On his first day out of jail, Fredid Toledo went home to his mother, took the best shower of his life, and shaved for the first time in two and a half years. 

“When you’re in jail you only get three-minute showers,” he remembers, chuckling. 

It was 2014. Smooth faced and clean, the 18-year-old called up some friends he hadn’t seen since his arrest for armed robbery. These were close buddies, not related to the gang life he was trying to leave behind. Things were going to be different this time around. 

When his buddy dropped him off at home that night near MacArthur Park, he sped away instantly. Toledo scanned the deserted streets uneasily. Anyone in a gang knew not to drive away before making sure your homie was safe inside. 

On the balcony next to his mother’s apartment, a group of men were drinking and playing loud music. A cold certainty seized him: 18^th Street gang members. The building his mom had moved into on Alvarado and 3^rd was in the heart of their territory. Toledo was part of Witmer Street gang, their direct rivals.  

“They knew I’d gotten out,” says Toledo. “Word spreads like wildfire man.”

They were waiting for him. Toledo sprinted down Alvarado. At the liquor store on the corner, another gangbanger was buying more beer for the guys upstairs. He chased after Toledo, brandishing a gun. 

“I’m like, man — I’m not gonna survive.” 

At the corner of MacArthur Park, he banged on a bus to let him in. The driver kept the doors closed. Toledo risked a desperate look backwards. The man was nearly on him; he raised his gun. Toledo banged and banged on the bus. Miraculously, the doors opened.

“The driver is like: ‘What the fuck do you want?’” Toledo says, grinning at the memory. “I’m about to get smoked, close the doors!”

The 18^th Street gangster strolled up to the bus just as the doors closed, gun in hand. A wide smirk covered his face.  

“You got lucky,” he told Toledo. 

That night, Toledo slept at a friend’s house in Boyle Heights. Home was not an option anymore. 

“That was a wake-up call that I needed to change my life around, live by a certain set of rules. Or else…,” he shakes his head grimly. “You know.”

Sitting in his light-filled office, it is difficult to believe that this is the same man who once shot and was shot at by other human beings. For the last two years, the now-27 year old Toledo has worked at Homies Unidos, first as an administrative assistant and now as youth development coordinator.

Homies Unidos – known simply as ‘Homies’ – has a cramped office on Beverly and Alvarado. It was founded in El Salvador in 1996, by ex-MS-13 gang member Alex Sanchez, who relocated it a year later to L.A., to help former gang members get their lives back on track and prevent young kids from joining. There’s nine members on staff, all from the Westlake/Pico-Union area where they work. It’s a heavily immigrant, primarily Salvadoran and Mexican neighborhood that took shape in the ‘80s and ‘90s, as millions fled U.S.-funded civil wars in Central America. 

Under the jurisdiction of the LAPD Rampart Division, it is also one of the most heavily policed neighborhoods in the country. In 1998, only a year after Homies started work in Westlake, the division’s anti-gang CRASH unit was the center of one of the largest corruption and police misconduct scandals in history. 

Long before he ever joined a gang, Toledo learned to be afraid of cops. Running to make it home before curfew one night, a police officer pulled up to him.

“Where you from? You got any tattoos?” 

When Toledo refused to be searched, he says the officer became aggressive. 

“Don’t make me take you to the cut and beat you up,” he told the 14-year-old Toledo. The cut is slang for someplace out of sight. 

Police have harassed Toledo like this more times than he can remember. Inside the police, there are forces pushing for change. 

“People fail to realize how much the LAPD has evolved,” Deputy Chief of the LAPD Emada Tingirides says. 

She pioneered a program to restore trust between the police and high crime neighborhoods and is now the Commanding Officer of the newly formed Community Safety Partnership Bureau (CSPB). She is also the highest-ranking black woman in the LAPD. 

“I think we’re one of the most progressive law enforcement agencies in the country, and that’s because of our failures in our past. We have come a long way since 1992.”

But CSP efforts are concentrated in the Watts neighborhood of South L.A. In Westlake/Pico-Union, there is still no CSP site. In their absence, it falls to people like Toledo and community organizations like Homies Unidos to help the neighborhood heal. 

In name, Homies is a gang intervention non-profit. In real life it’s a catch-all for the community’s needs. Gang members find it nearly impossible to stop gangbanging, so Homies pays for reintegration courses and tattoo removals. The neighbors are going hungry because of low pay and meager government assistance, so Homies runs food distributions at their office. Young men suffer from police harassment and punitively long prison sentences, so Homies organizes grass-roots advocacy groups to lobby for the rights of the incarcerated in Sacramento.

At Homies, Toledo shepherds the younger generation, guiding kids referred by school administrators, parents, or friends. On any given day he goes around in the Homies van picking up the kids at local high schools and middle schools and bringing them back to the office for group sessions he designs himself. 

“There was a time when I almost went through with killing myself,” says Martin Lopez, one of Toledo’s former mentees. “Fredid picked me up that night.” 

Lopez was 15 when his mother called Homies, concerned about her son’s depression and worried he would join a gang. He started coming by Homies to attend Toledo’s sessions, where the kids crowd into a tight circle of chairs in the tiny, windowless front hall. Little by little, passing around a colorful wooden talking-stick, Toledo got Lopez talking about his insecurities. Soon, he had him helping pass out food to the families around Westlake.

“He would always walk with his head down, didn’t meet your eye,” Toledo says of Lopez. “Now he’s got a sparkle in his eye, you know? He walks chest-out.”

Lopez is 17 now. He credits Toledo with helping him discover that he enjoys helping others. 

“Fredid is a humble person,” says Alex Sanchez. The Homies founder is a big, laughing bowling ball of a man. Around Westlake, he’s something of a local legend. Everyone seems to know him and have his number saved. “It took a while to bring Fredid around. But he doesn’t realize how much he does to support our youth and people in need.” 

Toledo’s objective is clear: to make sure none of the kids he mentors ever follow down the path he did. But Homies’ youth programs rely on grants from benevolent foundations. And as of today, the funds are running dangerously low. 

II. Roots and Initiations

Born in 1995, Fredid Toledo grew up only a couple blocks away from where he was nearly killed 18 years later. He was always skinny, earning him the nickname Flaco. Today he’s soft-spoken, with dark, intelligent eyes. He speaks in spare, trim sentences, with the occasional spark of humor flashing across his face. 

His mother, Julia Calderon, paid a coyote to come to L.A. from Guerrero, Mexico, when she was 17 years old. When his little sister Jenifer was born, their father left the family. 

“He was a machista,” Toledo says. “He firmly believed that he didn’t create any women.”

Calderon was left to care for their three children — 5-year-old Fredid, 4-year-old Gerardo, and the newborn Jenifer — alone. She worked as a bartender and kitchen prep, making just enough to pay the bills and put food on the table. Since she was always working, the kids spent most of their time with babysitters. These were older women who often physically abused them.

“They’d hit us, whip us,” Toledo says. “One babysitter threw the TV remote at Gerardo and gave him a scar. He still has it to this day.”  

Life in the poor, largely immigrant neighborhoods west of Downtown L.A. was rough. Alvarado Street, the main north-south artery, is a drab succession of gas stations, fast food chains, and liquor stores. On most days, the sun casts a blinding white glare on the treeless streets. With no shade, the heat is ruthless. The Salvadoran family restaurants and occasional market stalls sprout up happily, almost impossibly, like flowers between cracks of cement. 

By the time he got to John Leichty Middle School, Toledo was an easy target for gang recruiters. Gangs were part of the fabric of life: kids threw up their set, graffiti announced their presence, and most people had friends or relatives who banged. To this day, Toledo still knows whose territory he’s walking in.

Smoking weed with a buddy one day by a liquor store, he was approached by a couple of older guys. They asked him and his friend where they lived and offered to buy them beer. Then they started asking if they were “part of a neighborhood.”

“We kept saying no, but they wouldn’t stop insisting,” Toledo says. 

Eventually, he gave in. The older guys shoved him to the ground and beat him up for 13 seconds — the traditional initiation ceremony for new gang members. Toledo was 12 years old. His initiators were 17 or 18. He was officially a Witmer Street gangster. 

Witmer is one of many street gangs in Westlake. North to south their patch of territory stretches between Wilshire and Olympic Boulevard. To the West the line is South Union Avenue. The Harbor Freeway and Bixel Street provide natural borders to the East. Like most Mexican-American gangs, they often add the number 13 to their name to indicate their allegiance to the Mexican mafia. 

“In the prison system we would unite with other gangs with the 13,” Toledo explains. “But in the streets the majority of gangs have issues regardless.”

When he got home the night of his initiation with a bruised face and a dislocated arm, he told his mom that he’d been jumped. She believed him until someone sent her a video of the initiation. By then it was too late.

“As soon as you get in, [the gang] asks where you live, your phone number,” Toledo says. “It’s constant monitoring. Where you at? Why haven’t you come to the neighborhood? We’re going to come find you.”

At first, Toledo stayed out of fear. Then he says he stayed because he enjoyed it: the gang filled many of the holes in his life. It provided him with strong father figures (“I was the youngest — most of them were 17 to 25”), an outlet for his trauma (“from my own abuse, I only knew how to have fun by hurting others”), and a source of money (“I dealt mostly weed and crack”). 

At a very fundamental level, it gave him a sense of belonging. They all had nicknames — there was Player, Grim, and Wicked. They had clear enemies: MS13, 18^th Street, Rockwood Street, Orphans 13. It gave him protection and street cred. 

At 13 years old, kicking it with one of his Witmer Street buddies, they got a call that a rival gang was driving a truck through their territory. 

“We ran to the building to get guns, rifles, a sombrero,” he says. “Then we posted up on the corner of the school. We knew what truck we were looking for.”

The second the truck came into view, the older guys opened fire. Toledo heard the crack of the windshield and the screech of the wheels as they fled. They’d failed to kill the driver. 

“Them being grown men they went back to the house, they changed clothes, they peed on their hands,” says Toledo, alluding to the belief that urine makes gunshot residue undetectable. “I was shocked. I wasn’t yet fully corrupted.”

When he got back to school the next week, though, Toledo saw he’d earned a reputation. His siblings started to pick up on it too; he wore baggier clothes, the Nike Cortez’s. Gerardo wanted to join Witmer Street and started drawing Ws everywhere. 

“I beat him up, smacked him,” says Toledo. “I knew it was a bad thing, and I didn’t want him to be a part of it.” 

“I guess the way I expressed it wasn’t the healthiest,” he adds with a wry smile. “All it did was push them away to rival territories.” 

Gerardo started hanging out with Rockwood Street and Lincoln Heights gangbangers. Jenifer started seeing 18^th Street guys. The siblings, who had been close as kids, grew distant and suspicious of one another. 

On most days, of course, gang life was non-violent. It consisted of drinking and getting high with the homies at different houses in the neighborhood. What little money they had came from selling weed and crack.  

But when the violence flared up, it returned with a vengeance. As he got older it got worse. To pay the weekly dues, he started robbing — mostly drunk men walking late at night. 

“You choke them out. Instill fear in them. Then it’s easy.” 

When he was 15, the older guys decided it was time for him to become un hombre. They gave him a 20-gauge shotgun and went to reclaim Orphans 13 territory. Orphans was a “one-building gang” that had carved out an enclave inside Witmer territory at the apartments on Green Ave and 8th Street. The Witmer guys were “tagging” in an alley — spray painting their gang symbols — when one of their rivals pulled up.

“That’s when they tell me ‘Shoot him,’” Toledo says. “I’m already pointing the gun at the guy, I’m debating it.” 

He let rip, the shotgun recoil slamming his shoulder. He missed. 

“They keep yelling ‘Shoot him! Shoot him!’ But that’s when I see his wife is in the passenger seat and his three kids in the back seat. I froze. That’s what stopped me from killing him.” 

When they got back to the neighborhood, he got another 13-second beatdown for hesitating to shoot. 

Things got worse from there. The year of his arrest, Toledo was walking on 3^rd and Loma with his girlfriend in Rockwood Street territory. He was bald-headed and tattooed, a proud Witmer Street member. Sure enough, a clique of Rockwoods pulled up. 

“I just took my arm off my girl and told her ‘Walk the other way,’” Toledo remembers. “‘Pretend you don’t know me.’” 

Toledo ran fast, but there was nowhere to escape. Desperate, he scrambled over a high gate into an apartment complex, carried by a surge of adrenalin. 

The Rockwood gangsters patrolled the perimeter, waiting for him to make a run for it. They kept yelling: “You’re not gonna make it outta here alive.” 

“I was looking at my phone like, ‘Who do I call?’ None of my homies wanted to pull through,” says Toledo. “Then I remembered: Alex Sanchez.” 

When Toledo called, all Sanchez said was: “I’ll be right there.” 

“So, Alex pulls up with four vans,” says Toledo. “All of these guys looking like cholos. I mean these are OG veteranos.” 

Sanchez had pulled up with the big guns. These were former gang members who had been there in the worst of the worst of the ‘80s. Some of them had seen over 30 years of prison time. None of the Rockwood Street gangsters said anything as Toledo walked calmly into Sanchez’s arms. 

“When you come into the neighborhood with that type of manpower, nobody gonna fuck with you,” says Toledo. “That was super powerful. Who does that for me?” 

Sanchez did not stop there. Right after rescuing him, he took Toledo to a movie premiere.

As we drive through Rockwood Street gang territory on a blustery Friday afternoon, Toledo says that he still does not walk around those streets.

“It’s too dangerous,” he says. “An older cat could recognize me, might remember me.”

Years after leaving gangbanging behind, the invisible lines demarcating territories are still as vivid and real in his mind as the day he quit. It is hard to heal from trauma when the names of the streets are heavy with gang connotations.

Sanchez saved him that day, but he could not pull him from the spiraling violence. Soon after, Toledo witnessed an older homie crack a pregnant girl over the head with a hammer, just because she was from a rival neighborhood. He dropped out of school and moved into one of the gang houses. His mother had moved to the building on Alvarado and 3^rd — 18^th Street territory — and it was a death sentence for him to live there. 

One night out robbing, he slipped up and made a rookie mistake. 

“When you rob people, you want to make sure you take everything. Every last cent,” Toledo says. “Even if you take their phone, they might use those coins on a payphone.” 

That night he was sloppy. One of his victims called the police and they arrested him and took him to the Central Juvenile Hall. The worst part was losing his Colt 45. He had bought it for $900 from a homie, with money from robbing and selling crack. It was his biggest purchase. 

The charge was armed robbery. He was sentenced to two years in Camp Afflerbaugh, a juvenile detention center in La Verne, CA, at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains. He was 16 years old.

III. In Jail

If two guys were going to fight they sat down in the showers, locked legs with one another, and went at it until someone was either bleeding badly or about to pass out. It was the best way for the guards not to notice. Of course, fights happened outside the showers too. 

“Fights occurred all day, every day,” Toledo says. “You got down by your bed, you got down in the showers, you got down by the kitchen. Anywhere.” 

