This is just in Southern California, you realize.
A 35-year-old man was arrested Thursday on suspicion of setting on fire a tent where two people were sleeping, Santa Ana police said.
The morning of Jan. 19, authorities said, James Anthony Lawlor approached the tent, which was pitched in a vacant lot, and told the occupants they had 15 minutes to leave. Otherwise, he told them, he'd come back with his Glock handgun, according to the Santa Ana Police Department.
When a man inside the tent popped his head out, police allege, Lawlor kicked him twice and then fled in a black truck.
About five minutes later, Lawlor returned, carrying a red gas container, police say. He then poured gasoline on the tent and set it on fire.
The man and woman inside were able to flee. The man suffered some minor burns, as well as injuries from the two blows to his head.
Investigators arrested Lawlor at his home, and took him into custody on suspicion of attempted murder, arson of an inhabited structure and other charges.
Meanwhile, downtown, the U.N.'s
special rapporteur for housing, Leilani Farha, looked around & was horrified.
Nearly 58,000 people are homeless in Los Angeles County, according to
a 2017 count — a 23 percent increase from the year before. “The reason for the number of people living in encampments and in their vehicles is very simple,” Shayla Myers, an attorney with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, testified at the forum. “The City of Los Angeles is 560,000 units short of affordable housing for very low- and extremely low-income households.”
Myers said city officials talk the right talk, while primarily concerning themselves with the wishes of the well-to-do, especially when touting urban renewal that results in gentrification.
According to Myers, instead of treating the presence of thousands sleeping on its streets as an emergency, a city that’s hosting the Olympics in 2028 has “doubled down on its commitment to seizing and destroying people’s property.” The stated reason is cleanliness and disease, but the embraced solution is myopic and cruel, placing “the onus of public health, of alleviating the public health crisis, on unhoused people.”
Farha, who is preparing a report for the UN on informal settlements, shook her head throughout the testimony. After two hours, she’d heard enough.
“How the fuck did we get here?” she asked, apologizing for her profanity. It’s just that, she expained, “the fight is so base. In the frickin’ richest country, a relatively stable democracy, it’s so base — I mean, fighting for the right to sit; fighting for the right to shit; fighting for the right to sleep, in a tent.”
“People are being annihilated here,” she continued. “I have my work cut out for me.”
That's right, it's annihilation. Or simply murder. And don't think it won't happen to you suckers out there when your asses are gentrified out of the dumps you live in.
Me, I'm not leaving this world of shit & pain until I've struck a blow for justice & taken at least a couple of landlords w/ me, IYKWIMAITYD. (Hope I'm safe from little squealers if I'm not more specific about potential targets.)
[
L.A.Times/
LA Progressive]
Jay Michaelson / The Daily Beast:
