Gun Smoke Is the Park Peril

Smokers rights groups reacted with predictable fury last week when the Los Angeles City Council called for a ban on smoking in city parks. Most of the rest of us were just plain dumbfounded.

Sure, the American Lung Assn. of Los Angeles County supports the ban, which would prohibit smoking within 50 feet of park athletic fields, playgrounds and large picnic areas. Some other anti-smoking advocates probably like it too. But surely there are others like us who strongly backed earlier bans on smoking in offices, restaurants and other enclosed spaces but see regulating the great outdoors as going too far. Secondhand smoke, after all, poses the greatest health risk with continual exposure in enclosed areas.

Councilwoman Jan Perry, who usually has more sense, said that for adults to smoke in parks “normalizes smoking and causes it to be approved behavior.” Do we really want the park department’s few rangers used to chase puffers away from the jungle gyms? Certainly no one wants children to smoke or to see it as cool. But the City Council is not the virtue police. It must keep its priorities in order. Yes, children are dropping like flies in city parks, but not from secondhand smoke.

Last month a 13-year-old boy died of a firsthand bullet from a smoking gun in South Los Angeles’ St. Andrews Park. Children are too scared of the drug dealers, crack smokers, gangbangers and prostitutes to play in MacArthur Park west of downtown, site of 62 violent crimes this year, including two homicides. And the City Council wants to ban smoking?

Council members are not blind to these problems. Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas assembled a cortege of top-level city officials to walk the streets around St. Andrews Park after Marquese Rashad Prude was killed. Perry led community marches and a town hall meeting last week to address growing gang violence in South-Central. Councilman Ed Reyes is working with residents in Lincoln Heights, where elementary school children practice Cold War-style “duck and cover” drills against all-too-real bullets.

The council’s very awareness makes the smoking ban all the more pitiful an offering. Council members are keen on bringing new parks to this famously undergreened city, and encouraging progress has been made; examples are the Cornfield near Chinatown and Taylor Yards in Northeast Los Angeles. Equally important is making sure that children are able to use the parks we have.

MacArthur Park serves one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the city; nearly 375,000 people live in the eight square miles that surround it. That it goes unused out of fear is a crime. The parks and the people who use them need a bold new plan for protection--and not against smoke.