Toledo’s first fight was in the bathroom. He won that one. 

“When you go in there you’re repping a certain set. You can’t sleep safe.” 

Camp Afflerbaugh is divided into four dorms: Charlie, Bravo, Delta, and Alpha. Each one houses about 30 inmates, all of them under 18 years of age. All the inmates can socialize during the day at lunch and recess, but at night they have to go back and sleep in their assigned dorm. 

“Once I was sleeping and this guy comes over from another section. He’d filled his sock up with rocks during rec[ess]. He ran across the hall and started cracking the guy next to me sleeping.” 

The guards came over and tackled the aggressor. This was the way of things: the guards turned a blind eye until it was too late. Then the inmates involved were rounded up and had their sentences extended. If an inmate turned eighteen, they were transferred to an adult prison. 

Life at the camp passed like this, in a soul-crushing succession of bland meals, bloody fights, and interrupted sleep. 

John Mathews, Senior Justice Deputy at the Office of Los Angeles County Supervisor Holly Mitchell, is working to improve the treatment that incarcerated youth receive. The County Board of Supervisors approved a motion in March to explore moving youth out of juvenile halls and into camps.

“Barry J. [Nidorf Juvenile Hall] is notorious, the youth that come out of there have nothing good to say,” Mathews says.

Toledo himself bounced around juvenile halls, including Barry J., before going to Camp Afflerbaugh.

“That’s because it looks really carceral. They don’t have enough programming and education.”

When I tell Mathews that conditions did not improve much for Toledo between the juvenile halls and Camp Afflerbaugh, he assents. 

“The facility is just the first step, absolutely,” he says. “It’s about staffing these camps with community-based organizations who are credible messengers, who can come into the camps and halls and relate to the youth.” 

For all two years of his sentence, Toledo’s mother visited him every weekend. She had no car and barely any money, but every Sunday she took the bus up to La Verne. 

“Not once did she not show up,” Toledo’s eyes glimmer with sadness. “She’d fold up a twenty, super small, and they wouldn’t see it when she got searched.”

With the money his mom snuck in for him, he could bribe the guards for some McDonalds, pizza, or chicken noodle soup. 

“When you’re in jail, even the guards are crooked,” Toledo says, shaking his head. 

Toledo was a secretive, furtive kid. It’s not that he behaved well in jail. It’s that he never got caught for the bad stuff. Sometimes Gerardo brought him a Hot Cheetos bag he’d emptied out and taped back up with weed. Other times it was a Snickers bar, drained of caramel and stuffed with about seven grams 

“Weed that would’ve sold for $70 outside, I could make $300 from inside,” Toledo says. 

He was wily. His sentence never got extended. When his two years were up, his mom brought him back to the neighborhood, in desperate need of a shave and a good shower.

IV. Mother and Son

After a few weeks of living in Boyle Heights with a buddy, Toledo decided he was going to live with his mother, regardless of the rival gangs. He told everyone he came across that he wasn’t a part of that life anymore. When his old homies came around to beat him up, he hid from them. 

For a time, it seemed like he might just turn things around. He got a job as kitchen prep at El Pollo Loco and another at Chuck E. Cheese and started earning an honest wage. The 18^th Street gangsters left him alone. His old homies stopped bothering him.

Then one day, two years after getting out of Camp Afflerbaugh, it all came crashing down. His buddy had called him with a strange story: he’d been drinking beers with a random guy in a parking lot. The man had been drunk and apparently offered him his car for free. Did he want to go take it out for a spin? 

Driving the car, the cops pulled them over for a cracked windshield. When the officer ran the plates, it came up that Toledo was driving a stolen car. His buddy had been duped. The original thief had wanted to get it off his hands to hide his trail.

Back in County Jail, Toledo dialed his mom. 

“It was $500 bail. I had the money. I just needed her to come in and sign the papers,” he says. “It wasn’t even about being in jail. I just had to go back to my job so I wouldn’t get fired.”

His mom hung up on him. Her patience with him had reached its end. Toledo got another friend of his to come and post the bail instead.

From that day on, the relationship between him and his mother was broken. Toledo now had to pay $500 a month for rent. Neither Gerardo nor Jenifer had to pay anything.  

“At family dinners she wouldn’t put my plate out, to make me feel like I didn’t belong,” Toledo says, in a hushed tone. “She locked up the fridge. She started complaining when I used the kitchen.” 

The memories of his mother are more raw, more painful to summon than any of the many times he nearly died while gangbanging. 

“When the day came, she had no idea I was moving out,” Toledo says. “I asked her: ‘how much do I owe you for last month’s rent?’

She said: “Nothing. Just leave my house.” 

Since that day six years ago, Toledo has not spoken to his mom. He lives only a couple blocks away from her, though he doubts she even knows this. 

“Even though my brother also did bad things, I was always the black sheep,” he says with a sigh. “She hurt me a lot too, you know?”

Toledo accepts the full weight of his responsibility.  

“These are some of the things that gangbanging brings. It ruins the relationship you have with your siblings, your parents.” 

At 21, Toledo moved into a small place of his own. In a short time, he had lost the protective net of both Witmer Street and his family. He was, for all intents and purposes, alone in the world. 

At his hearing for driving a stolen car, Toledo was handed 400 hours of community service. It did not matter that the rightful owners of the car testified that Toledo was not the thief. 

As he scanned the list of organizations where he could volunteer, a name caught his eye: Homies Unidos. He remembered how years ago, before he went to jail for the robbery, Alex Sanchez had saved his life. 

Toledo looked up. “I’ll choose Homies,” he said.

V. Redemption

On a recent Friday afternoon, Toledo invites me to sit in one of the sessions. They come into the office after school, laughing and gossiping. Before sitting down in the circle of chairs, they pillage the office kitchen for Hot Pockets and potato chips.

There are five girls that day, most of them 12-15 years old. Then there’s Obed, a 13-year-old boy with an impish grin that seems to be perennially plastered across his face. 

Obed was referred to Homies by his school after he brought a BB gun into class one day. His middle school is in MS13 territory, but he lives on 18^th Street turf. Even though he’s not part of any gang, everyone at his school assumes he is.

“It’s hard when you’re constantly being identified as one,” says Obed. 

Toledo sees himself in Obed: the same age when he joined a gang, suffering from the same structural pressures. These are cycles of poverty (the amount of ramen, taquitos, and junk food the kids eat at Homies indicates this is a main source of food), violence (a 13-year-old feels compelled to bring a BB gun to middle school for protection), and bad policing (the first question law enforcement ask Obed is always: “What gang are you in?”).  

During his sessions, Toledo guides the kids gently around difficult subjects, getting them to open up to each other about their fears and hopes. 

“If you were to cry for no reason, your parents would give you a reason to cry,” says Eliza, 14. Her parents are both still active gang members. She hopes to choose a different path, to make her grandmother proud.

Other girls speak of constantly moving from evictions or of being single mothers. All of them agree on one thing: coming to Homies is much better than sitting at home. These kids are the product of broken families, typically absent fathers and abusive mothers. Toledo listens intently, gathering their worries into himself. 

There is something incredibly stirring in witnessing his quiet enthusiasm as he works with the kids. Toledo holds the passionate zeal of a convert, intent on spreading the word that change is possible, despite everything. 

“Now that I have two daughters, I try to empower and connect with them,” he says. “They love me. I love them. I’m trying not to repeat what happened when I was young. I give them affection and love.”

On another Friday afternoon, I hop in for a ride with Toledo and we go pick up his youngest daughter, Skylah, from Equitas Academy Elementary. She is a spritely, talkative little child, with all the world-weary opinions and sass of a girl three times her age. 

“Why don’t you take me out?” she says. “Dads are supposed to take their daughters out.” 

Toledo shakes his head, smiling, and swings into a McDonald’s drive thru. 

“I try to give her healthy foods, you know?” Toledo says, justifying himself. “She doesn’t eat candy bars when she comes to my place.”

“Yes I do!” Skylah chirps up. “Sometimes I do.” 

Skylah’s mother, Reina Sanchez, calls to check up. Toledo’s relationship with her is strained at times, but they co-parent well. The girls sleep at their respective mother’s homes but spend a lot of time together in their dad’s company. 

Almost immediately after, Toledo gets a call from another former gang member, who wants to know if he qualifies for money from the Rodriguez settlement. The class action lawsuit successfully sued the City of Los Angeles in 2011 for gang injunctions that enforced unconstitutional curfews on over 6,000 Angelenos. 

As Toledo explains the paperwork to him, we pass his mom’s building on Alvarado, the liquor store, and the corner of MacArthur Park where he nearly got killed. By Lafayette Park, Toledo hangs up and chuckles. 

“I got jumped there when I was 19,” he says. “A group of MS-13 guys kicked me in the face.” 

In the backseat, Skylah plays with her Sonic the Hedgehog Happy Meal box, giggling every time I point the camera at her. When I ask him if his daughters ever wonder about his past, Toledo shakes his head.

“I feel like it’s never going to be brought up,” he says. “I don’t want them to even know what gangbanging is. That starts with me — I’m very involved in their lives. I know when parents aren’t, that’s when bad decisions happen.”

He says the macho culture in Hispanic communities is still a huge obstacle. 

“A lot of fathers don’t tell their sons ‘I love you,’” he says. “If I cried, my mom would whip me and tell me ‘Boys don’t cry.’ She would put rice on the floor and make me kneel on it.”

Alex Sanchez has told him to speak to his mother. Will he ever be ready to reach out to her again? 

Toledo hesitates. He wants to say yes, but chuckles instead. “I don’t know. Maybe someday.” 

Ultimately, Toledo is grateful he was one of the few that got out of the neighborhood alive. Wicked, one of the older guys who initiated him, is dead now. Grim is doing prison time.

As a counselor to the kids, Toledo tries his best to shepherd them away from that life. It’s a job full of rewards when he sees them growing in confidence and strengthening their resolve to make something out of their lives.

It’s also a job that couples with tragedy. Wilbert, one of his mentees, was 18 when he was shot in the head at a park last year. Toledo had been guiding Wilbert, an active Diamond Street gang member, because he was in and out of jail and wanted to stay out of the hood.

“Wilbert would often call me in the middle of night because he was stranded in the wrong territory,” Toledo says. “Doing this type of work you have to answer calls at all hours.”

Wilbert regularly volunteered at food distributions with Homies, and Toledo helped him get his California ID. This can be hard for guys who are confined in the hood, either because they don’t have transportation or because the government office is in rival territory.

“When he passed away we helped with a car wash for him,” Toledo says. “Homies Unidos also donated money to his sister and mother.”

Toledo has the silent resolve of a man who has been through Hell and is intent on never going back. What’s more: he means to save the kids from his neighborhood from ever going there at all. The forces he faces are far vaster than him: dysfunctional families, easy gun access, hunger, deportations, a cruel, inhumane policing and justice system… But every day he shows up to Homies, or picks up desperate calls in the middle of the night, because it is the right thing – the only thing – he can do.

“Once upon a time it was my ambition to make a name for myself with the clique in the neighborhood,” Toledo says. “Now it’s to make a name for myself helping others.”

But Toledo’s work at Homies is imperiled. Organizations like Ready to Rise, Liberty Hill Foundation, and the Global Fund for Children provide a series of grants to fund the youth program. But at the end of the most recent grant cycle, money is running low — and there’s no certainty the grants will be renewed. Toledo has already seen his sessions reduced from five to three days a week. To lose the resources to help youth, having come so far, saddens him immensely. 

“To [the kids] it would feel like another person has given up on them,” he says. “Youth need guidance from mentors that can relate. Or else, the streets will get to work.” 

On a recent Saturday, Toledo gathers the kids on 8th and Witmer. Over the next ten Saturdays they’ll paint a giant mural on the outside wall of Ministerio Jesus El Salvador del Mundo. Each kid will receive a $500 stipend for the work. It’s the sort of cash Homies might not have for much longer. 

“I’m giving back to the community I once destroyed. There’s no breaks in this type of work.”

These days he loves to hike, fish with a buddy, or chill out with a few beers over Santa Monica pier. Looking back over his life, Toledo waxes philosophical.

“I’m not religious, but I try to do good things, to replace all the bad things that I’ve done.”

In his own quiet, diligent way, Toledo radiates compassion. In his role as moral and spiritual leader of the youth he works with, the gangbanger once known as Flaco has seen himself reborn. 

“I have a purpose now in my life, and it’s to guide these kids so that they don’t feel alone.”

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A kid, no older than 13, wearing green Chuck Taylors and what one of the Baby Stone Gorillas refer to as a “Pooh Shiesty mask,” emerges from the bouncy house area and saunters towards the group to share his admiration. “Y’all really made it out the hood, huh,” he says, flashing a gleaming smile. He poses for photos with the rappers and starts throwing up gang signs, to which one of the guys, out of a presumed sense of moral responsibility (or maybe because there’s an interviewer in their midst), tells the kid to put down. When the subject of the guys joining the kid in the bouncy house comes up, another BSG member chimes in that he can’t because he’s got his “grenade” on him. 

“A lot of people know us [now],” group member P4K mentions. “We go a lot of places, some people endorse us. Like ‘Here you need something to eat? We got y’all.’” All the guys seem unable to fully encapsulate how life-altering their quick ascent as the city’s premier new rap group has been. P4K continues, humbly, “We ain’t rich like that. But we in a position to make sure we straight right now you know. Like make sure our moms got it… we makin’ sure our moms are straight.”

If you look for it, you can see a small fence separating Gilliam Park from an incline that leads upwards towards the manicured greens of Baldwin Hills — the upper-middle-class section that has long towered above the poverty-stricken “Jungles” area where the Baby Stone Gorillas were raised. The Jungles were originally named for the tropical banana trees, palms, and begonias that once flourished in the area, but the neighborhood has since been known by the same moniker for its violence and gang culture. The area is the territory of the Black P. Stone Nation (usually referred to as BPS), one of the largest gangs in Los Angeles. 

“Lions, tigers and bears: It’s really like a jungle, you know,” member Top5ivee jokes in reference to growing up there.

A year removed from releasing their first music video, the rap group from Baldwin Village are already positioning themselves to become major players in the modern canon of L.A. gangster rap. They make quintessential shoot ‘em up street rap, full of vicious threats aimed at rival gangs, mournful prayers for lost ones, and challenges to anyone who wants to test them. Song titles include “Military,” “Die By My Troopers,” and “Body For Body.” The style is nothing new, but their particularly creative barbs and the charismatic back-and-forth flows make the music feel visceral. If you approach them the wrong way, they might shoot you. If you approach them the right way, they still might clown you for wearing an ill-fitting hoodie, just as one member named EKilla does over FaceTime to a friend at the park: “I mean look at my n****, he suffocating, he can’t even breathe.”

