This morning, LAPD officers, Bureau of Sanitation crews, and staffer Casey Pratts from Councilmember Traci Park’s office swept a single unhoused person living in front of 720 Rose Avenue in Venice. The building belongs to Venice Community Housing, the same nonprofit currently fighting Park in court over the Venice Dell encampment. When asked, neither the officers nor anyone else on scene could identify the legal authority under which the sweep was conducted.
LAMC 41.18 allows the city to prohibit camping in designated zones, but requires posted signage and carries expiration dates. A 41.18(c)(4) public safety zone was established for 705 Rose Avenue in November 2024, and VCH’s building at 720 Rose falls within that zone’s 500-foot radius. But no signs are posted in the area, and the designation would have expired in November 2025, months before today’s operation. Senior Lead Officer Kirk D. Madison of the LAPD’s Oakwood unit was among the officers present. Casey Pratts from Councilmember Park’s office was also on scene.
One local resident interviewed by Palms Unhoused Mutual Aid described what sweeps feel like in practice. “It really does feel like we lost our rights,” she said. “The day before cleanup it’s like the worst. They’re there every five minutes, shining lights in your eyes.” She described sanitation workers going through and stealing people’s belongings, and recounted a story about a woman whose mother’s remains were in an urn that was swept away when she wasn’t able to retrieve it in time. “She begged them, I just need to go in to get my mother’s remains. They refused. They took her mother.” She said the early start times are deliberate. “Six AM is too early and they know it. Their hope is they catch us off guard and they get to destroy stuff. That’s where the money is going when it could go to so much better. That’s state-funded terrorism. That’s what it feels like.”
The resources deployed this morning were massive for a single-person sweep. That scale is consistent with how CARE+ operates across CD11. A January 2026 report co-published by the CD11 Coalition for Human Rights, the Venice Justice Committee, and UCLA’s Luskin Institute found that CARE+ deployments averaged roughly 15 city staff and 10 city vehicles per operation, yet only 9 of 44 displaced people received any homeless services outreach. Most were simply pushed from one block to another. Earlier this year, a federal judge issued terminating sanctions against the city in Garcia v. City of Los Angeles after finding that the city had fabricated and altered records, including inspection reports and hazard checklists used to justify sweeps.
On March 27, Park introduced Motion CF 26-0478, transferring $247,417 of her discretionary community funds toward CARE+ operations in CD11, including $50,000 directly to the LAPD Police Fund for officer overtime. This on top of a city budget in which police and fire already consume nearly 63 percent of the city’s unrestricted General Fund revenue, and a proposed LAPD budget increase of $124.7 million for next year. In a recent participatory budgeting survey, nearly 90 percent of Angelenos opposed any increase to LAPD funding, calling instead for investments in housing, mental health services, and community infrastructure.
The choice of location for this sweep also deserves scrutiny. Venice Community Housing is not just any building on Rose Avenue. It is an organization actively litigating against Park over the Venice Dell project, an approved 120-unit affordable housing project that Park has worked to obstruct at every turn. Whether today’s operation was deliberately targeted or simply the product of an enforcement apparatus deployed without legal basis, the result is the same: public money routed through Park’s office to LAPD was used to sweep someone from the doorstep of her most prominent legal adversary, under an authority nobody on scene could name.