Making Nuisance Neighborhoods: Exposing the Effects of Community Policing in Los Angeles
What are the effects of racialized policing on neighborhood transformation? Evidence from numerous U.S. cities, from Louisville, KY to Lancaster, CA, Tampa Bay, FL to Lakewood, OH, demonstrates that nuisance abatement injunctions and "crime-free" housing policies are being used to exclude and evict tenants and to facilitate real estate speculation in "borderland" neighborhoods, those that are on the cusp of gentrification or those that are becoming home to working-class communities of color. Much less is known about how such processes have unfolded in the City of Los Angeles.
Encapsulating several years of analysis conducted by researchers at the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, the Institute and the Anti-Eviction Mapping Proiect have released this storymap exposing the effects of nuisance policing in Los Angeles. Focusing on CNAP, the Citywide Nuisance Abatement Program, the research project brings to light the concentration of nuisance lawsuits filed by the City Attorney in predominantly Black and Latinx neighborhoods. Justified as a form of community policing, such nuisance abatement has entailed long durations of police surveillance in working-class communities of color, turning rental property and residential hotels into police outposts and subjecting tenants to draconian house rules. Replicating and expanding the logic of gang injunctions, CNAP injunctions include banishment lists, permanently excluding targeted individuals from properties and neighborhoods and preemptively evicting tenants who are deemed to be criminal. Our storymap is meant to be a counterpoint to such state violence and racial banishment, drawing attention to an often overlooked tool of displacement.
While tenants have no standing in CNAP lawsuits and are never notified of the injunction, except through an eviction notice, our research brings to light past and current tenant struggles against criminalization and banishment. From tenant organizing in the residential hotels of Skid Row to the intervention of tenants in the recent CNAP injunction against Chesapeake Apartments, the fight for housing justice continues in Los Angeles.