Their style has begun to draw all sorts of attention; they recently inked a distribution deal with Empire and released a debut album, BABYST5XNE GORILLAS, on the label in early March. A gritty statement of purpose, it brims with snappy threats, pays homage to classic L.A. rap beats, and boasts a sharp humor. They’ve followed it up with two sub-30 minute tapes that teem with the same confident and funny punch-ins but differing sub-styles of L.A. rap beats. They have made music with some of the city’s biggest power players including RJMrLA, Wallie The Sensei, Saviii 3rd, Rucci, and Big Sad, among others.

“It’s crazy, damn like these motherfuckers I be really listening to and shit, we really be doing songs with them now,” says EKilla. Ekilla was the first to try his hand at rapping, and he roped his buddies into it since he had always heard them bouncing around bars in more casual settings. They looked up to other rappers from the Jungles growing up and list off a few — Take Money, the late Nfant, and Red Chuckstaaa — but all of them individually mention they never envisioned themselves actually following in that lineage.

The Baby Stone Gorillas consist of five members, all between the ages of 19 and 23. Despite his unassuming demeanor, P4K’s raps can terrify you through the screen and knock the fitted clean off your head. He has a penchant for spelling things out: “I’m from the A-U-G-U-S-T side of the J-U-N-G-L-E-S,” he says while twisting fingers. But he also exhibits an endearing gap-toothed smile and light-hearted charm. 

EKilla Off Da Blockk is the most chatty, and has a giddy energy about him like a kid who ate too many Skittles. You can clearly make out his hearty laugh as the crew banter and joke about crashing cars and bad fits, alternately hollering at girls on the other side of the parking lot. Everyone starts cracking up when one of the hollerees yells back that she’s got her kid with her. 

5Much, the most soft-spoken and likely the highest member of the group during our interview, has a deft and melodic touch, drowning the style in a syrupy vat of auto-tune similar to incarcerated Watts legend 03 Greedo. Top5ivee brings a relaxed energy but seems incredibly attentive: His slithery raps smoothen out the texture of the group’s music. In person, he measures his words so that they have impact when he does speak. The fifth member, Lil Chief, isn’t here. He only appeared in one of the group’s videos before being incarcerated right as their music began to blow up last summer. 

It’s clear the guys are always cooking up bars, or rehearsing their previously recorded songs. “I don’t go nowhere without my strap,” one of them melodically warbles mid-conversation. While telling a story about crashing his Dodge Charger, P4K breaks into lyric mode, rapping “do the dash, crash, and smash it and get another one” before explaining that he really totaled his Charger three times. The way they tell stories, everything in their lives feels a bit like an action movie — with lots of onomatopoeic sound effects and scene-setting details that bring you right into the stories. 

If you’re looking for an encapsulation of the group’s appeal, look to the group’s second-ever video, the fittingly titled “Baby Stone Gorillas.” Racking up over 1.4 million YouTube views, the song made them realize that a rap career was possible. It’s set in the same park, named after a former Dodgers legend, where we’re conducting our interview. The song starts off with an old clip of someone asking a 15-year-old P4K if he’s a gangbanger. Then it cuts to the present when he barges in, unloading a clip: “Military Choppa with the scope go boom boom boom, had a n**** runnin’ from the stick like Duck Duck Goose.” It’s accompanied by a cold stare towards the camera and a bunch of finger-twisting. 

The rest of the group take turns rapping about the gangbanging lifestyle — upping the murder rate and attempting to put their rivals on the news. The styles of each member fit smoothly with the next, and they have a lot of space to operate in the hollowed out, and minimalist L.A. menace supplied by RonRonTheProducer — one of the largest tastemakers and engineers of West Coast street rap over the past half-decade. 

Their music contains a palpable sense of danger, with rap tunes that would intimidate anyone on the wrong side of a beef. But it also has a playful streak that makes it feel like the product of a shit-talking and raucous studio session. This aspect comes across loud and clear on this Saturday afternoon at the park. The members have all known each other since they played in the sandbox; this natural chemistry in the booth is a product of the same type of back and forth jabbering that only comes from intimate friendships forged through talking trash on the basketball court, smoking pounds of Cali weed, and clowning on each other the way that only best friends can do. 

When asked about what their dreams were before they started rapping — or even if they thought about rap as a viable option — the guys are at somewhat of a loss. Top5ivee says, “I’d probably still be doing that shit like gangbanging, trying to figure out a way, like, how to make it out.” 

5Much pauses for a while and speaks slowly as the words come to him one at a time: “I don’t know. Shit. I knew I’d be doing something positive though.” 

EKilla chimes in that “for sure a n**** thought of a future, but how a n**** was livin’, I ain’t gon’ be sure, like I’d have to change up some shit, before I didn’t have a future.” 

This bleak outlook speaks for so many of the residents in the section. Developed in the ‘40s and ‘50s as large blocks of one and two-story homes for young Angelenos, Baldwin Village was initially a middle-class and 100 percent white neighborhood. But both environmental and policy factors through the late 20th century led to the area becoming the impoverished hub for gang activity. Throughout all of Los Angeles, realtors established what’s known as “racial covenants,” where certain areas were restricted for Black people, forcing them into smaller enclaves around the city. Though these covenants were technically deemed illegal by the California Supreme Court in 1948, their impacts linger through other levers that realtors pulled to get around the courts. 

According to the Los Angeles Times, after the 1948 ruling, “the most common way realtors kept neighborhoods all-white was through ‘racial steering’ — lying to minority buyers that a home had just been sold and expelling or freezing out of the business any broker selling to a minority.” Among other strategies, this was extremely successful in effectively segregating L.A. Black people were funneled into the “less desirable” areas, and much of South LA, including Baldwin Village, fell into that category. 

The California Department of Public Health measures what they call the most climate-vulnerable areas of the state; Census Tract 2363.02, which encompasses most of The Jungles, was ranked as having the highest vulnerability in all of L.A. County. The largest urban oil field in the country (over 1,000 acres) sits right next to Baldwin Village, and residents living in the area routinely report symptoms of dizziness, nosebleeds, headaches and asthma. As part of later gang crackdowns in the area, the LAPD cut down many of the trees the area was known for in order to clear visibility for helicopters and raids. Trees and canopy offering shade from the heat have continued to disappear, as construction projects over the last ten years have “required” their removal.

The wealthier white Angelenos who initially settled in the Baldwin Village area started making their way towards areas with stronger neo-covenants in the ‘60s, and they largely abandoned Baldwin Village as home prices dropped off and more Black people moved in. Per Census data, the percentage of the population in the tract that includes Baldwin Village that identified as Black or African American was 0 percent in 1960. By 1970, it was 81 percent; ten years later, it was 93 percent. In the intervening decades, the percentage has shrunk as gentrification has slowly begun to creep in. As EKilla notes: “There’s people who lived here the longest who are moving out […] More Latinos, more white people, it’s changing dramatically.” 

Nonetheless, the sense of community in the neighborhood runs deep and, for many residents, actually starts in ‘60s Chicago. There, a young boy by the name of T. Rogers felt that the Cub Scouts organization was not providing him the communal space necessary to flourish, so he turned to a newly formed organization called the Black P. Stone Nation. When he was 13, T. Rogers’ family relocated to the Jungles, where he founded the West Side set of BPS, which grew to about 500 members strong. They became affiliated with the Bloods, as in their early days the Piru Bloods helped protect members from Crips.

BPS is now one of the largest gangs in Los Angeles, which made the Jungles a frequent target for LAPD raids throughout the ‘00s. During our interview, P4K reveals that the late T. Rogers, who passed away last year at the age of 65, was actually his great-grandfather, and P4K’s government name still carries the Rogers at the end. “[He means] everything [to us]. Without him we wouldn’t be here. He is the set,” explains P4K, who has a large BPSN tattoo on the back of his head. 

The relationship between the area’s residents and LAPD has long been fraught. In 2006, the police slapped a gang injunction on the P. Stones, banning them from congregating in public spaces. In 2008, they officially labeled the Jungles as a “Gang Reduction Zone,” which gave them extra ways to impede the residents’ civil rights. A few years later, Waka Flocka’s “Hard In Da Paint” video was filmed in the area. In the video, there’s a black screen moment with a text overlay that says “Due to the Los Angeles gang injunction, this production was shut down.” The area is also frequently raided by the authorities. In 2011, nearly 1,000 LAPD officers and FBI agents swarmed the area, leading to over 50 arrests, and countless trashed households.  

The relationship between the cops and the community was captured in the 2001 Denzel Washington movie, Training Day. It portrayed the area as wild and reckless. The white cop in training remarked, “We’ll get killed coming in here […] they say don’t come in here with anything less than a platoon.” The Baby Stone Gorillas guys say they’ve watched the movie many times. In something straight out of a Boondocks skit, they claim that tour vans full of white people come through the neighborhood to show where Training Day was filmed. 

“[At first] we thought it was a set up, like police. All these phones out, and a van pulls up,” EKilla says. 

Remarks 5Much: “They pay for a hood tour.” 

Talking about the perceptions of the neighborhood that came out of the movie, the group laughs and jokes about how all publicity is good publicity.

“Let ‘em know we dangerous, that’s good promo,” EKilla says with a mischievous smile and laugh. 

For guys who came up in this dangerous environment — fucked up by government ineptitude, the crack epidemic, and mass incarceration propelled by Reagan’s War on Drugs — their newfound success feels surreal. It’s all happened so fast. In conversation, it doesn’t feel like it’s fully hit them how their lives are about to change. None of them had even stepped foot in a recording booth before 2021, let alone traveled around the country. Now, they’re hanging with DJ Mustard in Vegas, flicking up with Travis Scott, getting shouted out by Shaq and OVO, being brought out by larger rappers at music festivals and starting to headline their own shows. 

They get really excited while talking about a recent show in San Diego. There’s a spark in their eyes as they recount what it was like. “That shit was lit, it was a lot of people there, at least to us,” Top5ivee recounts. 

5Much chimes in: “It was the first time I was really, like, nervous, I don’t know. They was really there for us, you feel me?”

Close to the environment which raised them, the guys have a natural humility. They get excited when they hear multiple cars pass by playing their music from other parts of the park, and seem incredibly grateful for everything that’s happened in the past year. Top5ivee takes a moment to shout out “everyone who took they time and put their belief in us. It’s a lot, man. They took their chances on us.” 

From stints in juvenile detention facilities to having fans run up and ask for pictures, it’s been a pretty hectic turn of recent events. “It’s still new to some people to think of us like rappers,” admits EKilla. The rappers they previously listed off from the neighborhood as having looked up to — Nfant, Take Money, and Red Chuckstaaa — mostly have YouTube views in the 100,000s (with a few exceptions). At the moment, Baby Stone Gorillas have 11 videos with over 500,000 views already, and almost every one sits over 300,000.

The grass beneath our feet in the park is browning. At one point, the members of the group stare up to the hills looming above, the expensive homes and manicured lawns of Baldwin Hills and Ladera Heights, a stark contrast to the violent Section 8 housing in which they were raised.  Flashing a knowing smile, Ekilla says, “It’s crazy like we gon’ get there one day, like we see those houses above us on the hills and we gon’ have us one of those! It’s motivational. It be like… manifest.”

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These are the people who vote on important citywide issues: ordinances, the police budget, tenant protections, etc. They’re responsible for such recent policies as the city’s 41.18 homelessness enforcement ordinance and the decision to phase out oil drilling in L.A. Eight of the city’s 15 seats are up for grabs, and three of those races have no incumbent running, which means change is on the way in some form or another. The candidates include everyone from longtime political staffers stepping into the spotlight to law professors, to community activists running on police abolition and anti-vax advocates. If we, as voters, don’t choose wisely, we might get a lineup as bad as the eight people who seriously voted to ban roommates in parts of Shawnee, Kansas.

Some of these races contain only two candidates, an incumbent and a challenger, and will be decided in the primary vote on June 7. In those with more candidates, provided no one wins an outright 50 percent majority of votes, the top two finishers will face off in a runoff election in November. If you’re not sure what district you live in, you can find out here.

CD 1: Incumbent vs. Challenger (MacArthur Park, Northeast L.A.)

Here, public policy advocate Eunisses Hernandez is hoping to unseat Gil Cedillo. Cedillo’s held the seat since 2013, and he has had a long career in public office. He’s served in both the California State Senate and Assembly, during which he pushed hard for immigrant rights, authoring the Califonria DREAM Act, and working for years to get undocumented immigrants their driver’s licenses.

Hernandez is a lifelong CD1 resident, and she’s got two big issues. She accuses Cedillo of siding with developers over residents (e.g., approving a 750-unit building in Chinatown with no affordable units). She’s also a prison and police abolitionist, while Cedillo is decidedly not in favor of abolishing or defunding the LAPD.

What does Hernandez want to do instead? Decriminalize drugs and sex work (she previously worked for the Drug Policy Alliance), assemble mental health response teams, and shut down the old and cramped Men’s Central Jail (incidentally, the L.A. County Board of Supervisors voted to do this as part of a “care first, jails last” approach in 2020, and yet… it remains open). She also promises to bolster tenant protections (including making universal “just cause” eviction protections, which are now only afforded to residents of rent-controlled housingl) and commission a report on all public-owned CD1 land where affordable housing could be built. 

Both candidates tout their supposed progressive bona fides, which makes this race an intriguing indicator of where the city stands: with the old guard whose grassroots politics may have curdled after years in power, or with the new, insurgent left, whose ideals have yet to run up against the deadening inertia of council agendas and bureaucracy?

CD 3: Incumbent vs. Challenger (West and Southwest San Fernando Valley)

Incumbent Bob Blumenfield and challenger Scott Silverstein go way back — or at least to 2013, when among six candidates, Blumenfield earned 51.9 percent of the vote to Silverstein’s 4.4 percent.

Now Silverstein, owner of a real estate brokerage firm, accuses Blumenfield of moving too slowly on homelessness and of neglecting constituents. In contrast, Silverstein offers this campaign cycle’s popular refrain of more cops and no encampments. He also touts his Mental Health Over Real Estate (MORE) solution, in which private entities would buy properties and lease them to the city. The city would spend the money saved by not buying or building properties and providing mental health and addiction services.

Blumenfield, however, has played an active if contentious role in city homelessness policy. A handful of interim and Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH) projects have manifested in the district, including the Winnetka Village Apartments, two cabin communities, and Willows Bridge home. Most notably, Blumenfield co-authored the controversial 41.18 ordinance, which prohibits encampments in specific areas, such as near parks or existing shelters. 

Will that record convince voters or drive them away? Will Silverstein’s obligatory nod toward protecting the Valley’s coveted single-family homes play the way it has in the past? Will this race just be a redo of Blumenfield’s 2013 TKO? Only time will tell!

CD 5: Open Seat (Westside east of the 405, Bel Air, Mid-Wilshire) 

Paul Koretz has termed out and is running for City Controller. The four candidates running for his seat have some similarities. They all want a UCLA Metro station, and they’ve all placed homelessness, affordable housing, and safety at the forefront of their campaigns. They all want to shift to using mental health professionals instead of cops in various situations and advocate for more street safety interventions that would reduce the need for policing.

But it still may come down to cops and houses.

