Staying In Downtown Los Angeles Showed Me How Far The City Has Fallen

I was in Los Angeles last week to cover the wave of protests against President Trump and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Most of the main protests were in the heart of downtown, so I naturally stayed at a hotel a few blocks from there as getting a rental car did not make sense for the task.

Between 2017-2022, I spent a lot of time in Los Angeles County as my Mom lived in Burbank. While most of that time was spent in the San Fernando Valley, we did go to Hollywood, Santa Monica, and even downtown Los Angeles. But this was the first time I spent days near city hall.

What I saw there, outside the protests, disgusted me.

The expectation for any major city in the United States is the downtown area is the cleanest and safest, even in a post-2020 world. While Democratic cities have certainly taken a hit from their idiotic policies, you can still find good areas downtown. Not great, but good.

I remember going to Skid Row in 2019 for a story. It was as expected, but there was a clear line of where it started and where it ended. Today, there is no line. There is an overall grime you can see and feel when walking on the sidewalk. I’m not expecting streets paved with gold, but Chicago’s Loop has a cleaner atmosphere than downtown Los Angeles. Even outside the “nice and fancy” restaurants, as soon as you step out the doors, you’re confronted with that grime.

Then there are the drug addicts who are everywhere. I take no issue with homeless people, but the problem is the drugs today make them unpredictable zombies. Using drugs out in the open, harassing people walking by, and adding to the aforementioned grim, you have to be alert at all times when walking the street. You wouldn’t know the state has spent billions of dollars to “solve” the homelessness crisis if you never saw the reports.

Not to be outdone, there’s the trash and graffiti left behind by the recent protests. The walls surrounding US-101, where protesters walked on to disrupt traffic, are still covered in anti-ICE and anti-U.S. graffiti two weeks later. The walls and steps at city hall are in the same condition, with added trash from previous demonstrators. The bus stations near the sites are likewise covered in graffiti. My assumption is the city believes it is not worth the effort to clean up because vandals will do it again, not thinking to stop people from doing it in the first place.

The most damning indictment of the city giving a “what does it matter?” response is the aftermath of the stabbing I witnessed on Friday. Hundreds of high school students walked out of class to protest ICE. The protest had barely started outside city hall when multiple fights broke out, resulting in a student get stabbed in the back. He bled out to the point where there were large spatters of blood on the sidewalk. Not only did I film it, but I accidentally stepped in it while observing the chaos.

Police came in, dispersed the crowd, and set up police tape because it was a crime scene. Ok, that’s normal. What surprised me is more than 24 hours later, long after police left and the police tape was torn down, the blood was still there! No effort was made to clean the blood that was still sitting there next to a playground where children were playing right across from city hall!

It seems like a small thing, and in the grand scheme of things it is, but it speaks to how these once-great cities, or so I’m told, have fallen into despair because people just don’t care. Not the voters, not the politicians.

Staying in downtown made me understand why people who have true wealth would rather stay up in the hills and risk devastating wildfires than live in a place like that.

I’m certainly glad I do not.

(You can watch my coverage of the protests here.)