“This city is going crazy,” my Lyft driver muttered, as we watched a car make a left turn right in front of a speeding ambulance, sirens wailing to wake the dead. “People have lost respect for order and laws, they’ve lost their human kindness and dignity,” he said. “And that hurts.”

It’s been more than six months since I wrote my last “Letter From LA,” and my only excuse: health problems and general ennui about life in Los Angeles. The first is easy to get over — and in fact is almost over — as I’m buttoning up a two month immunotherapy treatment after a mid-June weeklong stay at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital for bladder surgery (a stay that I would not wish on my worst enemy — the care and food was so bad that I’m still reeling).

The hurt from the treatment gets less and less as time goes by. But the worst hurt is what’s happening to my beloved Los Angeles and Hollywood.

This year began with torrential rains that were described as “atmospheric rivers” (relentless storms wreaked havoc on roadways — a massive sinkhole in one neighborhood swallowed a car and a truck, leading to a dramatic rescue by firefighters) — followed by wildfires; late in the summer we had a hurricane and then earthquakes. But what’s horrible is the rampant crime and disorder:

• Smash & grab crime waves, also called flashmob crimes (30 to as many as 50 people, all believed to be between the ages of 18 and 25, barged into the Nordstrom at the Topanga Mall in Canoga Park, getting away with $300,000 worth of merchandise; trashed an Yves Saint Laurent store at the Americana at Brand; robbed a Nike store in East Los Angeles; a Costa Mesa Gucci store; and other, smaller high-end mom & pop jewelry stores on Melrose)
• home invasions
• violent dog-napping
• a spike in arson attacks (car fires, dumpster fires, trash can fires)

• roving gangs of catalytic converter thieves (who use a reciprocating saw and cut the unit right out of a car’s exhaust system in less than three minutes; the parts are worth up to several hundred dollars for the value of its precious metals, which are platinum, palladium and rhodium, all used in a broad range of high-tech applications)
• now that gas prices in LA have risen above $6.00 a gallon, there’s been a rash of gas-stealing crimes in which intrepid thieves drill through gas-tank flaps/doors to siphon fuel
• trash ridden streets (the city is being smothered in garbage from the proliferating homeless encampments)

• homeless encampments popping up everywhere, mentally unstable men and women walking around everywhere — making the streets seem like a set for an episode of “The Walking Dead” (by the way,the LAFD estimates 54 percent of its calls are related to homeless encampments)
• fentanyl overdoses by teenagers thinking they’re taking ecstasy
• crazy, reckless drivers: with the proliferation of Lyft and Uber taxi services and pandemic-fueled home deliveries, double-parking has become a way of life, blocking streets and causing traffic jams. The proverbial rolling “California stop” has now become an epidemic. Tail-gating and crazy speeders have become the norm (According to Allstate, “when it comes to the worst cities to drive in, Los Angeles takes the top spot. Not only do its citizens have to endure long hours of traffic jams due to the concentration of cars, but they are also at a higher risk of getting into an accident. Nationally, Los Angeles is the sixth most likely city to be involved in an automobile collision. LA also has the highest rate of motor vehicle incidents resulting in injuries and fatalities”
• copper wire theft: Copper wire thieves have targeted the Metro rail system and street lights on Los Angeles roads and freeways, costing the city about $4 million a year; Caltrans has spent about $24 million over the last four years in repairs according to the Los Angeles Times (I used to take my friend’s dog on walks through a grassy area in the Hollywood Bowl parking lot; one day some gigantic boulders appeared randomly in the green areas and I couldn’t figure out why until saw their exact placement — over the access panels to the park’s street lights)