If you’d like to see more cops on the street, go with attorney, non-profit leader, and former Los Angeles Civil Service Commission member Sam Yebri, who wants to return to staffing numbers advocated under the Villaraigosa administration, or with Katy Young Yaroslavsky, an environmental attorney and senior environmental policy advisor to County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl, who supports shifting police out of office roles and into more frequent patrols. 

If you’d like to see less, UCLA law professor Jimmy Biblarz would shift police response to only violent crime, and create an Office of Neighborhood Safety to coordinate unarmed responders and give residents a voice as to where resources should go. He also doesn’t think local cops need military-grade weapons. Nor does public policy analyst Scott Epstein, who wants to take funds away from the police and use it on crime prevention and infrastructure.

When it comes to housing and homelessness, all call for more permanent supportive housing, but — key here — Yebri is the only one who supports 41.18. For housing, Epstein supports expanded renter protections and updating zoning to allow more transit-oriented infill housing, which Young Yarosolovsky also supports, though not in single-family neighborhoods. Young Yarosolovsky wants to add more beds in congregate mental health settings, and prioritize rental assistance funding to keep people in their homes.

Both Yebri and Epstein are public transit users with goals to improve it, decrease traffic, and increase walkability. Epstein promises to champion free fares. Young Yarosolovsky’s climate change platform would phase out oil drilling and invest in local water sources and water recycling.

Biblarz supports the Livable Communities Initiative, a plan that streamlines adding housing on top of ground-floor businesses to create more density with three-to-five story buildings. The rest of his platform is extensive and full of ideas, including supporting local artists and improving access to women’s health services. 

At the end of the day, it’s no surprise that this district representing the core of upscale Westside L.A. liberalism has four variations on a theme of urban professional candidates. Young Yarosolovsky is strong on climate change, Epstein is community-oriented, and Biblarz is admirably idealistic. But in a district that includes Bel Air and Hancock Park, some folks may just vote for their property values. 

CD 7: Incumbent vs. Challenger (Northeast San Fernando Valley)

In perhaps the quietest race, incumbent Monica Rodriguez is hoping to keep the seat she’s held since 2017. In that time, she formed an Equestrian Advisory Council (see, every district’s different!) and added just over 400 interim and permanent support housing beds. Her sole challenger is Elisa Avalos, a lifelong Pacoima resident and president of the Pacoima Neighborhood Council. But Avalos will have an uphill battle in name recognition: As of May 16, Rodriguez had raised more than $335,000 to Avalos’s roughly $16,000.

Avalos’s platform doesn’t go into great detail on any particular issue, but she does have a lot of community-minded proposals: solar power in parks, more spay/neuter clinics, security cameras to catch people illegally dumping trash, and an embrace of the cannabis industry to attract more tax revenue. 

They may differ slightly when it comes to cops. Both women are fans of community policing, and Rodriguez implemented one such program in San Fernando Gardens. But whereas Rodriguez voted to divert money from the LAPD in 2020, Avalos’s campaign, which has endorsements from both the Los Angeles Police Officers Association and a group called Defend the LAPD,  specifically mentions making sure the department is “adequately funded.”

CD 9: Incumbent vs. Challenger (Parts of Downtown and South LA)

Newcomer Dulce Vasquez is challenging Curren Price, a former California state senator and assemblyman who’s held his seat since 2013. Price’s past initiatives have included raising the minimum wage and legalizing street vending.

Vasquez is a proponent of L.A.’s Green New Deal and wants to create a new transit plan to better connect housing and recreation via bus, rail, and bikes.

Despite being about 40 years apart in age, the candidates have similar stances on many issues. Both are critical of law enforcement, but neither is the most progressive candidate on the issue across the city. Price voted to decrease LAPD funding; Vasquez signed the “no new cops” pledge, but she isn’t looking to decrease the number of officers. Price was one of several council members to introduce a motion calling for unarmed crisis response, which Vasquez supports.

For Vasquez — a Mexican immigrant who grew up in Florida — it may come down to name recognition. Price is a CD9 native with longstanding political influence, while some locals have criticized Vasquez for only recently moving to the district.

CD 11: Open Seat (Venice, Pacific Palisades, Westside west of the 405)

Councilman Mike Bonin uniquely chose not to enforce Ordinance 41.18. But as ire over the homelessness crisis boiled over on the Westside, he became the subject of a failed recall campaign and now won’t seek reelection for mental health reasons. 

The eight candidates’ views on homelessness are likely to play a huge role in votes, and most of them are pretty similar, looking to clear encampments and move unhoused people into temporary shelters with services. But only one of them seems interested in following in Bonin’s footsteps, and that’s attorney Erin Darling. 

Like Bonin, Darling opposes 41.18 as a solution to encampments, instead calling for rapid rehousing into converted motels and commercial spaces. He also calls for “housing navigators” to cut through red tape, boosted tenants protections, and more affordable housing through solutions like vacancy taxes and inclusionary zoning. He’d also like to alleviate traffic by making sure people who work on the Westside can live nearby, adding affordable housing near transit. (Have you ever tried to get to the Westside on a bus? Yeah, it’s not fast.)

His opposite is business owner Mat Smith, who wants to “return conservative values” to the district. He thinks shelter is a right but “housing is earned,” wants to strengthen conservatorship laws to get people into treatment, and to “re-fund” police. That may be enough info for some voters, but there are seven other candidates in between.

Greg Good, former president of the Board of Public Works, wants to appoint a district Chief of Homelessness, initiate an RV buyback program for those who move from RVs to housing, and explore new Tiny Home villages on L.A. World Airports property. He would enforce the Mello Act, which increases the number of affordable units in coastal areas.

Venice Neighborhood Council prez Jim Murez wants to move people experiencing homelessness into Transitional Service Centers (TSC), built away from neighborhoods and commercial districts. He also wants to crack down on filming, requiring more input from the community and more giveback from production companies. 

Attorney Allison Holdorff Polhill wants to grant housing vouchers to the unhoused — but only those willing to go to rehab or job training. District businesses owners may be interested in knowing she wants to up the Small Business Exemption, meaning those with revenues under $500,000 wouldn’t have to pay the City’s business tax. Currently, it’s set at $100,000.

Attorney Mike Newhouse, president of the West L.A. Area Planning Commission, told the Westside Current he would give encampments residents 30 days to accept help or move along. He also wants to hire a small business liaison to work with locals, seeing the impending Olympics as a potential boon for business.

Attorney Traci Park’s plan includes using government-owned properties and parcels, establishing a 24-hour housing emergency hotline, and a city Public Health Dept. with mental health and substance abuse programs.

LAUSD teacher Midsanon “Soni” Lloyd, instead wants to tax billionaires to build treatment centers. He’s raised $0 thus far, and was very outspoken against the school district’s vaccine mandates.

As L.A. ‘s beach neighborhoods have filled with encampments, many of its residents (who often still fancy themselves liberals) have drifted towards more conservative measures — not unlike the mayoral race that sees Rick Caruso running as a Democrat. There’s a lot of candidates here, but ultimately, the question may be, is the beach for everyone — including those who could be sheltered there — or only those who can afford it? 

CD 13: Incumbent vs. Challengers (Hollywood to Glassell Park)

Welcome to the spiciest election of the cycle, in which four challengers are vying to unseat incumbent Mitch O’Farrell, who frequently touts his record of building affordable housing but who angered activists by clearing Echo Park Lake of its unhoused encampment. Many of those activists were arrested during said clearing, and the park remains encircled with a very unattractive chain link fence, save a few entrance points.

But did it work? Uh, no. A report found that of 183 people on a placements list, just 17 received long-term housing. LAHSA lost touch with 82 of them, 48 are still waiting, and six have died. So, what about O’Farrell’s competition?

To O’Farrell’s right is Steve Johnson, an Air Force vet and LASD sergeant. In a recent forum, he blamed the 179 Echo Park arrests on the protestors, voiced support for ousting progressive DA George Gascon, and attributed crime to LAPD funding cuts. 

The other three all consider the Echo Park clearing a failure — and not because of the protestors.

There’s labor and community organizer Hugo Soto-Martinez, who opposes 41.81 and calls for creating a network of drop-in centers with 24/7 health services, as well as using empty retail and office spaces and underused hotels and motels for shelters. He’s a labor guy, so it’s no surprise jobs are on his mind. He wants to train and place people in unionized jobs serving the unhoused population and “New Deal-style jobs” dedicated to the climate crisis, which could include fixing up houses to make them more energy efficient, installing solar grids, and, notably, capping the district’s defunct oil wells. Free transit and 100 percent electric buses are also on his list.

Kate Pynoos is a homelessness policy advisor who previously worked for Bonin. Pynoos wants to create a new Office of Tenant Support to help renters stay in their homes and explore Tenant Opportunities to Purchase Act (TOPA) programs, streamline affordable housing (including by exempting projects from frivolous lawsuits), and adopt a city “Right to Housing” policy. Her platform also calls for making business easier for street vendors (they were fenced out of Echo Park Lake), and better bus shelters. You know, the kind with actual shade and outlets.

Organizer Albert Corado’s turn to politics came after his sister, Mely Corado, was fatally shot in 2018 by LAPD officers who chased a suspect to the Silver Lake Trader Joe’s where she worked. He’s the polar opposite of Johnson. He wants to defund police and reinvest in social and public services, use eminent domain to seize vacant properties for housing, and levy taxes against landlords who fail to provide a percentage of affordable units and entities who own multiple residential rentals. Also: free public transit. 

For CD13, it’s all about whether people are ready for change. Back in 2013, O’Farrell was seen as a progressive candidate. He was the first Native American elected to City Council and, alongside Bonin, one of only two openly queer members. But can he keep his seat when so many — even filmmaker Ava Duvernay, apparently — regard the Echo Park situation as shameful? Soto-Martinez’s grassroots campaign has attracted plenty of supporters, including several of the groups that helped fuel Nithya Raman’s upset CD4 victory in 2020, so out of all the candidates, he may stand the best chance.

CD 15: Open Seat (San Pedro, Wilmington, Harbor City, Harbor Gateway, Watts)

With Joe Buscaino running for mayor supporting Rick Caruso for mayor after lagging big-time in the polls, CD15 has four candidates looking to fill his empty seat. This race has perhaps the most diverse selection of candidates, at least in terms of their platforms and areas of focus.

Anthony Santich, a native San Pedran who’s spent most of his career with the Port of Los Angeles, mostly has ideas about that port, including creating local jobs and updating business practices to capture lost dollars. He claims his plan would generate $100 million in community benefits over five years.

Similarly focused on local jobs is Danielle Sandoval, a former union officer who serves on the Assessor’s Advisory Board. She’s big on job training programs, and she wants to make it easier for small businesses to open in the district. She’s also got some interesting — and practical — ideas about public WiFi access and appointing a health officer to serve as a liaison between the county and state. 

Tim McOsker is the most embedded in politics. He’s the former Chief of Staff and Chief Deputy City Attorney to L.A. Mayor James Hahn, as well as an ex-lobbyist for L.A. Police Protective League. His platform gives attention to climate change by ensuring the district and its ports move to green technologies, but he’s vague on homelessness (more shelters, more coordination).

Twenty-three-year-old LAUSD teacher Bryant Odega is likely the most progressive candidate in this race. He supports the People’s Budget (which would divert funds from police to social services), free public transit, banning encampment sweeps, expanded rent control, a vacancy tax for empty units, and implementing L.A.’s Green New Deal.

McOsker has raised over half a million, far more than any other candidate, and he may appeal to voters who want to cast a cozy vote for the establishment. But for voters who want change in a majority POC district previously run by a white ex-cop, Sandoval and especially Odega are likely far more appealing choices. The question is, can they lure enough of the vote away from the guy with all the cash?

The post theLAnd’s Guide to the 2022 City Council Primaries appeared first on theLAnd.

This is not the Westside of Erin Darling’s childhood, but it is, unfortunately, its current iteration: the tech companies, the blatant inequality, the environmental hazards, the vitriol. In January, having survived two recall attempts that brought as-yet-untold levels of rancor to city politics, Bonin shocked Angelenos across the city by announcing that he wouldn’t be seeking reelection, citing the toll that events had taken on his family and mental health. Darling, a lifelong Venice resident, stepped into the race shortly thereafter, hoping to carry on the progressive torch.

Darling looks and talks like the surfer he is: tan, with blond hair and a mellow aura even when he’s discussing big issues. But he’s also a fierce civil rights lawyer who has made a career out of “standing up to bullies,” as he put it. For Darling, this has meant going to bat for tenants about to lose their homes during his time at the Eviction Defense Network, representing people facing harsh sentences in his role as a federal public defender, and bringing cases on behalf of locals who have been mistreated by Los Angeles law enforcement in his private practice.

Now, he says he’s ready to “scale up” — to go from representing his clients to representing hundreds of thousands of people across CD11. It will mean rejecting the play-village version of the district that shoves homelessness, income inequality, and environmental issues to the margins and fighting instead for a district that tackles these issues head on. It feels, he told theLAnd, like “a battle for the soul of the Westside.” 

theLAnd: You grew up in Venice—what was it like back then?

Erin Darling: It was just this economically, racially diverse place by the beach. It was bohemian, but it was also really old school. It had a strong working-class sense. It’s weird because on one hand, I really miss the Venice of the ’80s and ’90s, and there’s so much loss, there’s so much beauty that’s no longer there. On the other hand, I don’t want to romanticize things — especially in the ’90s when gang stuff was so intense, and it caught up people I know. By the time I was a senior in high school, like, I’m about to go to UC Berkeley, I know multiple people who were in prison.

When people talk about diversity in this really abstract, Wells-Fargo-commercial way, it’s so lame. The diversity that I grew up in is so beautiful, but it was not without its obvious tensions. And my life was a lot easier than people who grew up, you know, harassed by the police. I wasn’t on the gang injunction list. 

Tell me about your work as a federal public defender. 

I’m really thankful for the experience, but it was also really tough. I had a case I’ll never forget where it’s this dude who had been through the foster care system, taken from his mom, moved around a lot… he caught a drug-related felony. If you have a drug prior, a ten-year mandatory minimum can turn into a 20-year mandatory minimum. And if you have two drug priors, you’re looking at life. So there’s no way you’re going to trial when that’s hanging over your head. It was kind of a beatable case, it wasn’t open and shut — but he pleaded out because he didn’t want that much time. Ten years of your life, boom. And if you have kids… I just think about that case a lot.

Because you felt like there wasn’t that much you could do.

Exactly. And he was my age. Guys my age I feel like: “There but for the grace of God go I.” 

Before that, you worked at the Eviction Defense Network, right? How did that experience inform your view of the housing crisis in L.A.?

Yeah, good question. One, it was that evictions lead to displacement and homelessness. Yeah, we have rent control in the city of L.A., but for the most part, landlords have a lot of power — and at the time [just after the 2008 financial crisis], banks had a lot of power because there were so many foreclosures. The city could have done a lot more to strengthen renter protections and just hasn’t — and here we are, 14 years later. And, in the absence of local effort to strengthen renters’ protections, we have record displacement and homelessness.

