Residents of L.A.’s Watts Urged to Avoid Large Gatherings Due to Shootings

Residents of Watts, a predominantly Latino and black neighborhood in south-central Los Angeles, are being discouraged from attending large gatherings for the rest of 2023 due to the recent surge of drive-by and mass shootings in the area.

The Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday:

Leaders have now called on Watts residents not to congregate in large groups for the rest of 2023.

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The impassioned calls for “unity within the community” arrived on the heels of two shootings that killed two and injured nine near the Imperial Courts and Jordan Downs public housing projects, according to LAPD Deputy Chief Emada Tingirides. She told The Times that law enforcement agencies were investigating the recent shootings.

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Attendees were told during Tuesday’s briefing that both of the incidents involved lone gunmen. Disrespectful posts on social media likely fueled some of the shootings, which Rejón says is a trend that has picked up in other major cities across the country in recent years. He blames social media and online “rumor mills” that help disrespectful messages feed into a larger conflict.

The ongoing violence comes amid calls by newly-installed Mayor Karen Bass to hire 1,000 new Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers to bring the force back to 10,000 cops. Her predecessor, Mayor Eric Garcetti, vowed to cut $150 million from the LAPD during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, and to redistribute the funding to “communities of color.”

When Breitbart News asked Garcetti whether that would make such communities unsafe, he denied that it would. He also decried “systemic racism,” which he defined, when asked, as “racism that’s built into systems.” He is now U.S. Ambassador to India.

Crime has surged in many American cities in recent years, over a period that has coincided with the election of radical left-wing prosecutors, many of them backed by billionaire Democratic Party patron George Soros, such as Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón. Gascón has focused on reducing criminal penalties for violent felons, rather than reducing crime.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.