Sorry for the crappy quality photo. I was trying to record and Tweet at the same time. There’s a better video below.

A crowd of roughly 50–60 concerned citizens gathered outside the residence of LA Mayor Eric Garcetti on Saturday afternoon to protest a drug and homelessness crisis that has boiled over into an emergency. LA’s official mayoral mansion, the Getty House, is located in the tony and entirely-homeless-free neighborhood of Hancock Park.

Nearly everywhere else in the city, residents have noticed a drastic uptick in tent cities, public defecation, erratic behavior, and open-air drug use that makes walking LA’s streets a veritable nightmare. A recent homeless count found the surge is even higher than the most liberal estimates predicted.

The protest was sparked by outsider Mayoral candidate Kevin Dalton as a compelling way to make LA’s ruling elite answer for its brazen NIMBY hypocrisy.

His promotional materials illustrate the idea:

“If Garcetti will not address the homeless epidemic, we will bring the epidemic to his home address.”

The idea, in a nutshell, was to camp on Garcetti’s block, just to show him the absurdity of his policies. If it’s legal to sleep on the streets, why not sleep on the streets of Hancock Park? If Garcetti wants to reign over a city where drug-fueled tent cities are open operating — where neighborhoods are actively prevented from cleaning themselves up — then surely he wouldn’t mind if his own neighborhood accommodated the same. This, anyway, was the idea.

Protestors held signs that said “HEROIN AND METH CRISIS,” “HHH Haphazard: Help for the Homeless,” and “Senior Citizens DYING on the streets of our RICH city is unacceptable.”

Chants included “Get your pooper scooper out!” “Enforce the laws” and “Stop the drugs!”

The primary complaint was that almost everyone — the homeless, the addicted, the middle-class residents of Los Angeles who can’t afford to live in mansions miles away from the problem, and tourists — suffers from the current regime, yet the people with the power to do anything about it don’t seem to care. Part of the reason for that lack of care is the framing of the issue as a “housing crisis,” which makes the omnipresent drug and danger elements easier to shuffle under the rug. If there simply aren’t enough homes, then it’s an “unsolvable problem,” which is something Garcetti has said, before begging for even more funds (Hey Eric, what if the solution isn’t more money?).

There are other little things that irk people too. For example, older Angelenos noted that the Getty House didn’t use to have a six-foot fence around it, which is seen as even more NIMBY-ism from Garcetti. Interestingly, the mayoral mansions in both New York and LA are recently ringed with high fences, which many see as hypocritical given the progressive values of the mayors that inhabit them. Mayoral walls symbolize the hollow morals of the global elite: throw money at the problem and run away.

There was a heavy police foot presence monitoring the crowd, probably about one cop for every 5–6 protestors, (ironic considering the lack of foot patrols where they are needed most) but there was little animosity between protestors and police. The fed-up public and the police are, politically speaking, on the same side. LAPD is equally frustrated with its own inability to enforce the laws.

LAPD’s hands are tied due to a lack of resources and a local media that portrays the LAPD as violent fascists for trying to enforce the law. There is also the Mitchell Settlement, which police have told me makes it impossible to clean up homeless encampments.

(The Mitchell Settlement says, essentially, that cops can’t throw away the “personal property” of homeless people because it’s a civil rights violation. In practice, that means they can’t clean up anything off the streets, as it could all be personal property. It has caused police downtown to throw up their hands and say “there’s nothing we can do.”)

Simultaneously, the city government has failed to use additional resources provided by taxpayers to make even the slightest inroads into remedying the chaos. It is legal to sleep on the streets (although not in cars, of course, as that could disturb the people living in Garcetti’s neighborhood) and the Mitchell Settlement means you can’t clean up the resulting mess. Meanwhile, city funds are pouring onto the streets and into the open-air drug markets.

A group of Central Division officers I spoke to at a DTLA Strong meeting described the system with which drug addicts exchange their $1,000 monthly EBT payments for $500 cash at shady bodegas. They use the cash to buy drugs, get free food from the homeless outreach programs, and set up a tent because it’s legal to sleep on the streets. No one can clean up after them because their stuff is “private property” according to the Mitchell Settlement. The police take a lot of the flack, but there’s little they can do to help.

At the protest, a police captain listened patiently to the complaints of people who had discovered dead bodies on their streets, been spit on and defecated on, been assaulted while out for a walk, and had people sleeping in their elevators. She calmly and respectfully fielded the complaints and lamented the Mitchell Settlement and her general inability to enforce the law.

The protestors were a diverse group, ethnically and otherwise, but all with their own unique “this has gone too far” story; that moment when they realized this wasn’t just typical “city living” anymore.

A woman kept saying, “I’m just tired of being scared.”

They came with solutions too. One young man suggested getting the tech industry involved.

“The current methods aren’t solving the problem. It’s like an etch-a-sketch. It’s time to wipe the slate clean and try something new. We need to get together with the top academics, engineers, and tech industry innovators and treat this like any other difficult problem to solve.”

Hey, if Elon Musk can solve climate change, why not homelessness?

Despite the robust energy of the crowd, nobody ended up sleeping on the mayor’s lawn. None of the requisite “encampers” showed up, and the protest dwindled by 4 pm. Nonetheless, it felt like it could be the very first blip on the radar of what could one day become a storm. Angelenos are waking up to the fact that our biggest problem, our biggest moral fight, isn’t a global struggle like climate change or world hunger, but one right in front of our faces. If we can’t keep our own families safe and our streets clean, if we can’t help the homeless and addicted back onto their feet, how can we call ourselves good people?

AUTHOR’S NOTE: As I’m sure you’ve indicated from the tone, this is not an unbiased piece of journalism. It is entirely biased, and I admit my bias, as far as the politics of this issue go. My wife and I live downtown and have been assaulted in the lobby of our apartment building, seen a man defecating on our door, and been screamed at in the streets as we walk to the grocery store. Many believe that empathy is the key to fixing homelessness, and I agree, but it’s a different kind of empathy. It’s the harder kind, the one that takes work and responsibility. Pouring money into the hands of a drug addict is not empathetic to anyone. It ends up killing you both.

So, yeah, I’m on the side of the protestors on this one.