Do you remember any stories from that time that really stuck with you? 

Oh, so many. I represented a woman who’s, like, volunteering and helping with my campaign — we won her case, and she stayed in Venice. And she’s a wonderful local activist, and she’s still in that same unit. It’s just dope to have, like, tangible victories and to keep people in their homes… I remember another guy who had been homeless. We didn’t go to trial, but I won his case, and he was able to stay in his unit. And he was just, like, so happy. He offered to buy me a pastrami sandwich.

I guess I remember the joy most of all, you know? It was a good job to stick up to bullies. And I feel like that’s what a lot of this campaign is about, is sticking up to bullies — because I think a lot of the Recall Bonin stuff, people are pissed off at homelessness, but they’re not pissed off because they live in the wealthiest district and it’s characterized by mass homelessness. They’re pissed off because there’s a homeless guy down the street. And of course, it sucks, and it affects all of us. But we need to help people. We can’t just push people away. We know that doesn’t work.

Can you talk a bit more about some of your ideas to expand renter protections if you’re elected?

The biggest thing is a right to counsel. When people are unrepresented, they lose. And so I believe a right to counsel would really be huge in keeping people in their homes and reducing homelessness, because we know that people enter homelessness at a faster rate than they exit it, right? So we have to stem the tide. 

I think local leadership needs to really be more vocal for the need for change on the state level —like Ellis Act reform, which is happening now, but it hasn’t passed yet. We need to undo Costa Hawkins. That was on the ballot a couple of years ago, but there wasn’t enough support for it, and I think there could be… We have to draw a direct line from homelessness to tenant protections, and if that’s not made clear to people, the landlord lobby is going to control the narrative.

You’ve spoken about the need for homelessness policy to be citywide, rather than patchwork. 41.18 has been incredibly patchwork in the way it’s enforced, but it is on the books right now. Would you enforce 41.18 if you’re elected?

No. I’m the only candidate saying no. We know enforcement doesn’t work. I mean, look at Echo Park. A year later, the UCLA study showed that literally more people have died than remain housed in a year [Ed. note: This analysis is based on one count in the study; another count shows more people were housed.]. This is a massive policy failure. And like, we also know that lots of unhoused folks were pushed out of the park — and they came to Venice Boardwalk. We’re playing whack-a-mole, and people are getting displaced. And so the 41.18 approach I think is just the extension of the status quo, where we push people from one part of the city to the next. It’s this out of sight, out of mind mentality.

You talk about child homelessness in L.A. on your website, which is something I really don’t see discussed in L.A. that much. Can you say a little bit more about that specific crisis?

There’s 17,000 LAUSD students who are homeless. I mean, that’s a massive number. People are very supportive of addressing childhood poverty, but in the same breath, they could be talking about enforcement and anti-homeless rhetoric. It’s just like: it’s the same thing. It’s not as if child homelessness is this distinct problem. The children are homeless because their parents are homeless. Let’s strengthen wages and tenant protections so that families can stay in their home — so that they’re not sleeping in their cars and it falls on school districts to feed kids.

Before I went to law school, I worked as a college counselor at a high school in East Oakland. There was a girl who was a sophomore when I was there. And last week, I met her again because she’s a USC doctoral student living in a van with her husband. She just had a kid, he’s literally less than three months old. She was pregnant, while homeless—while being a grad student at USC. 

People paint homelessness with such a broad brushstroke. It’s just not accurate. I feel like there just needs to be more awareness of the amazing challenges people face, and quite frankly, how amazing people are to be that resilient. And yes, there are people who have mental health breakdowns and cause a nuisance to neighbors, but that’s because we don’t have a mental health social safety net in this state. 

Local government needs to support and expand what grassroots organizations are already doing — take the success of what is already happening in civil society and scale it up.

How do you think the L.A. City Council could do that more effectively?

For one, just directing dollars at successful projects so that they can scale up. They spent $5 million to house 200 people off the boardwalk and in some ways this was a success because people got off the boardwalk and got a roof over their head. On the other hand, the social work and basic services weren’t necessarily followed up [on]. 

You mentioned the Encampment to Home project on the boardwalk. Bonin definitely touted that as a success, but it was really expensive. And I spoke to unhoused folks who ended up staying way longer in motels and temporary housing than they were initially quoted. How do we improve on that?

We have to improve. That people haven’t been fully transitioned to permanent supportive housing is, one, a reflection of the challenges but, two, of the fact that we’re relatively new to this, and it will be expensive until we get better at it. But you know, we need to get federal and state funding to do it. Electorally, homelessness is a big issue in California, and there’s a budget surplus in the state.

I think almost all experts agree it has to be “housing first:” You need to give people a roof over their heads before you’re gonna do anything else. But housing first doesn’t mean housing only, right? It’s lowering the entry to some basic housing, but then it has to come with services. A lot of people I’ve spoken to in Venice about this — there is frustration with how it’s been, but I think when things aren’t good enough, that means we improve them. We don’t scrap [them] and say oh, “we’re just gonna send you to the desert” or some absurd, punitive, other idea.

I want to talk a little bit about the environment. You mentioned shutting down SoCalGas’s Playa Del Rey facility. What are some of your other environmental goals?

The city council took a major step in banning drilling, but it didn’t stop it all. What’s overlooked is there’s this massive Southern California gas storage facility super close to Playa Vista. Everyone knows about Aliso Canyon, and it’s like, we’re facing another potential Aliso Canyon, and it’s so risky. I totally understand the infrastructure challenges as we transition away from gas, but we haven’t done it yet. I think we can walk and chew gum at the same time and push L.A. to be 100 percent renewable energy by 2035. My framework is: Climate change is here, and it’s all around us, from increased wildfires in the Santa Monica Mountains to increased storms along the coastline. And so we can’t be doing things like the Southern Company gas storage or just our status quo energy system. 

I’ve been endorsed by Youth Climate strike, and I bring it up because this is the role model: youth realizing that this is the existential challenge and we have to lay our bodies on the line. Inequality and climate change are the two existential crises of our time, and if our democratic system can’t address these crises, then where are we?

I hear you’re a big Mike Davis fan. Was City of Quartz the first book of his you read? 

I talked about growing up in Venice and all these influences, and I feel like Mike Davis’s writing is that. He reads. So. Much. Just so many intellectual threads — he’s quoting NWA and the Frankfurt School.  And I think we need Cassandras. City of Quartz is, to me, the seminal book of L.A., but Magical Urbanism is super overlooked… I think of Ecology of Fear whenever I’m in Malibu. 

Are there any other seminal texts that you really look to understand L.A.?

Ruthie Gilmore looms so large right now. She was at Berkeley when I was there. She came to speak to our seminar right when Golden Gulag came out. It was great. I just read some Raymond Chandler for a book club I’m in with some lawyers. It’s such a different L.A., an L.A. I don’t know, and, like, it is so racist. It’s just like, dude! I guess I bring it up to say: L.A. is always changing. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad, sometimes it’s just change. I feel like I’m gonna hang up the phone and think of [more] — that’s how my mind works whenever people ask me about albums and books.

Well, what’s your favorite L.A. album? Because we did a big list. 

I literally went to Skylight to pick up that physical copy. I think the first thing that comes to mind is Freestyle Fellowship’s Innercity Griots. That’s like a criminally underappreciated album. Freestyle Fellowship was at the height of their powers, and it’s just like post-riots L.A.…“Park Bench People” is like a freaking classic. I think about that song a lot when we’re talking about homelessness. You guys had Love[‘s album Forever Changes] up there and it’s funny because Love is so classic, but I feel like it’s not—

It’s an unexpected choice for top album.

Yeah, Love isn’t the soundtrack to [my] coming of age, you know, The Doors feels like more connected to my life because it was in the background more. I shouldn’t say it’s not as good as The Doors. I’m not saying that!

Anything else you want to say before I let you go? 

Now, with Roe v. Wade, this reactionary wave seems to be so strong — and so many people in California have this sense of California exceptionalism. Like, “oh, we’re safe, we’re different.” But is the Westside just going to become a place for wealthy white people? We’re just going to police our way to a sense of safety? Like, we know that doesn’t work. 

So I just really hope that… it feels like a lot of pressure. I don’t want to screw up this campaign. I feel like there’s some really strong reactionary energy, from the sheriff to mayoral candidates. I just want to feel like my city, my neighborhood, my community is stronger than that, better than that. 

It does feel like a battle for the soul of the Westside. Are we going to become a fortress? We know that fortress mentality doesn’t work for our country. So many of us were against that approach that Trump was taking. But then when we’re talking about the Westside, it’s like, we’re going to spend more energy making sure that poor people aren’t sleeping in parks than we are housing people? Is that really who we want to become? It’s already lost so much diversity, and there’s been so much displacement. I don’t want my son to grow up in a punitive environment like that.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. An abridged version appeared in the May 17 edition of theLAnd’s newsletter.

The post Battle for the Soul of the Westside appeared first on theLAnd.

During those years on house arrest, he started writing graffiti, as well as his own music, to keep himself busy and out of trouble. He was guided in part by his younger brother Nate, also known as N8NOFACE, the synth-punk visionary currently tearing up the underground. But the elder Hose was influenced more by Hall & Oates, Egyptian Lover, gangsta rap, and Zapp, which steered him into being a foundational component of this generation of electro-funk music. To listen to Zackey Force Funk is to fall into a strange and captivating hybrid of highly danceable music, with lyrics about hustling, and a love for the streets.

In the early, exciting days of MySpace, Zack used that network to help kickstart his music and art. The former caught the attention of legendary DJ/producer Justin “Kutmah” McNulty, among others. It was Kutmah who connected Zack with Hit + Run, and before he knew it, Zackey Force Funk was getting burn all over the place.

His song “Press Play” with XL Middleton and Eddy Funkster quickly became a lowrider anthem upon its release in 2013. Indeed, it sounds like it was made specifically to blast out of the speakers from a tricked-out 1964 Chevy Impala. His subsequent music has continued to blend a party vibe with a hint of danger, and vocals that hit a range as wild and dynamic as Mike Patton’s in Lovage. While he may have started making music in Tucson, the vibe has always felt as if it belongs in clubs like the old Airliner, or thumping along the streets of Whittier Boulevard. There is an almost sunny vibe to his music, married to the grime, that makes it feel like a quintessential part of L.A.

He’s now released seven records as Zackey Force Funk, one album with Eddy Funkster as Líneas, and the groundbreaking, electro-funk-glitch-hop album Exorcise Tape, with renowned electronic-psycho-pop-rock musician Tobacco, for a project called Demon Queen. He’s also collaborated with Brian Ellis, Egyptian Lover, and many others.

Zack hasn’t been in any real trouble for 20 years. Nowadays, he works on rockets, makes music, and focuses more on finding a positive side of life, “one with art and creativity.” But he’s had a wild journey, and recently documented it all in book form, The Memoirs of Zackey Force Funk. The book is certainly jarring and intense, but at the same time it’s uplifting and inspirational. While chronicling the insane struggles of his early life, Zack also details how he learned to re-tune his thinking and behavior, and managed to “defeat all this fuckin negativity with positivity.”

“I’m always gonna try my hardest to think positive in the worst situations,” he tells me. “We’re only here for a limited amount of time; you deserve to be happy. It’s not about how much money you make or how successful you are, but how much you gave back to the community. When you die, you’ll see how much you really were worth. Even a cockroach in China right now, is probably related to us in some way. And that’s a good thing. We’re all connected and we’re all one.” 

Over a healthy serving of Heineken’s, ceviche, and buffalo chicken mac & cheese at Pike Restaurant & Bar in Long Beach, Zack talked about his love for L.A., Long Beach, and his hope for the future of our adopted home. “I like it here,” he tells me. “I’m happier now.”

What inspires you about Los Angeles?

Zackey Force Funk: Los Angeles is the greatest city in the entire world. I’ve traveled all over, and I really think it’s the greatest city in the world. Because you really can be whoever, or whatever, you want. I can come out here and be a funk artist, and I don’t have to worry about crime or trying to be a criminal. My son’s gay; he can come out here, and put makeup on, and dress however he wants, and walk down downtown L.A. or downtown Long Beach, and not get messed with. It’s normal, it’s OK. He can’t do that in Phoenix, he can’t do that in Tucson. He’ll get fucked with.

You can literally be whoever you want to be in this city and county, and it’s OK. That, to me, is the number one greatest reason why it’s the best city in the whole world. You’re not gonna get that… Maybe in New York? I don’t know. But who wants to be in New York in January, when it’s a blizzard?

This is the greatest city in the world, I’m telling you.

My family is in Arizona, so I go out… But after a day or two, I’m over it. Get me the fuck back to California. 

The heat will kill you, it will make you angry. It will make the most passive person turn into a criminal, it’s so hot. So that right there is peaceful. 

I like sitting by the ocean. I like knowing that I can be myself. I like that I’m around creative people. Let’s face it: the most creative people in the world are here. So I can talk about weird shit, creative things, and they’ll understand me. As opposed to Arizona, it might not be that way, or other cities, it might not be that way. 

Whatever I do, I wanna be progressive. I’m gonna be 50 years old soon; I’m not trying to be the next Justin Bieber. I’m gonna make the music that I wanna make, no matter how weird it is. It’s cool that in L.A., there’s people who can get with it. They know it’s progressive, and that I’m trying to do something, and they respect it. As opposed to doing some trendy-ass shit.

What got you to move to Los Angeles? Was it just music, or a sense of reinvention?

ZFF: I was already getting released out here with the Hit + Run crew, and I already knew Kutmah. I was already starting to do shows out here in L.A. more and more. And it was becoming harder for me to get out here. My brother finally met a girl from L.A., and moved out here. He was doing music. And I’ve always been close to my brother, I was doing music, and I always wanted to come to L.A. He finally got an aviation job. I’m older, I have kids, so I want to have some stability, health insurance, shit like that. A job, a paycheck. I don’t know about making money off of music. To me, making money off of music is crazy, it’s foreign to me. It’s a hobby.

But he was doing well out here, and got a job at Gulfstream, right out here at Long Beach Airport, fixing jets. And I had just broken up with my ex, so there wasn’t really much growth for me in Tucson anymore; there wasn’t much holding me back. My kids were moving out of Tucson, up to Scottsdale, my ex moved up to Scottsdale. I was trying to get out of crime, and Tucson can suck you in.

So with my brother moving out, and music, and I got fired from my job fixing planes because of a urinalysis refusal, so I was like, “Dude, let me get the fuck outta Tucson.” So I came out here, got a job as a contractor fixing planes with my brother, and started doing more and more music stuff. And I have not moved since; I’ve been here ever since. Same spot that I moved into the first day here, it’s been eight years now.

