“The contrast is shockingly stark,” says Brigham Yen, a downtown Los Angeles real-estate expert and chronicler of the area’s revitalisation on his site DTLA Rising. One wrong turn out of a trendy night spot or the Disney concert hall and you can find yourself in another world, where encampments of the drug-addicted and mentally ill spill out on to the sidewalk for block after block after block. Every Angeleno has seen these tents – always between the hours of 9pm and 6am, when police look the other way about camping on the streets. We know the victim lived in a tent he’d pitched it near the corner of San Pedro and 6th street. Known locally by the name “Africa” or “Cameroon”, he was shot by several officers after allegedly grabbing one of their guns beyond that, facts about the precise sequence of events have been slow to emerge. The neighbourhood went from metaphorical to literal battleground last Sunday when, on a rare rainy day in this city, an altercation with Los Angeles Police Department officers resulted in the death of a 45-year-old resident. It’s no exaggeration to call Skid Row one of the main battlegrounds for the future of Los Angeles. The struggles over what to do with it now reveal the extent of the challenge facing LA in its current transformation into a denser, more traditionally urban city. Skid Row’s very existence illustrates a major planning mistake the southern Californian metropolis made in the past. Los Angeles’s Skid Row, a common name for a once-common form of down-and-out quarter in American cities, persists as the last neighbourhood of its kind. But below the belt he’s in just his running shorts and shoes-he likes to change out of his robe quickly to maximize the time of his lunchtime run.I n the centre of one of the world’s most high-profile cities lies a concentration of desperate poverty unlike any other in the developed world. Under the black robe he wears on the bench, Mitchell is in a shirt and tie as you’d expect. It was a blessing-he’s a runner to the core now, even when he’s in the courtroom. It was too early in his career to say no, so he joined the team. He ran his first race because he was asked by his boss at the District Attorney’s Office to run a relay. Mitchell had been running for about 15 years when he started the club. “There are so many little things that emanate from this very basic idea of just running,” he says. “He looked me up and introduced me to The Mission.”Īs soon as Mitchell got there, he decided the best way to reach the people was through running. “For some reason he decided he liked the way I treated him, even though I sent him to prison,” Mitchell says. It all began when a young man he had previously sentenced to prison, Roderick Brown, contacted him through the Midnight Mission. Judge Mitchell, who is married with three grown children, started the running club in 2012.
0 kommentar(er)
