Immigrants and the Revitalization of Los Angeles: Development and ...

MacArthur Park. There, LA city agencies engaged local CBOs as mediating organizations that interacted with informal workers and tried to formalize their activities. The chapter describes and analyzes how the neighborhood's day laborers and street vendors were engaged in the city's efforts to regulate MacArthur Park's immigrants' milieu and how the “miqueros” (providers of counterfeit identification and immigration documents) were not. The city intended such engagement to legitimize previously informal activities, increase social order in the neighborhood, and, ultimately, increase the city's control over the immigrants' milieu. The chapter discusses both the opportunities for and the limitations of formalization. The efforts to regulate informal activities provide crucial examples of co-evolutionary processes within the neighborhood.

Chapter 6 describes and analyzes the infamous Rampart Division and the LAPD's evolution from a warrior-cop mentality (detrimental both to the LAPD and to the community) toward a community-policing model (which led to increased safety). During the 1980s and 1990s, MacArthur Park was the hub of LA's drug market and one of the nation's most violent neighborhoods, inundated with gangs such as Mara Salvatrucha-13 (MS-13). The warrior-police strategies of the Rampart Division led to abuses of immigrants and to corruption within the department and its Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH) units. The new chief of police since 2002, William Bratton, made an effort to change the hostile relationship between the LAPD and the community by initiating the Alvarado Corridor Project, which helped the Rampart Division transition into using community-policing strategies that greatly lowered crime rates in the neighborhood and increased the sense of safety within and around MacArthur Park. The community-policing strategies now applied by the Rampart Division are evidence of co-evolution between the division and the neighborhood agents. Interactions between diverse stakeholders, such as the police, CBOs, agents of the business community, and other city agencies, helped the LAPD develop new mechanisms by which to serve the neighborhood and contributed to selection among various potential stakeholders. The chapter also discusses the May Day melee events of May 1, 2007, and the controversies surrounding them.