Some people don’t like Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti — or, as one critic called him, Mayor Garsh***y.
And one reason some folks are less than ecstatic fans is the city’s massive and expanding homeless problem.
Last week, CNN reported:
As Los Angeles city and county officials struggle to shelter and build housing for nearly 60,000 people who are living on the streets, they are facing resistance — not just to new structures in neighborhoods where residents fear more crime and blight, but also from some within the homeless community, who insist they would rather continue living independently on the streets in their tents.
For LA resident Alexandra Datig, it’s time to trade Eric in for a new model. Hence her recall effort, which she discussed with City News Service:
“The homeless situation is in a state of emergency, and everything that we’ve done has not worked. At this point, I think we need an intervention, and we need to recall this mayor.”
Alexandra’s created the site www.recallthelamayor.com, which provides a ton of info about the issue as well as her reasons why Eric should be removed.
“He can’t handle the crisis,” she explained to the Los Angeles Times. “He needs to step down.”
On Wednesday, the activist appeared on Tucker Carlson to outline the situation (see the video below):
“I think we are living in third world conditions that are a threat to public health here in Los Angeles, and we have a mayor who is completely ignorant of that and he is an abysmal failure. … We have this position in the city of Los Angeles where our leaders seem to think that it’s okay to leave people on the street to die, just whistling past the graveyard. We have had over 3600 people dying on the streets of Los Angeles in the past five years.”
As for her Third World claim, Tucker recently welcomed historian Victor Davis Hanson, who claimed the entire state has reached Third World status (here).
Alexandra told Tucker she doesn’t wanna take any more crap (like here):
“The Los Angeles Times reported there is a $57 million a year program just to get toilets on the streets. We are dealing with environmental crimes — the type that are illegal in the state of California. You can’t allow fecal matter to go down the storm drains. It’s been happening for the past six years. It’s illegal to do that. We need to have people committed to state hospitals under conservatorship and people need to be taken off the streets. We need health screenings — these people are dying in our streets, they are vulnerable to diseases because of their immune systems…there is no prevention, no treatment. There is no interdiction. There is no incarceration.”
She’s filing a notice of intention with the city clerk. If approved, it’ll require over 300,000 signatures of registered city voters. Alexandra also started a Change.org petition; as of Tuesday afternoon, it had 8,000 signatures.
And now I’ll do something I virtually never do: I’ll share a personal anecdote. “How bad is the homeless situation?” you might ask.
One night while driving downtown, I turned onto a side street to nowhere and everything went dark. I guess the streetlights were out. But there was a giant crowd — what looked like maybe 1000 zombies all up and down the road, some walking and hanging out in the road. It was if they’d claimed the street as their village. And about 50 yards ahead, there lay something on my side of the two-lane street. Something that literally took up the entirety of my lane. I couldn’t quite make it out, but it looked like a tarp. As I came up slowly, I began to see that it was a bunch of blankets piled on top of one another. I creeped up to it. And there in the center of the blankets — in the center of the lane — was a woman sleeping.
She was just in bed for the night. A bed she’d made in the middle of the lane.
That’s how bad.
Alexandra Datig thinks she knows how to make it better. I hope she — or someone else who will come along with a different idea — is right.
See more on LA homelessness in the Vice News video below.
-ALEX
See 3 more pieces from me:
Find all my RedState work here.
And please follow Alex Parker on Twitter and Facebook.
Thank you for reading! Please sound off in the Comments section below. For iPhone instructions, see the bottom of this page.
If you have an iPhone and want to comment, select the box with the upward arrow at the bottom of your screen; swipe left and choose “Request Desktop Site.” If it fails to automatically refresh, manually reload the page. Scroll down to the red horizontal bar that says “Show Comments.”
Join the conversation as a VIP Member