Letters: Echo Park’s gang injunction
Re “Locos no longer locals,” Feb. 4
As The Times notes in its article about gentrification and gangs in Echo Park, L.A. City Atty. Mike Feuer did address the Greater Echo Park Elysian Neighborhood Council (of which I am a member) on the subject of supporting a gang injunction.
What the article doesn’t report is that the council voted against the injunction.
Seeing this as an attempt by developers to market the community as “hipster ready” to potential buyers, the council was convinced that the injunction promised great harm, including racial profiling and guilty-by-association policing.
As one Echo Park resident was quoted as saying: “Being bald and Mexican American, we’re all looked at the same. We’re all the problems. I don’t want to be looked at twice.”
Many second- and third-generation Echo Park families with members who may have been formerly associated with gangs, sometimes as children, have been impacted by the injunction, which was approved by a judge in September.
Development always wins.
Cheryl Ortega
Los Angeles
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