And I don’t think I’ll ever leave Long Beach. I love L.A., but L.A. has changed so much because of COVID. The nightlife has changed a huge deal in L.A. Funkmosphere would be on Thursday nights, Dub Club would be on Wednesday nights, you had Motown Mob on Mondays. Before COVID, I would want to actually work the weekends, and go to my parties in L.A. throughout the week. Low End Theory Wednesday nights. There was just so much going on in L.A. during the week.

COVID hit, and a lot of things changed. All the places are dead now; none of those places are open anymore. And it seems like Live Nation bought everything out. We were about to get our residency Friday nights at The Echo, it was gonna change my life. I was gonna quit my job. It was gonna change my entire life. Then COVID hit, and that all stopped.

Live Nation bought Echoplex. We even reached out to them, and you could tell they were more based on having more concerts, touristy shit on the weekends, and let’s not worry about these weekly residencies and local shit.

So now, because Orange County is hardcore right-wing, Trumpy motherfuckers who don’t believe in COVID — no disrespect to O.C. — they have the best, coolest Hispanic/Latino funk scene in the world. They’re the capital of funk. East L.A. is getting more and more gentrified, more souldies, cruising on Sundays, whereas Orange County is more funk, hardcore funk. More lowriders, shit like that. 

The center for funk, for me, is in Orange County. And because it’s hardcore right-wing, the clubs never stopped. They’re open. You don’t have to wear a mask, you don’t have to show a vax card. So, during the pandemic, the past two years, L.A. has really died down in the funk scene. There’s no more Scam & Jam; Funkmosphere is kinda gone, it’s just barely starting back up, I think recently for the Townhouse. But even then, it’s different.

But, you go to Orange County, and it’s cracking, every club’s cracking. Everywhere you go to is just packed, all playing funk.

So, being in Long Beach, I can go 25 minutes south, and do shows in Santa Ana and Anaheim, or go 25 minutes north, and do shows in downtown L.A. If I move to L.A., it’s gonna be hard for me to do shows in Santa Ana; if I move to Santa Ana, it’s gonna be hard for me to do shows in L.A. Long Beach came to be the most perfect city for me. 

Also, from being from the desert, from Tucson, I fuckin hate the desert. I wanna be by the water, you know what I’m saying? I’m five or ten minutes from the water in Long Beach, I get the Long Beach ocean weather, I’m 25 minutes from the funk scene in Santa Ana, I’m 25 minutes from the souldies scene in L.A. I don’t want to live anywhere else; it just makes sense for me to stay here. 

Things are coming back, but they are coming back differently. I’m sitting here talking to you about L.A., I’m talking about Santa Ana, but I unfortunately never talk about Long Beach, because it never really popped off. But, now, things are starting to change, even in Long Beach. I’m starting to see The Grasshopper is doing more funk and soul, Alex’s Bar is doing more funk and soul. So that’s really helped me out, and I think Long Beach is slowly starting to change into a more funk and soul scene, which is good. It’s great for the county, good for people like me, good for people in Long Beach, even for people in L.A. Cause they don’t really have shit up there right now, they really don’t. A few small venues, but… Scam & Jam’s gone. They’re only doing shows in San Diego now, because of the COVID restrictions and shit like that. 

It’s cool, right now Long Beach is popping off a little bit. And Funkmosphere now, starting back up, at Venice Townhouse. I could see that helping L.A. out. East L.A., they still have some shit, Boyle Heights has some small, little clubs that play soul stuff. 

But the big parties are gone now. The only one who’s holding it down on a street level is The Night of the Blaxican. They try to bring communities together in South L.A. I’ve been doing shows with them. That’s probably the biggest party. Because they’re more underground, they don’t have to deal with restrictions as much… Even though they do now, they’re starting to go more commercial now. 

It is coming back slowly. 

I guess it’s kind of contingent on the health department…

ZFF: Pretty much. And Live Nation… I’m really worried about L.A. They bought up everything, The Regent, Echoplex, I mean they own everything now. The culture in L.A. might be changing. I’ve been here eight years now. Since I moved to L.A. County, I’ve seen so much gentrification… downtown L.A. doesn’t even look the same. It looks completely different than it was eight years ago. I’ve personally seen a huge change with gentrification, you can tell it’s coming. It’s already here. 

Are you still doing graffiti?

ZFF: I’m about to start again. I’ve been doing more sculptures. I don’t think people are more open to sculptures, but I think they’d be more open to graffiti. Me, my brother, and Val (his girlfriend), we’re gonna do a show in Long Beach this summer, when he gets back from tour, and I really want to do sculptures, because graffiti gets buffed over, it gets crossed out. Paint’s expensive now, and I’m not gonna go steal paint. So now I gotta go buy all this expensive-ass paint, and it’s gonna get crossed out or buffed out. Whereas a sculpture is a different story. The way I make it, it’s gonna last forever. You can hang it in the house.

I just noticed, out here in Long Beach, and especially in Santa Ana, Orange County area, and even L.A., they respect graffiti out here, and I like that, that’s cool. And I used to be really good at it. I’m thinking of making some burners around here, and everyone is willing to give me a wall. So I think that’s the next step; I really want to paint a graffiti piece, here in Long Beach preferably. And then start rocking some graffiti pieces, and “he’s back.” Then let me do a gallery show, show off some of my sculptures, and I’ll have Foos Gone Wild there, I’ll have N8NOFACE there, I’ll have the best funk DJs there. I’ll do a little performance there. I think that’s probably coming, this year. It’s on my list of things to do. 

What’s your history with lowriders? Is that just something you grew up with, or have you owned lowriders?

ZFF: Growing up in Tucson, we used to cruise South 6th, on Saturdays and Sundays, and you would see lowriders. I’ve always wanted one. Then when I came to California, it was a whole other level. This is the mecca, this is what we’d look up to. And when I came out here, my song “Press Play” became a lowrider classic. The lowrider scene is the one who made that song my most famous song to this day. So any lowrider community, and lowrider show you go to, you’re guaranteed to hear “Press Play” being played, and guaranteed they’re gonna know who Zackey Force Funk is. And the shows I go to — No Man’s Land, the Super Show, Moon Eyes, Hello Stranger — all my shows right now are kind of based on the lowrider scene. Even Scam & Jam here in L.A., is run by some homies who throw lowrider shows. 

It’s just all connected out here, the funk scene and lowrider scene. So I’ve been getting more and more into it. My best friend just bought a lowrider, he’s getting that done. Sooner or later, I’m gonna have to get one, but they’re not cheap, at all! [laughs]

The lowrider scene out here, all of California, is huge. I think it’s the mecca. And I’m very fortunate that they love the song “Press Play,” that’s their main song. 

What is next for Zackey Force Funk?

ZFF: My Lineas album (with Eddy Funkster) is coming out on Foos Gone Wild, this summer, with NFT. My album with XL Middleton is one song away from being finished. People have really been anticipating me and him doing an album together for years, since the song “Press Play,” we’ve never done one. We’ve been working on this album for two years. So that’ll be coming out as well.

My book is slowly starting to gain steam now. And I’m starting to get booked for a lot of shows. Maybe a tour?

And you’re working on an album with N8NOFACE?

ZFF: Yeah, just started. It’s not gonna be punk, it’s not gonna be funk, it’s all gonna be minimal wave. The song I recorded last night is just him holding down one key, no drums, and we’re just doing what we have to do with our vocals. 

What are you passionate about these days?

ZFF: Uniting all the scenes. There was a while where the modern funk scene kind of split up, and I kind of reunited that shit. I pride myself on that, because I’m not from L.A., I’m from Tucson.

An old man from Tucson, Arizona, coming out to L.A., and making people shake hands, let bygones be bygones, and bringing the scenes together. It’s important to me, because I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen the success and progress it’s brought out. It’s inspired me to really be part of the community here in Los Angeles and Southern California. 

Foos Gone Wild, another example. They’re passing out free food, free clothing. You wanna help out the community too. I do shows for free a lot of time, to just give back, you know? It’s super inspiring for me.

The post The Legend of Zackey Force Funk appeared first on theLAnd.

In a better dimension, his Krylon prose punched out on a cracked iPhone screen would have made him the cult heir to Bukowski and Burroughs. Instead, Lucas’s legend was confined to several thousand denizens of deep-fried meme pages and esoteric rap blogs. Divinity anointed him the voice of those searching for the right diction, those desperate for refuge and redemption, whose tragedies he absorbed and multiplied with his own; but destiny offered conflicting directions.

I was his editor, friend, and occasional life raft. I succeeded at the first two, but drowned at that final, fatal component. During the time that I knew him, battles with substance abuse and mental health often debilitated him. For months, even years, the streets won out, casting him adrift on punctured Greyhound odysseys around the country. But when he could silence his demons, he was one of the most gifted writers of his generation, suffused with a fundamental decency and selfless generosity that enriched anyone within his gravitational vortex.

In the fall of 2019, the riptide seized him again. For months, he was homeless, shivering in sleeping bags on Skid Row, a clairvoyant in rags, prey to any illicit substance that would help him sleep through the night. But the temporary derangement offered a wild clarity. Despite the psychological and physical violence surrounding him, he glimpsed the horrors of late Capitalism in L.A: the tens of thousands of humans abandoned to the elements; the sanctimony and hypocrisy of ostensibly well-meaning liberals; the sheer absence of humanity in a social welfare state that’s more sieve than functional system.

When winter arrived, we coaxed Lucas back into a rehab deep in the Valley. For months, he detoxed and recovered from the chemical ravages, writing and reading feverishly, plotting his opus about Soundcloud Rap and the doomed generations of the decaying west. Upon his release in early 2020, Lucas produced some of the finest music journalism in recent memory, a 21^st Century mutation of gonzo that distilled the schizophrenic lunacy of life in Trump’s America. When the pandemic struck, it triggered a relapse. Paranoia, isolation, and poverty took him under. Lucas endured another breakdown and disappeared into a drugged archipelago of couch surfing, the streets, and jail. He eventually found himself back in San Diego County, where his mother enrolled him in a Veterans facility that offered treatment for those suffering from addiction and homelessness.

Last summer, Lucas left the halfway house after the time allotted to live there had expired. Soon after, he was found dead from an accidental overdose in San Diego’s Gaslamp District — barely 26 years old. In the aftermath of his tragic demise, I found myself mournfully sifting through the letters and emails that he’d sent to me. In one missive mailed from rehab, Lucas mentioned an article that he’d been writing for theLAnd. He’d recently devoured Mike Davis’ City of Quartz and wanted to capture the scope and dysfunction of the local homelessness crisis, one rooted in his poisoned traumas and personal disillusion.

In a stroke of fortune, Lucas sent his first draft to theLAnd contributor Will Schube, which otherwise saved it from being lost like so many of the other longhand pieces that he’d written over the years. The letter ⁠— a harrowing chronicle of life on the asphalt ⁠— is published in full below. Beyond the glaring magnitude of the genius lost, what strikes me most is how many others remain out of reach. For all the Spring Street posturing and the billions of dollars spent, this epistle remains as relevant as the day it was written two years ago. It reads as one last frantic plea from a life that couldn’t be saved, an apoplectic plea to end the inertia, and salvage whatever and whoever can still be redeemed. — Jeff Weiss

Los Angeles County consistently tells itself there are 40,000 bums sleeping in the rough between its borders. I’d put the number somewhere north of 100,000, and climbing. Drive East on the 105 from LAX towards Orange County on a clear day and you’ll see some 10,000 tents in dense encampments along the still water and trickles of the L.A. River system. Walk on Fifth Street from Figueroa down through five miles of open air drug markets and abject squalor and you get the feeling that there [sic] at least 20,000 souls camping on Skid Row. And anywhere you find yourself in LA, from Koreatown to Winnetka, from Venice to Long Beach, from Highland Park to Sylmar, there are the ubiquitous tents. Technicolor camping gear boosted from Wal-Mart or even bought on Amazon that grow on the toes of highrises and in the knuckles of housing tracts. Tents that drool hypodermic needles and Hot Cheeto Wrappers. Tents where dreams die and propane tanks ignite canyon fires. Tents that, however numerous, still contain only half our indigent population.

Besides a general capacity for observation and distrust for any figures on homelessness given by a county that proclaims a homlessness crisis without doing a thing about it, my 100,000 plus estimate was shaped by my own experience as a homeless Angeleno. For most of October, I was couch surfing across the state or spending my nights ambling aimlessly across Downtown’s haunted streets. Despite hospitalizations at Good Sam and Hollywood Pres no Polo-shirted censure (or nurse or doctor) asked me explicitly if I was homeless. In fact there was no interaction with any sort of outreach prostelyzor or liberal do-gooder or county bean-counter out and about during those surreal fall nights when I wandered between tall buildings with thousands of other slouching souls. In the DT every night quite a few humans with hoodies and hats drawn constantly walking to nowhere, getting high to forget that the winds moving silver moonlit clouds across the starless sky, between imposing skyscrapers, are going to whip them til sunrise. 

The only officials I interacted with were security guards, who apparate whenever you cross unmarked boundaries into the property of some highrise or another, instruct you to move along, and disappear just as quickly. This was the experience reported universally to me by the dozens of unsheltered Downtown and Koreatown residents I became acquainted with over those weeks. Curiously, the popular rumor seemed to involve “The Reptilians.” Reports of malevolent, humanoir, dimension-hopping reptilian-like creatures who pop out to feast on the suffering of the sick, tired, house free residents of Downtown. Among the whispers of these beasts of malevolent benediction, there were a few witnesses. One was a booster from Buffalo who, between rips of fentanyl and meth, told me about the police getting ahold of one some late night and the thing laughing maniacally as they tried unsuccessfully to behead it. 

These are the sorts of things one tends to believe down and out in Downtown L.A. 

The cast of characters one comes across here is what our progressive, high-minded, and even (self-styled) socialist politicians, academics, media loudmouths have pledged to protect. A rainbow coalition of drugfucked or mentally ill or unlucky proles who all had some bad breaks and now find themselves perennially in the hole. A few weeks on the street is a bad break, a few months and you’re both a social pariah and unemployable. First month’s rent and a security deposit anywhere in L.A. is $3500. General relief is $224 a month for single, childless adults. Meth is $10 to $20 a gram. You are welcome to calculate this yourself. 

To paint all of us as deviant speed freaks in search of risks and violence and without a care is grossly irresponsible and partially incorrect. While plenty of able-bodied and sound minds duck behind dumpsters at night and boost merchandise during the day, an unreported number rolled snake eyes at some God awful juncture. 

While meth is once again king between San Julian Park and Bunker Hill, plenty of opioid connoisseurs play Russian roulette with fentanyl. There’s a sad old story you hear from opiate addicts: injury, surgery, pills, heroin, oblivion. One such tale told to me by a man named Mike. A few years earlier Mike lived not quite comfortably but halfway decently. He was reared in the Inland Empire and, like so many boys out that way, grew up racing and jumping bikes in nearby deserts. He wasn’t rich so learning to fix and maintain his motorbike was a necessity, and he took amateur mechanics naturally. By his late 20s he was working on bikes full-time, making enough for his own house and a wife. Then riding his bike one day he fell and broke his neck. Like all hard luck junkie stories, his began with a pill prescription. And when the scripts ran out and the cold sweats of withdrawal began he quickly found heroin. When he got strung out there was no one to bail him out. He lost his home and business and followed the dope to where it was cheapest and readily available, and found himself a smoker in Ktown. He was quiet, shy even, with boyish good looks cocked to the side by a horribly crooked neck. With a striped polo and backward hat, a quiet, sad demeanor, he seemed like a lost boy led astray. 

