Mayor Karen Bass opened her Zoom meeting on the Cotner Avenue Inside Safe operation by thanking residents for helping the city “make sure this encampment never comes back.” Her tone was brisk and managerial, the kind that treats homelessness as a maintenance or sanitation issue rather than a crisis of housing. “We can put things in place so they don’t return,” she said. “We need all of you to help us . . . so that we jump on it immediately and do not allow it to fester.” Over and over, she used that word “fester” to describe the people who had lived along Cotner for years, as if their presence was an infection or infestation to be cleaned out.

Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky echoed the same rhetoric, saying Cotner had “been cleaned up and come back again many, many times” and that the city was “not messing around.” She promised that the area was now a 41.18 “no camping zone,” backed by LAPD patrols, sanitation power washing, and $150,000 in overtime for police to keep it clear. “This is not a place where there will be encampments anymore,” she said, adding that the goal was to “change behavior” so that “it stops being a persistent issue.” The city, she explained, was exploring ways to “beautify” the area with planters, murals, and lighting “to send a very clear signal you can’t come back.”

Inside Safe director Anita Kidaine described the sweep as a “success,” citing city figures that said 76 people were “brought inside.” Slides showed before-and-after photos of the street, alongside the amount of debris collected: 280 pounds of human waste and 20,000 pounds of trash. “If you come out here tomorrow, you won’t see any trace of what was here,” she said. The mayor’s team congratulated itself for what it called a “historic” cleanup, complete with a video clip of a formerly unhoused man thanking the city.

But for people who have been doing outreach at Cotner for years, the city’s version of events bore little resemblance to reality. One unhoused resident who does outreach across the Westside to people struggling with mental illness and addiction described the sweep as “a massive PR event and an enormous amount of back-slapping.” He said the chat was turned off during the meeting and that “if the questions were the slightest bit critical, they were dismissed.” When he asked why people had been “made to stand in handcuffs for two hours while waiting for Mayor Bass to arrive,” no one answered. He called the meeting a display of “monkeys in a cage” where city officials invite people to marvel at the animals they have “helped”. He was shocked at the language being used to describe unhoused people and said that “the only people they’re really helping are themselves.”

A mutual aid organizer who has been engaging at Cotner since 2021 painted a detailed picture of life before the sweep and of what was lost. She recalled a long-standing community that had stabilized over time, even as services dwindled. “Back when Koretz was in office, there were bathrooms and sinks,” she said. “Now there’s nothing.” Her group brought meals, harm-reduction supplies, and casework, often doing “the city’s job” to get people into housing. “We were doing full-time case work because there were so many gaps within the system.” When the Inside Safe operation arrived, she said, “they taped off the area so much we couldn’t see what was going on.” Outreach workers were told everyone would receive motel rooms, but “there was a bait and switch . . . they said, no, we only have shelter for you.” Some people who had lived there for years were never housed at all.

“I get really frustrated when they lie and say that they’ve housed everybody there,” she said. “It’s all about cleaning, making this appealing for housed people rather than caring about the actual safety of these folks when they get criminalized.” She pointed out that many participants in Inside Safe end up back on the street because the conditions in the motels are unsafe or unsanitary. “Hotel rooms aren’t housing,” she said. “This program is extremely expensive, and some of the same people that have gone into Inside Safe two years ago are going back onto the street again.”

That frustration runs even deeper among those who remember that Yaroslavsky once seemed to understand the limits of enforcement. In February 2023, she introduced a motion directing the city to study the effects of Los Angeles’s controversial anti-camping law, Municipal Code 41.18. The study, published in June by the city’s Chief Legislative Analyst and reported by LA Public Press, found that the policy had cost millions while failing to reduce homelessness or prevent encampments from returning. Of more than 1,600 41.18 zones created since 2021, 81 percent were later repopulated. Only two people were confirmed to have moved into permanent housing. Yaroslavsky said at the time that “the reality is we don’t have a clear picture as to whether 41.18 is working,” and that the city needed “data, not ideology,” to guide its approach.

But at the Cotner meeting, she championed the very policy her own study discredited. “We do have a no camping zone there,” she said. “We’ve set up 41.18s . . . and we are planning on using that tool to enforce.” She described how her office would send staff and police to monitor the area daily, with new patrols and city crews keeping sidewalks “clean.” The about-face was striking: a councilmember who once questioned whether criminalization worked now citing the same law as the key to “success.”