but Kanjobal, K’iche’, Chuj. They come from trains and vans and the small space beneath the spare tire in trucks and they come here, to MacArthur Park, to start. It is a baffling, chaotic place to begin to assimilate and it is in this chaos that their view of America first takes shape.
If they are dropped off at the corner of Alvarado and Wilshire, and many newcomers are, then it is the 99Ā¢ store that they see first; there is also, down the street, the: 98Ā¢ store, 97Ā¢ store, and the $1 Mas o Menos store in which goods are routinely priced and sold for $25.99 and $30.99. Such obvious, unapologetic misrepresentation is totally normal in this neighborhood. A dreamier version of America is in fact why many of them have come at all and they are shocked, for example, when they arrive to find Los Angeles expensive– whatever American story they were told at home was apparently so exaggerated and so mythic as to leave out certain critical details like the fact that most people in this country pay rent. And if rent is not a surprise, then a last name is. Mothers go to register their kids for kindergarten as only “Marcos” and “Francisco” to which the school secretary says that the children need a last name to enroll. For whatever reason, she does not explain that often one of the key points in a last name is that it stays consistent in a family unit and so the mothers make do: they ask random students in the school office for their names, to borrow, so that they may please the bureaucracy and go home. Marcos is now “Marcos Miguel”; Francisco: “Francisco Pedro.” These are kids in huge families with new last names in America, all of them first names, all of them different.
And when school starts they come with their High School Musical backpack and sit down on the rug and say in total seriousness that yes they have pets, they have chinches and would the Miss like to see them? Almost everyone lives with bugs. MacArthur Park was developed shortly after the turn of the twentieth century to be dense and compact– this was never the Los Angeles of the single-family home with the lawn and the two-car garage. Its design was intended for white, wealthy, single people who worked downtown and commuted close by. That the residents were wealthy meant glazed brick buildings with ballrooms in the basement; that they were single meant that the units were small, mainly studios and one-bedrooms. When the wealthy left–when the streetcars were ripped up and the price of rent plummeted– the demographic changed, but the infrastructure did not. Into these small spaces moved families of eight, nine, ten, more than ten. MacArthur Park is the densest neighborhood in the United States, outside of Manhattan. You cannot buy corn tortillas in packages of less than sixty.
You also cannot buy chocolate chips or tampons here– the palate is distinctly Latin. All along the street are carts and blankets and booths with belts and cologne and calling cards on display; the vendors are nearby in mid-mantra. Tarjeta, tarjeta, tarjeta. ID, ID, ID Bonita? A lot of the stores double as churches in fact and congregations rent storefronts at 10, 11 o’clock at night for services. If they cannot afford the rent at even that rate then they hold church in the park on Sunday with bullhorns and folding chairs; for special occasions: a generator, a drum set, a full band.
Church is in Spanish and if not Spanish, then Kanjobal. School is in English. Everything else is somewhere in between. There is “Mucho Bargain” and “Regalos Para Baby Shower” and “Flue Shot”– signs written in such pure invention that no one knows whether they’re looking at poor English, poor Spanish, or a new burgeoning dialect, another Yiddish.
Institutional signs are less confused. Esperanza, Hope, is the name of one school; Camino Nuevo, A New Road, the name of another. More recently a park was built and it was named “Hope and Peace Park.” This neighborhood is a Project. Everywhere there is evidence of this attempt to re-invent and create distance from the MacArthur Park that in 1990 was the site of 30 murders; there was (is) also problems with prostitution, narcotics, gangs, and rampant car theft.
The May Day Melee in 2007 certainly did not help the PR efforts of those trying to promote the neighborhood, but they go on. Westlake Theatre is under renovation. Survelliance cameras surround MacArthur Park and police officers are everywhere. And yet there is still the unsettling sense that there is in fact no order here. Teenage girls throw down, three on one, slamming a girl’s head into the pavement and kicking in her stomach, in the middle of a pedestrian walkway, on a high-traffic street, in bright, stark daylight. Maybe one or two people honk, but no one gets out of the car, and the girl on the ground limps off to the El Pollo Loco wiping street grease and tears from her face. A chunky 10 year old boy holds himself and urinates onto the clear, glass storefront of the McDonalds with customers inside, sitting on stools staring right at him, making eye contact even, and no one misses a bite. Still we all see what we want to see, and so every weekend the newly arrived go to the park and pay $5 to have their picture taken in front of what looks like a giant postcard of a clean and bright and beautiful MacArthur Park and they say thank you to the nice photographer and leave looking relieved to now have a picture of the America they came here for.