Immigrants in MacArthur Park

Despite a massive police crackdown on drug dealing in MacArthur Park, you reported that on one recent afternoon “young men brazenly peddled bags of marijuana,” and others openly offered crack cocaine for sale (Metro, June 25).

Park problems are complicated by “scores of homeless people, runaways and other street people who are themselves either drug addicts or merely destitute.”

Later in the article you note that the area around the park is “the most densely populated in the city” and is “the entry point for poor immigrants from Central America,” and that “60% of the drug arrests at or around the park are of Central Americans.”

Each of these statements is painfully true.

Like the great majority of Los Angelenos I oppose drug use and drug sales. And I applaud every thoughtful effort to get rid of this scourge.

But MacArthur Park is more than a story. The park is a major human tragedy. Our most pressing unsolved community problems surface in its 32 acres. Homeless people, many of whom are only teen-agers, frequent the park because there are few other places they can go. Despite the Immigration Reform Act and the INS, poor immigrants from Central America crowd the area in increasing numbers, seeking the same freedom from tyranny for which we so readily applaud brave Chinese students.

While laws must be enforced, human tragedies cannot be solved by laws. The people of the park need compassion and understanding. Most are not hardened criminals. I have come to know many of the park’s teen-agers. Together with a handful of volunteers, three days a week the Missionary Brothers of Charity are able to feed an average of 65 of the areas homeless youth, provide a place for them to shower, and then, painfully, we have to send them back out into the hopelessness they are forced to call home. Some walk an hour and a half to sleep at La Placita, the Old Plaza Church across from Olvera Street. Others risk sleeping in abandoned buildings or the park.

I understand community efforts to “take MacArthur Park back.” I can only plead that there be a compassionate heart to those efforts. Surely the creative spirit of this community can find some way to bring a measure of hope to those who have so little.

BROTHER JOSEPH

Nuestro Hogar (Our Home)

The Missionary Brothers of Charity

Los Angeles