CommentsAT LENGTH--Joe Buscaino was first elected to the Los Angeles City Council District 15 on Jan. 17, 2012 to fill the vacancy left by Janice Hahn, following her successful bid for the U.S. House of Representatives.
He had no previous elected experience unless you count class president at San Pedro High School or raising enough money to be honorary mayor just before running for council office. His previous career, after graduating from California State University of Dominguez Hills with a Bachelor of Arts degree in communication, was as a Los Angeles Police Department officer. This explains his police-centric view of city governance and his total reliance on digital communications, which circumvent the local media whenever possible.
By contrast, this publication gets daily press releases from Gov. Gavin Newsom, Mayor Eric Garcetti and Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn just to name a few electeds. From Buscaino’s office, by contrast, we get a once weekly diet of filtered self-promotional “good news” about him. It’s the Good News Joe selfie report that comes out on Fridays. And it never carries a disparaging word about anything.
In these reports, by Buscaino’s propagandist Branimir Kvartuc, you would come to believe that everything is just hunkydory here in the 15th District, that he had made steady gains in addressing the homeless crisis, crime and making his district the envy of all the city. The truth is far more complex and self-evident as both crime and homelessness have increased beyond what palliative actions he has used to cure either.
His approach to most things that can’t be glossed over or constricted by court orders ends up appearing more like enforcements than solutions. It’s a bit like if you only have a hammer every problem looks like a nail.
On homelessness, it would appear on the surface that he and the city are making great strides with several Bridge Home shelters opened and finally a “tiny home” village being constructed and lots of apartments being built. And yet, the average homeless count from 2020 showed that even with all the efforts the City and County of Los Angeles made to provide shelter for the 63,703 homeless, the population increased by 12.7%. One can only guess what a year of the pandemic will actually cause as the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority count was postponed due to COVID-19 this year.
While the LAPD and Buscaino have backed off the strict “no camping on public property” laws, mainly because the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the city of Boise, Idaho in a landmark decision, local citizenry continue to cry out in opposition to public encampments, both in support for more solutions and against them as being a blight. If not for federal Judge David O. Carter holding the city council’s feet to the fire over enforcement without beds, things would be far worse. One of the few items that never made it into Buscaino’s propaganda reports is that Judge Carter actually convened his court in the council chambers to grill all 15 council members on exactly what they were going to do. Shortly thereafter, the “pallet (tiny) homes’’ made an appearance on the 15th District office’s to-do list.
Now tiny homes wouldn’t seem to be much of a big deal except for the fact that the sudden awareness five years ago of the homeless problem countywide came about because the Central San Pedro Neighborhood Council supported a young activist by the name of Elvis Summers to build tiny homes for a few people living without shelter down on Beacon Street. This spurred an anti-homeless social media uprising that was heard all the way down at city hall and picked up by every news outlet in Southern California.
Prior to this, Buscaino considered homelessness a nail and enforcement measures the hammer. He wouldn’t listen to the community activists who understood the issues. At the time, I explained to those who were listening that what we have is an octagonal problem trying to be solved with a three-point solution. Today the councilman has an eight-point program that has evolved by order of the judge, but which hasn’t done more than take a few hundred souls off the streets. Well at least it’s something, but still not enough. And now he wants to drag this hammer and nail approach to the mayor’s office. It would be different if he was actually building something out of wood, but he’s not.
Back when the NIMBYs rose up waving the Saving San Pedro banner against the tiny homes, they were all for their Sicilian hometown boy. But the day after he announced his run for mayor, the majority of them on Facebook wouldn’t support him for dog catcher. His detractors on both the right and the left criticize him for the same failures, albeit from opposing perspectives. The homeless crisis seems to be the main focal point with few affordable housing units being built or even proposed among the various developments he has tried to rush through city planning. And then there are the continued enforcement sweeps to clean up encampments where no sanitation services are provided, no safe campsites are provided and the local residents rightly complain about the squalor.
What Buscaino doesn’t get is that he has had the power to cure much of the homeless crisis from the very beginning, he just wasn’t willing to listen to anything outside of his own social media bell jar that conflicted with his hammer and nail approach.
In light of the recent Chaleff Report on LAPD response to the demonstrations last summer, it seems unlikely that electing a former police officer for mayor would get wide support. That he is so committed to being a cop in this era of defund and reimagine policing isn’t going to garner much support from the growing array of LAPD critics citywide. Especially since he has not supported any of the most popular public safety reforms.
In the end, Councilman Buscaino’s rather boosterish approach to leading the district has left many wondering if he’s qualified to lead the largest city in California when what is really needed is leadership that listens to the people and actually fixes the problems.
(James Preston Allen is the founding publisher of Random Lengths News. He has been involved in the Los Angeles Harbor Area community for more than 40 years.) Photo at top: S. Beacon St. by the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro. Photo by Brenda López.
-cw
