DA Nathan Hochman touts progress at MacArthur Park – Latest News
City Councilwoman Eunisses Hernandez has spent years backing insurance policies that turned MacArthur Park into a squalid zombie-filled drug den.
Law enforcement leaders, together with LA’s police chief, district legal professional and high federal prosecutor, have pushed for months to clean up the public park –– and return it to taxpaying households.
Their progress, highlighted this weekend by LA County District Attorney Nathan Hochman, is an admirable begin on a long reclamation project.
LA County DA Nathan Hochman hosts a picnic at MacArthur Park. X/@MattSeedorff
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Hochman fulfilled a promise from June to carry his household for a Labor Day picnic at the roughly 35-acre park, to show that law enforcement has made it safer.
While the park nonetheless has a long strategy to go, the symbolism issues.
So do the public commitments made by Hochman, LA Police Chief Jim McDonnell and federal prosecutor Bill Essayli, who’ve united to focus on the Mexican Mafia, native drug gross sales and different scourges of the once-proud public space.
Law enforcement has arrested dozens of people this yr in main anti-drug operations at MacArthur Park.
Good. The park’s crime and filth –– enabled for years by LA politicians reminiscent of Hernandez, Mayor Karen Bass and homeless committee chair Nithya Raman –– has long been unacceptable.
Hernandez needs to be particularly ashamed, because the park rests at the historic coronary heart of her council district. One would possibly suppose she’d battle to clean it up, clear it of crime, finish the human distress and stop the flood of medication.
LAPD officers arrest a man in MacArthur Park in Los Angeles’s Westlake District on Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2025. Barbara Davidson for NY Post
Quite the alternative. She’s fought towards police funding, towards anti-camping legal guidelines to curb homeless squalor, and towards efforts to carry people accountable for the havoc spilling into law-abiding neighborhoods.
In 2023, Hernandez redirected $250 million in scholarship money to needle and pipe distribution within the MacArthur Park space.
Unsurprisingly, the “free” drug paraphernalia solely made issues worse.
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The LAPD reported an average of 4 emergency drug overdoses per day at the park in 2025.
And then there’s the squalor. The California Post revealed that in 2025, metropolis crews scraped 12.7 million kilos of stable waste from the park –– together with feces, syringes, corrosive chemical substances, mould, blood and useless animals.
Meanwhile, Mayor Karen Bass confirmed more outrage over a July 2025 ICE sweep at MacArthur Park than for years of human agony there.
Local business proprietor John Alle fingers out flyers to the homeless offering to pay for journey home in MacArthur Park, CA, on Friday, July 24, 2026. David Buchan for CA Post
The metropolis’s priorities, and insurance policies, have long been backward.
The California Post has routinely famous this, highlighting dysfunction at the park to immediate the type of cleanup and enforcement motion taken by Essayli, Hochman and the LAPD.
It’s on this context that law enforcement has made substantial progress towards the park’s painstaking rehabilitation.
Kudos to them –– and will they keep it up.
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