His Pied Piper was a fentanyl junkie with a broken back hunched over so far he shrunk from 6 foot four to five foot seven. His back was so busted that half the time the top of his hunch was higher than his low hanging head. Posner looked about as sorry as they come, mumbled most of the time, and was incapable of speaking after a few good issues of fentanyl, but he was resourceful. He kept his eyes on the ground, not just because his back pointed that way, but constantly on the lookout for lost phones, cash, cards, and baggies. One night I saw him pick up an eight ball of meth off the sidewalk in Silver Lake, another night an iPhone out of the Red Line’s tracks at Western and Wilshire station. His actual hustles were endless, constant, and unprintable, and he seemed to have an endless supply of fentanyl, leading a train of junkies across Koreatown until he’d nof off standing up for a few hours, his crunched back holding his head at his feet, while a few itching fiends patiently waited for him to rouse from his slumber. 

“We gotta get you to a doctor, man. There has to be something,” I said to Posner one moon-lit night.

“What? Go to a hospital. I’ve been, they don’t do shit.”

And with a few mumbled words he summed up the realities of homelessness in L.A. It is a massive humanitarian and public health crisis unfolding in plain view of highrises where finance gangsters move billions of invisible dollars, of city hall and superior courts, of supposedly progressive, fair trade coffee vendors, of filthy, overcrowded shelters and rehab programs. The frigid indifference of the monied classes and their institutions is almost unbelievable. There are no public restrooms in Downtown, all restaurants lock theirs with a code that requires purchase, coffee shops do not have power outlets and no eatery will take yours behind the counter to charge your phone. So your [sic] left with the library. You’d think that when faced with this crisis literally on its doorstep L.A. Central Library would at least feign an attempt at outreach. I spent many days writing in the library. The computers were atrociously slow, dated by 10 years and incapable of loading the PDFs I needed to edit to file invoices in the browser or Adobe PDF software. There were no social workers, no resources, no seminars, any inquiries into this or using staff computers to get hard-earned money were callously rebuffed. 

It is a common theme everywhere you turn when you have grubby hands and sad eyes in Los Angeles: inhuman indifference. Whether ground down by the constant, intense human suffering or programmed by a dehumanizing capitalist culture, the brazen lack of empathy and inaction on display here is a gut punch. America has never cared much for its losers, nor has it tried much to understand them. The homelessness crisis cannot be reduced to a fentanyl or meth epidemic, nor a mental health crisis. The children of the middle and upper class are sent to rehab and therapy. Their parents pay the rent when they cannot, health insurance is upgraded when they suffer some terrible injury, school when their [sic] unemployed. The working class is constantly one paycheck away from sleeping in the dirt. Junkies, speed freaks, winos, schizophrenics, maladaptives, and the simply indolent are an undeniable majority out there, but many of those camping across the county are normal working people who had some bad luck and nowhere to turn. My friend Karen works 40 hours a week and shares a room with 3 people in a motel. Plenty more are much worse off.

It is a crisis of poverty and a nonexistent social safety net, and absolutely no one gives a shit. Certainly not the arrogant, preening “progressives” who drone on pretentiously about all their liberal sacred cows, their fashionable affectations, yet lack the gumption, currency, and decency to do anything. A separation from the realities of normal, working class life is so viscerally apparent amongst our political class as to be comedic. Medi-Cal covers breast implants, hormones, and facial feminization surgery for transgender men, yet when trans people are struggling with employment or thrown out by their parents, there is little in the way of help.

The human tragedy unfolding here will probably continue unabated. The grinding gears of a capitalist hellscape ran by Charlatans, fools, and thieves turning unabated. The human cost is incalculable, but surely noones [sic] counting.

The post Postcard From <br>The Edge appeared first on theLAnd.

Krick went on: “This is a place for all demons to be cast out and for people to be healed.”

The assembly had come, curious, ill, and anxious, looking for supernatural succor. If attendants stuck around, the 31-year-old pastor promised, she would banish the terrible spirits plaguing body and soul. 

At her beckoning, the group came forward and spoke into the microphone, relaying their woes: withered limbs, empty bank accounts, ancient curses. Krick listened and then prayed, an arm lifted towards the sky. One woman took an unsteady step out of a wheelchair and limped forward, tears in her eyes. “Hallelujah,” Krick said. “God is freeing you, hon.”

These weekly ceremonies appeared to meet a need: Covid-19 case numbers in Los Angeles were queasily rising and falling and rising again as new variants emerged; many churches had closed, leaving masses of the faithful without a solid spiritual home. Into this breach she stepped. Krick is among the more peculiar breeds of so-called coronapreneur: the enterprising faith healer. She wasn’t always in this role. Krick came here several years ago from upstate New York with showbiz dreams but after efforts as an actress and singer fizzled, she segued into the work of the Holy Spirit.

The scenes over which she presides have a particular resonance in this city. Pentecostalism, a homegrown form of Christianity known for practices such as speaking in tongues and belief in modern-day prophecy and healing, was born here more than a century ago. In 1906, the Los Angeles Times marveled at the site of a novel creed bubbling out of a ministry on Azusa Street. “The newest religious sect,” the paper wrote, “has started in Los Angeles.” Pentecostal healers found success in the following years. In the 1920s, the Echo Park evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson captivated audiences with innovative stagecraft and claims of supernatural power; the preacher-and-healer Kathryn Kuhlman’s services packed auditoriums in the ’70s. “Wonder-workers of many kinds ⁠— faith healers, exorcists, seers ⁠— have always been central figures in Pentecostalism,” says Leah Payne, a professor of religion at Portland Seminary. “For the faithful, they provide public demonstrations of the Holy Spirit’s capacity to work in the life of any practitioner.”

Yet Krick’s ministry isn’t some nostalgia act. This is a 21st century affair ⁠— her success is partially owed to a mastery of digital networks. In the park, a volunteer media team of four trails her with cameras, mics, and tripods. The entire service is streamed online; the juiciest segments are later cropped and uploaded to TikTok, where she has amassed more than a million fans with titles like “Little Boy Couldn’t Speak, God Delivered Him & He Spoke” and “Demons Cast Out Of Mom, Then Dad, Then Son!” Her branded hoodies and shirts with the catchphrase, “Revival is Now,” are stacked next to a cash box. Some weekdays, Krick holds livestreams from her apartment, where healings are performed through the computer screen. 

Krick’s emergence as a bonafide, if niche, celebrity gives a window into a freewheeling and entrepreneurial corner of Californian religion. This region has never lacked for freelance gurus or culty start-ups, offering sundry deliverances and therapies — from aura diviners to chic surfer churches. But in 2022, this faith healer has found her own lane. Over a series of interviews, Krick reflected on her shift in fortunes. She spoke carefully, in conversations from her home and at a cafe in Fairfax, where she ordered a pumpkin spice latte as her driver sat nearby. “I was never ever expecting this,” she said. “But that’s God’s timing, you know?”

Before her miracle-working career, Krick was raised in Andes, a sleepy town on the edge of New York’s Catskills Mountains. Both of her parents worked as educators and the family attended a Presbyterian church. She went to college in Ithaca, studied communications, and considered becoming a wedding planner. 

In 2013, Krick leased a car and moved to Los Angeles to be an actress instead. She landed bit parts, including one in a short-lived reality TV show titled Love at First Kiss from the producer of The Bachelor ⁠— the conceit of which was two strangers were matched for a dramatic smooch before going on to other dates (Krick didn’t make it past the first round). She recalls these days with reluctance. “I had one foot in the world,” she says.

At the same time, she was finding her religious bearings. She began attending Mosaic, a multi-site evangelical church with Southern Baptist roots, headquartered in Hollywood. Here, Sunday mornings bring slender and fit industry types wearing knit beanies and designer sweats; services consist of a few soaring songs followed by an inspirational sermon. “We are all strivers here,” a worship leader told me recently. At the time, Krick was pursuing music, and in 2015, she released a throbbing dance single of her own, with a video produced with friends from the church. “I felt God leading me to become a Christian EDM singer-songwriter,” she explains.

Around this time, Krick visited an upstart ministry in the Valley held in the living room of a Kenyan pop singer-turned-pastor named Lovy Longomba Elias. In contrast to Mosaic, this gathering was a florid Pentecostal tableau: worshippers might murmur in tongues and Elias, who now called himself a prophet, performed rituals meant to ward off devilish spirits. “For the first time, I saw demons being cast out,” Krick says. “I was set on fire.”

Some months later, Krick found herself at a conference headlined by another pastor named Kasambale Moses Geordavie. He had flown in from Tanzania for the event, which included feats of healing. Their meeting would prove pivotal.

A balding man with a thin mustache, Geordavie cut an enchanting figure as he addressed the room. He traveled in a limousine, wore beautifully ornate suits and came bearing a majestic tale: Geordavie’s website boasted that since the age of 5 he had been blessed with miraculous skills, which now included prophesying and curing the sick. He started a church in his home country and presided over a ministry-and-media empire, including an FM radio station, regular TV programs, and music festivals. Geordavie had been looking to bring his works to America. He was returning to Tanzania soon, but needed someone to run things in Los Angeles. 

Upon meeting Krick, he revealed that he had been led by the Holy Spirit to offer her a leadership position in the California branch. She accepted. “He said I was called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ,” Krick says, “and to reach the nations and that many miracles would happen through me.”

Geordavie provided Krick with a credential ⁠— she used the title of apostle soon after this ⁠— and mentorship in the practice of faith healing. The Los Angeles branch (called Geordavie Ministries International, then Advanced Anointing Church) would meet at a Mulholland Drive park overlooking the city and in a series of rental spots, like the basement of a Legion Hall and a senior activity center. Krick took to her new role with gusto, but the church drew paltry crowds of no more than 15. She worked part time as a nanny; her parents sent money to keep things afloat. “I had no clue what I was doing,” she says. “That was a really uncomfortable season for me.”

In 2020, Covid-19 hit Los Angeles. Following health orders, Krick’s church shuttered and went outdoors, to nearby Pan Pacific Park.

She officially changed the name of the church ⁠— now calling it Five-Fold Church ⁠— and ramped up online outreach, something she had been dabbling with for a couple of years. Sitting at her computer, working late into the night, Krick compiled short, bite-sized clips of herself ministering at her small park services, highlighting things like people speaking in tongues or shaking during prayer. 

The materials showing demon-manifesting (faces contorting, voices deepening) would prove to be a hit. Krick tailored the videos to pack a punch. “I wanted people to see the amazing power of God ⁠— like, ‘Woah, that’s supernatural!’” she says. “But I don’t want it to be too creepy. Because demons can look kind of creepy. No, there has to also be the moment of freedom, you know, to see the victory over the demons, to see the look on the person’s face when they’re free.” 

These posts — hashtagged #deliverance #anointing #miracles #healing — lifted Krick into a small network of other faith healers with hundreds of thousands of followers plying their trade on YouTube and TikTok, like one exorcist-livestreamer named Isaiah Saldivar, from San Joaquin County, who befriended and promoted Krick. There are any number of crafts for which one may acquire coveted online clout, yet there is recognizable alchemy to the influencer template, whatever the goods on offer: a warm persona; cross promotions and collabs; patrons and donations; tasteful lighting; a consistent color scheme; solid merchandise. Krick carefully assembled her ingredients. “God told me to make the videos one-minute long,” she says. “They started going crazy viral.”

On camera and stage, Krick has echoes of a young Julia Roberts, with other bits Judy Garland and Gemstone. Gestures are grand: head cocked forward, when listening sympathetically; stern scowl, when banishing devils; a blissful smile when praising God’s might. In time, her social channels caught the interest of Pentecostal media-makers of an older generation, like the veteran televangelist Sid Roth, who featured Krick on his TV show, and the California pastor Shawn Bolz, who praised her on his podcast. “If you want to get deliverance,” Bolz gushed, “you might as well get one of the Disney princesses to do it.” Krick’s following swelled past a million and, by the summer of 2021, weekend services were packed.

At Pan Pacific Park, the afternoon shadows wore on.

Krick motioned for the attention of the audience and said, “Stand to your feet now. It’s time for every demon to obey.”

The media crew focused their cameras. One by one, the testimonies sputtered forth: a man attacked by incubus and succubus demons in his dreams; a women haunted by witchcraft-induced sleep paralysis; another cheated out of money by a fortune teller; a woman who incurred a deadly curse after killing a black snake; a woman who believed her jealous neighbor had cast a horrific spell on her through an aerosol spray bottle. 

A middle-aged woman galloped forward, howling in agony. 

Krick stretched out a hand and addressed the demon inside: “You cannot stay in this woman any more. You can no longer torment her mind. You can no longer keep her up at night with anxiety. You can no longer send her nightmares. Look at me now. I break every curse off of this woman now. And I command, on three, every one of you must leave her, in Jesus name. One, two, three! Out of her now.”

The woman crumpled to the ground, limbs like jelly. The crowd let out a chorus of hallelujahs and amens.

“Jesus is freeing you,” Krick said. More hosannahs.

A ministry helper stepped forward with a trash pail. The woman spit and dry-heaved, as if vomiting out the evil. “You cannot fall for the demon’s lies,” Krick said encouragingly. Glory, glory.

On the sidelines, a gray-haired social worker named Jerry Davis appraised the exorcisms like bouts in a boxing ring. 

“That one came right out. Uh-huh.”

“Oof. Look at that one go.

“That one doesn’t want to come out, huh?”

A passerby, balancing a leashed pomeranian and an iPhone, stopped to gawk. “Oh my gosh,” she said into her cell. “You’ve just got to come here next week.”

At the close of services, Krick has perfected techniques to exit smoothly. A trio of helpers surrounds her as the event closes, acting as buffers. Another volunteer waits street side in an idling SUV so the apostle may slip off unbothered. In the front seat of her getaway ride, Krick texted the team and explained to me, “I used to be able to sit up here in the car as they cleaned, but then the crowd started to see me.” Krick nodded, and her driver pulled into traffic.

The religious limelight, like any limelight, will take its toll. As Krick’s star has risen, the criticisms have flowed forward. One wing of opponents take issue with the simple fact that she is a woman doing pastoral work. A radio host named Chris Rosebrough has launched detailed theological broadsides against Krick based, in part, on this conviction.

For others, it is the claims of physical healings that demand a closer look. One of Krick’s early and widely-advertised claims is that her prayers healed a group of Tanzanian orphans of HIV. But the picture is muddled. Reached by phone, Faraja Maliaki Rayani, the director of the orphanage, says that Krick had visited his facility three times and supported them with donations. Rayani explains that during one visit, in 2019, Krick prayed over 30 children who had earlier been diagnosed with HIV. “9 of the kids, after her long prayer, we took them to blood tests several times,” he texts. “They don’t have HIV anymore. We thought it was a healing miracle.” 

