Here's How the Policies of Newsom, Gascon, and Weiner Led to 'the Trafficked Girls of LA's Figueroa St.'

In a random act of journalism, the New York Times did an investigative piece headlined, "Can Anyone Rescue the Trafficked Girls of L.A.’s Figueroa Street?" The gray lady did a deep dive on a corridor near the University of Southern California (USC) in South Los Angeles known as "the Blade," which is notorious for prostitution, drug dealing, and child sex trafficking.

While the piece detailed the circumstances that led to the explosion of sex trafficking and crime and documented a trafficking sting involving a young victim, the journalist never bothered to answer the query in the headline. The potential law enforcement endeavors and rescue are merely scratching the surface of a leviathan that has been years, and even decades in the making, enabled by the progressive left and their bought and paid for politicians.

I attended USC in the late '90s, and the stretch of Figueroa that the article focuses on has always been beyond sketchy. Almost 40 years later, despite the gentrification that has occurred in South Los Angeles and Exposition Park, it has only gone from bad to worse.

So, who's at fault?

RedState columnist Steve Williams attested to how long this problem has existed and put the fault where it most belongs: from politicians like longtime Democrat Congresswoman Maxine Waters (CA-43), who supposedly has congressional oversight of this part of the city, to Governor Gavin Newsom, whose social justice predilections give him the cover to sign laws that coddle criminals and enable criminality.

I leased two 1 bedroom units on 74th and Fig last month. Leased a 3 bedroom on 81st and Fig back in August.

In 2024, when I was running for Congress against Maxine Waters, I was almost held up at gun point at 95th and Fig delivering campaign signs to a supporter while the…
— Steve Williams (@SteveAWilliamsX) October 27, 2025

I leased two 1 bedroom units on 74th and Fig last month.
Leased a 3 bedroom on 81st and Fig back in August.
In 2024, when I was running for Congress against Maxine Waters, I was almost held up at gun point at 95th and Fig delivering campaign signs to a supporter while the prostitutes watched from the motel across the street.
PJ Watts Crips even helped me put up campaign signs at the 76 gas station on Manchester and Fig.
Also, from 1989 to 1993, I watched as the pimps and prostitutes controlled Fig from Exposition Boulevard to Imperial Highway while I attended USC.
Nothing’s changed in 36 years.
Hmmm… Maxine’s been in Congress for 34 years representing South Central L.A. and her buddy, Scott Weiner wrote the state bill that keeps LAPD from cracking down on the issue.
It’s sad how it all works.

Newsom's extended pandemic shutdown also played a large role (emphasis added):

For the 77th Street Division, which covers the northern half of the Figueroa Corridor, prostitution had always been a problem. But in recent years, the officers had seen the magnitude of child sex trafficking explode. Part of that boom happened during the pandemic, when many girls were out of school and immersed in social media, where traffickers lurked. Teachers who would ordinarily follow up on absences or report signs of neglect could not.
Gangs that had long sold drugs began to take advantage of Figueroa’s lucrative opportunity. With a dozen girls, one trafficker could easily make $12,000 a night. “Drugs are sold once and gone forever, but girls can be resold indefinitely,” said Navarro, who had been in the division for two decades. Motel owners who noticed the parades of customers but feared the gangs’ retribution kept quiet.

A great deal of responsibility for the marked increase in the enablement of criminal behavior lies at the feet of the Soros-backed Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon. In 2020, the voters, assisted by rampant mail-in ballot fraud, pushed out incumbent L.A. D.A. Jackie Lacey and voted in former San Francisco D.A. George Gascon to take her place. Gascon immediately implemented his activist D.A. and social justice agenda, as our Managing Editor Jennifer Van Laar reported at the time, instituting eight Special Directives on his first day. One of those terrible portions: decriminalizing loitering and prostitution — no exceptions.

Certain misdemeanors are to be “declined or dismissed before arraignment and without conditions unless ‘exceptions’ or ‘factors for consideration’ exist,” including: [...]
Loitering – Penal Code § 647(b),(c), (d), (e)
Loitering To Commit Prostitution – Penal Code § 653.22(a)(1)

State of the Los Angeles DA Race - George Gascon Faces Likely Ouster

And business boomed.

Over the years, the Blade had become much busier than when Ana started: more girls, more customers, more traffickers idling in their Hellcats and Porsches on the side streets, watching to make sure their girls didn’t hide any money and didn’t snitch. Ana had seen the Blade expand from three main intersections of Figueroa to more than three miles. She had met girls brought in from the East Coast and the Deep South, and there sometimes seemed to be four times as many minors as before — easy to spot by their over-the-top makeup and unsteady gait. The police helicopters Ana used to notice hovering overhead with search lights seemed to become infrequent. Eventually, she said, they disappeared completely.

Why pour money and effort into patrols if police cannot make any arrests and deputy D.A.s cannot actually prosecute crime?

Soon every intersection from Gage to Imperial had girls waving and waiting to be rented out, some of them imported by traffickers from Oregon or Texas or Alabama. By the end of 2023, the city attorney had taken to calling Figueroa the Kiddie Stroll because so many of the girls weren’t even 13.

While Gascon is another convenient puppet in this mess, the lion's share of blame belongs to those who create the laws: a governor and a California legislature that cares more for their progressive credentials and pet projects than they do for human lives.