• bad air: A report by IQAir a company that helps track global air quality, found that LA has the most polluted air out of over 2,400 cities analyzed in 2022
• LA is the second-most vulnerable city for rat infestation in the US, behind only NYC, according to a 2023 study by home service industry website Home Gnome
• real estate developments all over the city are replacing smaller, older apartments with high-rise, mixed use “luxury” buildings with jacked up rents where renters pay $3500 a month for a one-bedroom apartment which, in turn leads to …
• a dearth of affordable housing with apartments and homes priced out of reach for most middle and lower class residents; more than half of Angelenos are renters, and almost half of renters spend at least half their income on housing. That’s way beyond the federal definition of unaffordable housing (devoting over one-third of household income to housing). And it correlates with a rise in homelessness

The Los Angeles Next Door social media platforms are a hotbed of worried Angelenos citing muggings, break-ins, thievery, shootings, car-jackings, problems with the homeless — so much so that it’s amazing that anyone leaves their home. In fact, when I posted a complaint at Next Door Hollywood about some egregious homeless activity, Next Door lit up like crazy and my post received thousands and thousands of views and comments: there were 12.5K views in five days compared to 1.4K views over a photo and complaint about people not picking up their dog poop — right under a dog-poop-bag dispenser.

And some neighborhoods are more susceptible to crime. According to an article, “10 Worst Neighborhoods In Los Angeles 2023: Beyond the Glamour,” in the Southwest Journal web magazine, Hollywood is 109% more dangerous than the national average, total crime is 109% higher than the national average, violent crime is 231% higher than the national average, property crime is 84% higher than the national average and the chance of being a victim of crime in Hollywood is 1 in 21.

Despite the anecdotal, tabloid-like media reporting, crime in Los Angeles is actually down this year — and more than a little. Homicides are down 24%, from 269 in 2022 to 203 this year (through August 26). Rapes are down 17%, robberies 12%. Citywide, property crimes are level for the last several years. But personal and other thefts have increased 14% this year and are up 42% from this time two years ago, while motor vehicle theft declined by 27%.

Some of this is hyperbole but I really think that life in Los Angeles has hit a new low.

 

Which leads me to the “mean world syndrome,” first coined by mass media researcher George Gerbner, who developed a “cultivation” theory that postulated that long-term exposure to television shapes how consumers perceive the world; the more television people watch, the more likely they are to hold a view of reality closer to what television depicts; because of the violence on TV, people start to see the world as more dangerous than it actually is. He tested this hypothesis by surveying people who watched violent TV shows, assessed their views on violence in their neighborhood, then compared that to actual crime statistics. Invariably, TV watchers saw the outside world as much more violent than it really was. Though Gerbner did his research in the 1970s and 80s, it’s not hard to extrapolate his finding to the negative influence of violent movies, reality TV shows and video games, and the further amplification of a mean world via social media (Next Door, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc.). And this doesn’t even take into account the myriad studies that make a direct connection between violent TV, games and movies with violent behavior. That’s for another day.

Not to be all doom and gloom: While in a garden near my apartment, I was surprised to see several Monarch butterflies fluttering around the bushes and trees. In the last decade, there was widespread fear that their numbers were precipitously in decline. But since last year, new data shows that Western Monarch butterfly numbers in California has increased to almost 250,000. This one-year trend doesn’t mark a full recovery since, historically, Monarchs numbered in the millions along the California coast. Still, that’s a bright spot in our current ecological disruption.

And those butterflies are emblematic of a Los Angeles-past, a time of happiness and endless possibilities for kids growing up on the West side of the city. In the 1950s and 60s, LA and Venice and Hollywood seemed like golden plains of never-ending fun; the beaches were glowing bastions of warms sands and cool waves; the streets were wide open and safe and beckoning to young drivers to find new vistas. Especially if you were white and middle class. And went to any of the West LA high schools.

This weekend marks the 60th reunion of my Venice High School graduation class, and though I won’t be attending — my immunotherapy treatments make traveling too difficult — I began to ponder lost dreams, lost desires and lost friends. Earlier this summer, before my treatments, I was driving on an errand, wondering what had happened to one or another of my classmates, when the Four Seasons came on the radio: