MacArthur Park offers a grim — and frankly absurd — case study in what happens when progressive ideology steamrolls common sense.

In 2025 alone, city crews ran more than 7,100 CARE+ cleanups and hauled away 12.7 million pounds of solid waste. 

That delightful stew included 142,329 pounds of human waste, along with syringes, flammable materials, corrosive chemicals, toxins, petroleum products, mold, blood, rodent infestations and dead animals. 

Haul-away required OSHA-level protective gear and safety briefings. Unconscionable.

A once-grand public park that served working-class families somehow morphed into an open-air drug market and septic wonderland.

This disaster isn’t some act of God. It is the thoroughly predictable result of deliberate choices by local leaders who decided activist talking points mattered more than the basic duty to keep public spaces safe and usable.

City Councilwoman Eunisses Hernandez, whose District 1 covers MacArthur Park (and who enjoys solid Democratic Socialists of America backing), shockingly continues pushing the standard “harm-reduction” playbook: housing and social services first, free needles and food handouts combined with deep skepticism toward anything resembling actual enforcement. 

Strong policing or clearing encampments? How cruel!

The results, as always, speak louder than progressive slogans.

Repeated mega-cleanups simply have created an expensive revolving door of disorder. Taxpayers get the privilege of funding this endless loop while families have quietly lost their park.

Mayor Karen Bass delivered a peak outrage performance in selective compassion. Last July, she famously rushed to the scene to confront federal immigration agents at the park, demanding they “leave right now” and branding the operation “outrageous and un-American.” 

She painted it as a terrifying threat to children playing. Yet this was the very same park long overrun by fentanyl dealing, 18th Street gang activity and filth so extreme that hazardous-waste specialists are needed for basic maintenance.

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When federal and local forces later launched “Operation Free MacArthur Park” in May — complete with DEA and LAPD sweeps yielding multiple drug arrests — Bass offered reserved applause while still stressing treatment and services.

The pattern shines through: full-throated outrage when law enforcement doesn’t fit the narrative, followed by reluctant acceptance once the mess becomes impossible to ignore.

The human cost lands squarely on the people these compassionate policies claimed to champion. Working-class residents and immigrant families in Westlake, Pico-Union, Filipinotown and Koreatown lost one of their few decent green spaces.

Kids can no longer play without dodging needles or open drug use. Taxpayers have watched millions of their hard-earned dollars vanish into cleanups that never fix root causes. 

Even the homeless often end up worse off — warehoused in degrading, dangerous conditions where addiction is enabled instead of seriously treated. And even bedbugs threaten park visitors.

Let’s cut through the fog with absolute clarity: Public spaces belong to the law-abiding public and not as 24/7 zones of tolerated chaos.

Government’s core job is to enforce basic safety and order so families aren’t living in fear. “Harm reduction” without enforcement isn’t compassion; it’s surrender that subsidizes addiction while sticking the productive class with the bill. 

Personal responsibility, swift consequences for crime and disorder and treatment paired with accountability have delivered better results wherever seriously tried.

MacArthur Park proves the opposite: De-prioritizing policing and accountability, while expanding services, reliably produces exactly the failure we see. Over and over again.

Critics of this current approach are predictably smeared as “heartless.” Yet the mountains of documented waste, the repeated need for raids just to restore basic function and the daily reality for residents expose the lofty rhetoric as performative progressive nonsense.

Real compassion doesn’t transform historic parks into biohazard dump sites or force children to navigate needles and waste. It restores safety so communities can actually thrive.

Los Angeles voters, taxpayers and visitors have every right to be furious and to demand real accountability from city leadership. 

The leaders who continually choose ideology over results — Hernandez, Bass, Nithya Raman and the broader progressive and DSA activist framework they’ve empowered — own this mess. 

What would be a good start? Permanent park rangers, a stronger LAPD presence, expanded recreation programming and increased Metro Police and sheriff patrols around the transit station. 

MacArthur Park stands as a flashing warning sign: When government obsesses over narrative control and abstract theories instead of law, order and the practical needs of ordinary citizens, everyone pays: in lost safety, wasted money and a diminished quality of life.

Angelenos must scrap the failed model. Real restoration means returning to fundamentals that actually work: clear rules, consistent enforcement and a government that answers to the public rather than to activists.

A park is supposed to be for families and kids, yet people are living in filth. Taxpayers are paying millions to clean the same mess over and over. 

This isn’t “compassion” — it’s reckless.

Richie Greenberg is a political commentator based in San Francisco.