Crime in Los Angeles has gotten so bad the head of a police union in the city is warning tourists to stay away.
"We can’t guarantee your safety. It is really, really out of control," Jamie McBride, head of the L.A. Police Protective League, told CBS Los Angeles. “I said it to people before, it’s like that movie ‘Purge,’ you know, instead of 24 hours to commit your crime, these people have 365 days to commit whatever they want.”
In the 2013 horror film, there is a 12-hour period where all crime is legal, according to Imdb.com.
His comments come as Proposition 47 is being debated again after 20 looters struck an L.A. Nordstrom in a smash-and-grab attack.
“Criminals have been laughing at us,” Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert said, reports the Los Angeles Times. “There’s a clear belief — and very large reality — that there’s no consequences any more to theft. ... You tell everybody we’re not going to hold anybody accountable and guess what’s going to happen?”
Meanwhile in Beverly Hills, anti-gun residents are now heading to guns stores and getting shooting lessons because they’re “living in fear.”
“Even hardcore leftist Democrats who said to me in the past, ‘I’ll never own a gun’ are calling me asking about firearms,” Joel Glucksman, a private security executive, told the New York Post. “I’d say there has been an increase of 80 percent in the number of requests I’m getting this year.”
The recent murder of Jacqueline Avant, the wife of famous music executive Clarence Avant, has only made residents more on edge. Despite having a private security guard, she was killed in their home during a robbery.
More than 1,800 people have been shot in Los Angeles in 2021, up from 1,530 in 2020. Homicides in LA rose nearly 50 percent, from 161 to 236, between January to October of 2020 and 2021.
There had been 361 homicides in LA in 2021 as of Dec. 9. That’s still a far cry from the peak: 1,984 homicides in 1991. (New York Post)
And yet, LAPD Chief Michel Moore disagreed with McBride’s comments.
"It’s not out of control. It’s not a spiral that we’ve lost control over," Moore said. “I believe tourists coming to Los Angeles are safe. Certainly, as safe here as any other portion of the country.”