In the name of decriminalizing sex work and removing stigma from marginalized communities, California State Sen. Scott Weiner (D-San Francisco) championed the ridiculously named "Safer Streets for All Act" (SB 357), which was supposed to protect "people" from discriminatory arrests and harassment based on their attire or profession.

This was the first legislative initiative of the DecrimSexWork CA Coalition, made up of current and former sex workers, organizers, and allies, and it repealed the California Penal Code Section 653.22, which criminalized loitering for the intent to engage in sex work. In other words, he's saying we can't discriminate against sex workers because they look like sluts — they have a right to earn a living just like the rest of us! Since Weiner deemed that many sex workers were LGBTQ and minorities, then this already protected class deserved even more "protections."

Our bill to repeal the crime of “loitering with intent to commit prostitution” — arresting someone simply for standing on a sidewalk & “appearing” to be a sex worker — passed the Senate.

This crime targets trans, Black & Brown women & needs to go.

Thank you, colleagues! #SB357 pic.twitter.com/zrIdOEPK9V
— Senator Scott Wiener (@Scott_Wiener) June 2, 2021

In 2022, Gov. Gavin Newsom gleefully signed it into law, and it was enforced in 2023.

As trafficking grew, the means to deal with it shrank. In 2021, the Police Department’s central human-trafficking unit was disbanded following budget cuts, leaving each division fewer resources to tackle the problem. According to Navarro, the 77th Street Division was supposed to have six investigators at Armendariz’s rank in its vice unit. Instead, she was the only one.
Their jobs grew even more challenging when California repealed the law allowing the police to arrest women who loitered with the intent to engage in prostitution. The repeal, known as SB 357, was intended to prevent profiling of Black, brown and trans women based on how they dressed. But when it was implemented in January 2023, the effect was that uniformed officers could no longer apprehend groups of girls in lingerie on Figueroa, hoping to recover minors among them. Now officers needed to be willing to swear they had reason to suspect each girl was underage — but with fake eyelashes and wigs, it was nearly impossible to tell. One girl told vice officers that her trafficker had explained things succinctly: “We run Figueroa now,” he said.

Many Angeleans became fed up with the increase in violent and opportunistic crime that occurred on Gascon's watch. In 2024, they gave him the boot, and Californians statewide voted in Prop. 36, which restored felony penalties to crimes such as burglary, property damage, and drug-related offenses. However, Newsom, who tried to block and vociferously opposed Prop. 36, has refused to fund the law, citing budget deficits. However, he has all the money in the world to push through his gerrymandering scam, Prop. 50.

Current L.A. District Attorney Nathan Hochman repealed Gascon's directives, and prosecutors returned to actually charging and prosecuting criminals - but are now hamstrung by Wiener's law.

So, can anyone rescue the trafficked girls of L.A.’s Figueroa Street? Assemblywoman Maggy Krell (D-Sacramento) bucked her party in the legislature and took a stand against sex trafficking. She introduced AB 379, which made it a felony to purchase sex from a minor 17 years of age or younger, and fought hard against opposition from the leaders of the Assembly and the Senate to see the law voted in.

At this point, Newsom knew that he needed to look presidential, so he moderated, expressing support for this bill and the age ceiling, which members like Senator Scott Weiner tried to get reduced.

AB 379 faces obstacles in the Senate led by Scott Weiner (D-San Francisco). Weiner remains adversarial to parental rights, authoring and promoting bills that lower the age of consent and eroding protections for the underaged.

Despite the legislature's roadblocks and Weiner's vocal opposition, the bill was passed, and Newsom did the right thing and signed it into law.

Dive Deeper: California’s Anti-Sex Trafficking Bill Passes With Age Ceiling in Place, Serving CA Dems a Huge Loss

NOPE! To Kick Off Pride Month, CA Sen. Scott Wiener Claims California's Kids Are 'Our Kids'

While the NYT clutches its pearls over the horror of trafficked girls, it continues to run cover for the politicians who foster the atmosphere and push the legislation that keeps this blight in place. Last Wednesday, the NYT penned a puff piece on Weiner after he announced he would be running for Democrat Rep. Nancy Pelosi's (CA-11) congressional seat.

After serving on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Mr. Wiener was elected to the State Legislature in 2016. He has played a pivotal role in the advancement of bills to accelerate housing construction in California, including legislation enacted this year to allow tall apartment buildings near transit stops over the objections of local officials.
If Mr. Wiener wins his race, he would become the first gay person to represent San Francisco in federal elected office.
Almost anywhere else, Mr. Wiener would be considered liberal. But in San Francisco, some progressives have dismissed him as a corporate-friendly Democrat because his laserlike focus on building more housing has benefited developers.
Nationally, he has been called by Breitbart News “California’s most radical legislator” for writing laws that include making California a sanctuary state for transgender people and banning Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from wearing masks. He said he had regularly received death threats.
He has not shied away from scrapping with Fox News reporters and conservatives such as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia. He sometimes posts images of himself in skimpy clothing from the Folsom Street Fair, an annual San Francisco festival that celebrates the kink and leather communities. He said he would not stop living authentically if he were elected to Congress.
“I’m going to be me,” he said.

The NYT failed to mention his "pivotal role" in the horrific fallout from SB 357 or the other laws that Weiner has championed, which erode parental rights and harm minors. Instead, it prefers to fluff and prop up another corrupt politician who could potentially elevate his less-than-savory proclivities toward these types of laws onto the national stage.

Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.

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