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MacArthur Park cleanup: Blink and you missed it

LA’s recent cleanup of MacArthur Park provides a textbook case of that familiar government malady: going through the motions.

Councilwoman Eunisses Hernandez, whose district contains the embarrassing cesspool, made sure cameras rolled as she touted a grand park cleanup event, complete with “free” trees and water.

Just one problem: A week later, the park resembles an open-air Dumpster again.

As with homelessness broadly, the city needs to eschew the feel-good, virtue-signaling shortcuts and cut to the heart of the matter: ensuring tough-love treatment for the indigent addicted and mentally ill.

Praiseworthy policy would aim to get the hardcore homeless the kind of help that gets them off the streets for good.

Last week, the FBI and LAPD did well in arresting 18th Street gang leaders known for pushing meth and fentanyl in MacArthur Park, Skid Row and beyond.

Good start. But the misery won’t end until City Hall takes systemic action.

That means treatment programs, not an endless cycle spending tens of millions of tax dollars on blink-and-you-miss-them cleanups and “services” that entrench suffering.

Of MacArthur Park, Hernandez said, “We don’t ignore the real challenges here. We lean in. That’s why our office has secured and invested over $27 million in the area to address public health and safety and bring the resources this community deserves.”

Where’s the proof that this spending’s done any lasting good?

Politicians claim credit for throwing other people’s money at the problem, while nonprofits –– which gorge on endless subsidies from taxpayers –– find it in their interest to “serve” the homeless without solving anything.

This means that rather than prioritizing the core issues of addiction and mental illness, the city spins its wheels while people suffer.

We refer not only to the homeless themselves, but to innocent victims of the crime and violence that plague the park.

In one example, a deranged woman last month smashed the face of volunteer Eva Woods with a metal pipe, leaving the Good Samaritan with broken upper and lower jaws and several destroyed teeth.

The city needs to address the conditions that promote such mayhem.

Instead, we get perpetual wheel-spinning: mobile showers, laundry service so addicts can wear clean shirts, city-furnished drug needles, and the like.

None of this brings meaningful change.

Rather, these programs entrench the status quo, normalize dysfunction, and invite more of the same squalor, crime and violence.

Enough. If Mayor Karen Bass, Hernandez and the rest of LA’s bloated 15-member City Council actually care about this city and its residents –– homeless and otherwise –– they will chart a new course on homelessness.

One that gets people help for addiction and mental illness, rather than pretending to help while just going through the motions.

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