Add The California Post on Google Los Angeles County’s top prosecutor is delivering on a promise he made in June to “clean up” the city’s notorious MacArthur Park by Labor Day — by bringing his family to the crime-ridden park for a picnic.
District Attorney Nathan Hochman was spotted attending that picnic at MacArthur Park on Saturday, according to social media posts.
“I promised we would do it many months ago and if I viewed the park as having not improved as far as public safety then I wasn’t going to risk the public safety of myself, my family, my friends and my colleagues to go to a unsafe park,” Hochman said Friday.
“But I’ve watched the efforts of law enforcement, I’ve also watched the efforts of the community organizations.”
In June, the prosecutor said he would bring his family back during a highly publicized multi-agency raid targeting drug crimes at the park.
“We will not allow MacArthur Park to be a cemetery any longer,” he had proclaimed.
That promise came after officers targeted stupefied users openly smoking fentanyl at the park’s litter-strewn corner near Alvarado and Seventh streets, placing several in handcuffs and hauling them away as others scurried from the scene.
MacArthur Park has had a bad reputation since the 1980s as dealers and gangs moved in, with as many as 30 murders occurring there in 1990. It’s known as an epicenter for homelessness and drug use, with throngs of addicts buying fentanyl and meth there each day.
This year, however, Los Angeles’ top federal prosecutor, Bill Essayli, has made cracking down on the drug trade at the park a priority. His office has targeted MacArthur Park and other hotspots in a series of drug busts, with Essayli describing the area as an “open-air drug market.”
“We’ve come a long way in returning the park back from the criminals and drug users to the community. More work to do, but we’re headed in the right direction,” Essayli, a Republican, told a local FOX reporter on Saturday.
Hochman also acknowledged that the park still isn’t 100 percent perfect, and that there’s a long road ahead.
For example, this past Friday, a FOX11 reporter noticed visible drug use in certain areas of the park.
“It’s not perfect. I don’t want in any way to suggest that this park doesn’t still have a lot of problems. It does,” Hochman said. “But I see great progress having been made in this park.”
At least 37 people have been arrested across major joint federal and local drug operations at MacArthur Park this year.
