BLOOMBERG NEWS
Copyright 2006 Newsday, Inc.
LOS ANGELES - Police Chief William Bratton says that within five years he can do for Skid Row what he helped do for New York’s Times Square: purge drug dealers, addicts and transients.
“We got it right in the 1990s,” Bratton said in an interview last week. “If I can do in L.A. what I did in New York, with half the resources, the legacy is proved.”
Skid Row, with about 7,000 homeless people, has defied cleanup efforts for more than 20 years. The blight deters investors from developing lofts and other projects that are reviving other parts of downtown, Bratton says.
As New York police commissioner, Bratton helped former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani set the stage for a commercial revival in Times Square by sweeping away peep shows, panhandlers and three-card monte games.
Bratton, 58, has a third of the officers in Los Angeles that he had in New York to cover an area that’s 66 percent larger. To maximize resources, the chief is copying Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s Pacific strategy in World War II, seizing control of key areas and using them as bases to clean up adjoining neighborhoods.
Bratton’s plan to salvage Skid Row includes more street lights, which he says helped reduce crime in Times Square. Undercover surveillance, more officers and a mental health clinic in the local police station also will help, he says.
Some people question whether those steps are adequate. Los Angeles needs to create more shelters around the city and county to get homeless people off the street for Bratton’s plan to work, says Bob Erlenbusch of the Los Angeles Coalition to End Hunger and Homelessness, an advocacy group.
January 15, 2006