Text Jessica Ramos
Design & Photography Julian Lucas

The rise of Black Lives Matter and Police Abolition efforts means it is time for us to scrutinize the kind of security we need for sites such as Holt Boulevard, our major arterial vein running east and west connecting Los Angeles County and the Inland Empire. Recents attempts to make the area safer have involved cracking down on the unhoused, the mentally-ill as well as full service sex workers (prostitutes). In a year where people are questioning why we need to use police to address issues with the unhoused or those dealing with mental issues, it is time to look at at our police BIDs (Business Improvement Districts) to determine whether our systems in place actually help or hurt the community. Utilizing personnel specifically trained in these matters rather than police has had a positive effect in some areas.

Originally, BIDs (Business Improvement Districts) were created to identify and provide extra support for specified municipal area that have historically lacked government support. They are designed to provide funding for remodeling, clean up, and security patrol, as well as to fund businesses that are positive for the community. BIDs continue to operate in many cities across America. Businessperson Kuo Yang told the Los Angeles Times that BIDs helped him when he first opened his boutique business in Los Angeles: “The BID was very effective with their security detail. They respond much faster than the police because this is petty crime; the police are tied up with bigger challenges.”

BIDs have help to enhance a city’s reputation by improving safety, building hip restaurants, and cultivating a more hospitable environment. Hospitable, that is, for middle class citizens. However, the truth is, that BIDs can easily become corrupt. Services contracted operate privately, giving property owners and developers a bigger political hand in shaping communities. They’ve been accused of threatening and criminalizing of BIPOC (Black, indigenous, people of color), lower-income, or un-housed citizens in the community. “BIDs have been relentlessly policing poor and homeless people for simply existing in public space.” The Western Regional Advocacy Project and Jesse Clarke

The BID in Pomona is run by the DPOA (Downtown Pomona Owners Association) which, formed in 2004, and is set to continue at least until 2028. A current look at what more BID police could mean for other areas of Pomona can be seen in both LA’s Chinatown District and the city of Berkley. Berkley journalist Carol Denney suggests that BIDs in the city have been counterproductive, and have remained uninformed on how to handle the issues of homelessness since their creation in the 70s.

In Chinatown, there are petitions to abolish the BID police for their harassment of the elderly, local vendors, and the unhoused, and failing to support small businesses during COVID, subsequently hurting, ignoring, and displacing large members of the community. To read more, check out their Instagram and click the link in their bio for their petition, as well as a zine they created going into detail about who is behind the BID police and why citizens are against them. 

Are BIDs a New Age spin from the Broken Windows Theory?

Laws That Banish and Exclude

“The United States has a long history of using discriminatory and violent laws to keep “certain” people out of public spaces and out of public consciousness.Jim Crow laws segregated the South after the Civil War and Sundown Towns forced people to leave town before the sun set. The anti-Okie law of the 1930s in California forbade poor Dustbowl immigrants from entering the state. Ugly Laws swept the country and criminalized people with disabilities for being seen in public.

Today, such laws mostly target homeless people and are commonly called “quality of life” laws or “nuisance crimes.” They criminalize sleeping, standing, sitting, and even food-sharing. Just like the laws from our past, they deny people their right to exist in local communities.

Today’s “quality of life” laws and ordinances have their roots in the broken-windows theory. This theory holds that one poor person in a neighborhood is like a first unrepaired broken window. If the “window” is not immediately fixed or removed, it is a signal that no one cares, that disorder will flourish, and the community will unravel. This theory conceptualizes poor people as “things” to be removed, and not people who are struggling to survive”.

- JESSE CLARKE; Street Spirit; Laws that Banish and Exclude

It’s all interconnected with issues of gentrification. In a documentary titled, Jackson Heights, director Federick Wiseman follows activists who are opposing the creation of a BID in this community, voicing the fears that BIDs will destroy small businesses in the neighborhood. BIDs empower property owners by giving them the power to transform neighborhoods into their vision. That vision can mean up-scale restaurants, expensive housing units, and chain businesses, replicating white and wealthy gentrified neighborhoods, thereby erasing the original charm, identity, efficacy and community in the process.

Establishing a police force almost guarantees the criminalization of those who need help the most. Alternative methods like harm reduction for the un-housed can create a more manageable and gentler way of dealing with these citizens, instead of the middle-classes’ preferred approach ripping them off the streets and leaving them forgotten in a shelter somewhere. The street-to-shelter pipeline has become too easy and facile of a ‘solution,’ without being a solution at all. The enforcers typically turning a blind eye to the multitude of issues that exist within shelters that not only deter many from entering, but also end up not providing the help they need. In many cases, they exacerbate the problem, making things worse.

Instead of incorporating more police, leadership can make more attempts at harm reduction by building on community efforts to provide supportive services for people with addiction, the un-housed, mental illness. Instead of law enforcement utilizing force to fill beds in shelters. Furthermore, we should be making attempts at harm reduction for full-service sex workers in order to focus on those who are actually endangering the community by committing the crime of sex trafficking.

For the sake of our community, we should focus on attracting relevant businesses that are higher paying and attractive in appearance that contribute to the community. 

The question is: Will we focus on true community improvement or will we continue to do business using old, 20th century tactics based on Broken Windows Theory to create just one more homogenous, gentrified, unaffordable area that displaces those who need help? How do we break this seemingly never-ending cycle?