I and journalist Sue Pasco, of the Palisades "Circling the News," walked Venice Beach this morning at 6 AM, counting campers and encampments.
We found 56 campers, most concentrated north of Dudley around the Rose Avenue parking lot. We saw four or five tents, a few far out on the sand, and a couple on the knoll NW of the parking lot by the restrooms.
This represents about a 20% increase in campers over last weekend.
It is problematic to see this increase while nighttime enforcement has continued and is a harbinger of what's coming. The LAPD/Sanitation/Rec&Parks teams that have kept encampments from ballooning back up end tonight, with the Mayor's Office and Councilman Bonin unwilling to allocate the additional funds needed to keep the Department of Sanitation staff engaged.
Sanitation's participation is critical to the effectiveness of the nighttime enforcement effort because only Sanitation is permitted to remove and store tents, furniture, bedrolls, tarps, etc., from the beach and Boardwalk under city law.
My prediction is that encampments will start to grow with the loss of overnight enforcement.
M. Ryavec