Krick’s social media is filled with such testimonies of the efficacy of her works. Yet there are those who see no change at all and even Rayani says he was puzzled as to why the 21 remaining kids still had HIV. When asked about this, Krick offers an explanation: “Things are more deep and complex in the spiritual realm than we realize.” She speculates the sick children might be living under a curse, and recommended they renew their faith.

She then adds, “So, to have faith is the big key for many to receive healing.”

Krick’s teacher Geordavie is eager to take credit for his mentee’s successes. “Kathryn did not have prior experience, she needed someone to guide her,” Geordavie’s private secretary, Lisa Kessy, tells me. “That is why she is where she is now.” But Krick’s achievements appear to have more to do with her own knack for new media, and marshaling of it during the pandemic. On her church’s website, she doesn’t trumpet any association with Geordavie by name, nor does she mention him in most interviews. Still, it’s these ties that have elicited the most colorful and nasty attacks, sometimes from rival pastors. These center on the accusation that Geordavie is not what he appears — “an African warlock,” one commenter dubbed him — and since Krick is in cahoots with him she is a sham, or dabbling in dark magic. One park volunteer, Rohan Misra, eventually cut ties with Krick over these concerns. 

Krick will describe detractors as carrying out a Satanic agenda (“the devil doesn’t want this work to happen”) or prejudiced (“this is ethnocentrism,” she wrote in response to criticisms of Geordavie). In more private moments, Krick will also say her naysayers are just envious. “This is pure jealousy, number one,” she says over the phone. “My platform has grown at a speed that many people have not seen. I’m new on the block.”

Since the summer, Krick has taken her ministry on the road, accepting invitations to heal at churches in new states (Tennessee, Oregon, Nebraska, Texas), seemingly each week. In February, she flew to the United Arab Emirates to hold a ticketed event. In March, the Netherlands. She shared dreams of scaling further: “In five years? Stadiums, stadiums, massive deliverance.” 

The weekly outdoor services remain the heart of the enterprise, for now, and bring the occasional reminder of the local competition. At Pan Pacific Park, the amphitheater is rented out by the hour and the following group, for much of the summer, led New Age sound baths with various instruments and a light show. (Their offerings: “Live Mantra, Breathwork, Visuals, Starseed Musicians, Energy Healing.”)

As Krick finished, the two groups eyed one another.

“They puked on the stage, again,” complained a man carrying singing bowls.

One of Krick’s helpers said, “Way more people come out for us.”

It seemed, for a moment, there might even be a confrontation. Yet things flowed along. Krick was whisked away and her crew cleaned. A huge gong was arranged on a fur mat and, in preparation, a woman waved a blazing clump of sage to clear the air.

Most of the faith healer’s crowd prepared to leave, but some lingered to see what would come next.

The post Demon Time appeared first on theLAnd.

Aries, 2022 has adventures in store for you! Sleep may feel like the cousin of death, which could become awkward at Cinespia events. But #keep #grinding. You’ll be called to pay attention to your relationships and shared resources, so tell your college roommate looking to escape the East Coast cold to consider an Airbnb. You’ll expand your knowledge and step up your career moves. That’s right: It’s time to pursue your lifelong dream of becoming a LinkedIn-fluencer! Share that thinkspirational marketing hack that you’ve been sitting on for years, just waiting for the right occasion. The right occasion is now! It’s your moment to set the bar for what you will take and no longer take in your life. Mingle with friends, connections, and people around you. If they’ll add you on LinkedIn, even better. Take them to Erewhon. Pull up in a glamorous retro clown car. Call them your “bestie.” Who cares! The key is to keep mingling, unless they are not being supportive of your dreams and passions. In that case, un-mingle immediately. 2022 presents opportunities to take out the trash in lots of areas in your life, so you might as well do it while listening to a self-realization podcast — or better yet, while recording one.

Leo

Hi Leo, you beautiful star! These upcoming months bring forth themes of friendship, community, and creative exploration for you, so it might be a good time to consider an experimental collective living arrangement. However, as the zodiac sign ruled by the Sun, which is the literal center of our solar system, you deserve to be the center of attention, the main character, the arbiter of which member of the experimental collective is not doing their share of the dishes and might therefore also be lacking in deep-seated moral character. It is your life, and they are mere disciples in it. If somebody is giving you less energy or effort than what you are worth, perhaps they aren’t worthy of membership in the Society, which is what you’ve started calling this little commune thing you’ve steadily been consolidating power over. It is important for you to set realistic boundaries and expectations with your relationships. These are your minions, after all, and you can label them as “toxic” the moment they stop conforming to your exact expectations. Remember, you are the leader of this cult, and they are merely the idiot who thought it was acceptable to buy gluten-free cereal at Von’s instead of specifically at Erewhon as you requested. As Carrie Bradshaw would say: “A relationship is like couture: If it doesn’t fit perfectly, it’s a disaster.” Take time to find what works best for you!

Sagittarius

Sagittarius! The first months of 2022 will bring you energy to network and focus on inner evolution. Is that a QR code on your business card, or a Magic Eye? Only you can really know. You’ll get serious about finances and open yourself up to collaborate with those around you, which could make you a magnet for crypto entrepreneurs looking to link and build. You are the adventurer of the zodiac, but just remember, if it requires driving through Orange County, it’s probably a bad idea. Use your expansive and fiery energy to put your name out there, even if technically you are being politely asked to please leave the Century City Mall and stop harassing the customers, this is your final warning. The name of the game is “Invest in Success.” Plenty of opportunities might be making their way to you, so allow yourself to receive the blessings you deserve! As we approach your birthday season, find little things you can do to treat yourself. For example, go shopping at Erewhon, where the privilege of purchasing is a treat for your body and the planet. Every time you buy a Green Goddess Probiotic Tonic, a real goddess makes the world just a little bit greener. It’s you; you’re the goddess! 

Capricorn

Ah, sweet Capricorn. These past two years have been, metaphorically speaking, a constant process of dealing with your neighbor’s alarm that goes off for ten minutes every time the clock hits 4:45, morning or afternoon. But the chaos will start to dissipate soon. It’s important right now for you to learn the worth and the value you bring to situations. You must know when it’s okay for people not to access your energy, lest they imprison it in the Great Crystal that sits beneath the fountain at the Americana at Brand. Think that’s a joke? L.A. is filled with Energy Vampires asking to “take a meeting” and “pick your brain” over cupcakes at the Sprinkles ATM. Beware! The only way to undo their power and access the Great Crystal is to beat the high score on a Frank Sinatra slowed and reverbed Peloton ride, then redeem your Peloton Points to enter the Amazon Basics Yawning Chasm at the Amazon 4-star store. And good luck getting them to validate your parking after you’ve shattered the interdimensional energy field that powers Rick Caruso’s empire. You’ll be on the run for the rest of your life! No, it’s better all around to order an energy boosting ginger shot at Erewhon and tell those vampires who’s the boss!

Taurus

Salutations, Taurus! 2021 has been a whirlwind of change and occasionally a whirlwind of wind. What else will the Santa Anas of fate blow your way? 2022 will allow you to really consider what you want your life to look like. Do you want to live in a TikTok house mercilessly exploited by the Paul brothers, or do you want to help community organizations that are in desperate need of TikTok creators to bring awareness to their own TikTok accounts? Do you want a new Range Rover or are you going to live the CicLAvia life full-time? What steps do you need to take to appear on Bachelor in Paradise? 

You are a Venus-ruled sign, which stands for everything related to beauty, relationships, and money (yes, we know the Venice rent is very expensive). Lean. Into. These. Themes! Go get that smoothie with raw almond milk, barley grass powder, hemp seeds, spirulina, chlorella, tocos, maca, mesquite, lucuma, pumpkin oil, xylitol — even if you don’t know what any of the ingredients mean. Go to Topanga and blow a band on crystals. Go to Erewhon and blow a band on groceries. Go on a date with your partner or, better yet, become the manager for your partner’s budding career as a trauma counselor for former TikTok house residents, then make TikToks about your manager journey. There is mad boss bitch energy in the air: Be a chain-link fence near a Ralph’s parking lot and get that bag before it blows right by you!

Virgo

Good news, Virgo! This year will bring themes of relationships to the forefront, but, for now, a season of self-exploration awaits. Was it Lao Tzu or Kylie Jenner who claimed that every year can be the year of realizing stuff? Set space for your self-realization to unfold. As the saying goes, you can’t manifest without a mani-fest — and a pedi-fest. Virgos sometimes struggle to let loose, but consider this your chance to live a little. Spruce up your bathroom with the latest issues of Reader’s Digest. Get some new potpourri. Add a few candles to the mix. Really commit to making sure your alone ti me is quality time. Go to Erewhon! Order that $21 Erewhon Tonic Strawberry Probiotic Juice! Add on that $42 Moon Juice Magnesi-Om Berry Unstressing Magnesium Drink Dietary Supplement! Round it out with the $130 Beginner 2 Day Juice Cleanse! It’s time to unclench every part of your celestial being. Don’t give a fuck what people think of you, even if your bathroom window is right above the patio where your neighbor does yoga. Just let it all out, Virgo. A fulfilling future awaits. 

Libra

Libra, Libra, Libra, you gorgeous Libra babe. We know your voice is still hoarse from screaming “it’s Libra season!!!” over “Way 2 Sexy” at The Doheny Room, but your Hot [Insert Preferred Self-Description Here] Summer is, alas, destined to never to end. The first months of this year demand that you put yourself out there and indulge in fun plans! Get tickets to a Lakers game and beg Rob Pelinka to trade for a legitimate three point threat. Gradually escalate your messaging by buying an ad on the Jumbotron. Hold Jack Nicholson at gunpoint on the sidelines until you’ve made your point. With good fun comes responsibility, though, so just remember Ice Cube’s maxim of checking yourself lest you wreck yourself, or, worse, end up as a guest on your neighbor Jayden’s sports podcast. As the year begins, it can be a beneficial period to connect with family. Don’t be surprised if your relatives call checking in on you, wanting to know which famous celebrity you ran into at Erewhon today (it’s always Jon Hamm) or if you’ve finally landed the gig that will make you rich so you can buy them a $4 million mansion in the hills (it’s always one meeting away).

Gemini

What is up Gemini, you social butterfly?!? 2022 calls for you to let your hair down and live a little. Why not do both at once with a new paraben-free organic conditioner from Erewhon? But it’s also crucial for you to learn the responsibilities that come with daily work and relationships and even your new socially conscious haircare routine. The ancient Greeks didn’t call this adulting, but language evolves, and so can you — possibly even without ayahuasca. Like most Geminis, you’re probably a bit of a walking encyclopedia, so maybe you can explain to the rest of us what parabens are now that you’ve eliminated them from your conditioner. Be careful, though; you will be called to shed beliefs that don’t serve your highest purpose, and, you know, first it’s the parabens, next it’s QAnon with this kind of stuff. You’ll also be called upon to share new knowledge with those around you. Once again — and this cannot be stressed enough — do not go all anti-vax with this. Stick to fun facts, and maybe throw a lil’ meme in there, as a treat. 

Aquarius

Ahoy hoy, Aquarius! Welcome to the beginning of 2022 — full of opportunities to step up your game and career life. Maybe you’ll even get accepted on Raya this time. Open yourself up to new connections. Your network is your net worth, and there’s nowhere that’s more true than in line for the latest Funko Pop release. You get everyone in that line together, we’re talkin’ millions worth of Funkos. So flash your Deadpool tattoo at the guy next to you and start finding — er, funkin’ — some common ground! Self-discipline is a main theme in your life right now, but one can never have too much investment-grade statuary. Just try to avoid any of those get-rich-quick Pokémon card index funds. There’s a lot of pot ential to get inner self work done come the end of December, so, while you’re in collector mode, consider stocking up on the full line of Erewhon soups and get ready to get after it over a steaming hot bowl of clarified bone broth. 

Cancer

Dearest Cancer, welcome to 2022! A new year demands that you have fun. It’s time to get out of your shell and explore new opportunities and connections. Go ahead and talk up the other people in line to take an Instagram picture at the pink wall on Melrose! Find out that actually it’s a different pink wall on Melrose that you were supposed to take your Instagram picture in front of, and go to that one! Talk up the people waiting in line there. Buy them a round of pumpkin spice lattes! Finally snap that cherished fall weather pic in an oversized jacket that doesn’t really make sense in L.A. Tag your location. They’ll have to admit the fit is strong. 

Your work life and relationships might require extra focus, so meditate on which areas of your life are fulfilling your soul, preferably while using promo code ITRUSTTHELANDHOROSCOPES for a free month trial of the meditation app of your choice. Are you part of a healthy and supportive team at work, or do you have toxic coworkers who won’t shut up about how their love for cheese is the only thing stopping them from becoming fully vegan? If it’s the latter, have you told them about the wide range of vegan cheese options and other plant-based delights   available at Erewhon, purveyor of natural goods? Did they just explain that, uh, actually, they’ve eaten at Monty’s Good Burger and have tried vegan cheese when in fact they’re exploring polyamory and went on three different dates there this month? Well, this is the year to boot these energies out!

Scorpio

Greetings Scorpio, and welcome to 2022! In very true Scorpio fashion, you are called to pick up a metaphorical flashlight, look inward and dive into the sweet, sweet depths of yourself. What makes you tick? Which things bring you joy? This is the psychological equivalent of going to Trader Joe’s at 6:00 p.m. and withstanding all the consequences — remember, murder is legal if it’s over the last container of pomegranate seeds (no one can really tell what is blood), so proceed accordingly. Yes, there might be lots of opportunities for people watching, but there will also be people challenging you — like the woman in front of you taking forever to pick one single pack of eggs, or the dude behind you who won’t stop talking about how intermittent fasting is actually really healthy even if you pass out on day two. “You just have to get your body, mind and chakras aligned!” How you react to external situations will depend on how you tend and care for your inner self. Take a deep breath and remember you have full control of your reactions. Turn around and leave if you must. They also sell pomegranate seeds at Erewhon, and you can defend yourself better with a glass container.

Pisces

Oh, we see you Pisces, you delectable morsel! 2021 has brought a lot of transformation and lessons; it’s time to utilize them to grow and become the best version of yourself, a hulking hydra of barely restrained daemonic energy. If doors are closing, release an unholy shriek of eldritch magic from the bottomless deep and blast those doors to smithereens. It is time to upgrade. No longer can a mere seven heads contain the fel power that surges within you; there must be an eighth, summoned by blood ritual and draconic fire. Approach the dread temple, upon whose altar chaos reigns. But don’t be afraid to change your destination, and definitely don’t act to please other people or fit into the version others have of you. If you want to take a detour to Erewhon for an immune-boosting cold pressed juice, look, there’s plenty of arcane horror in that, too. 

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