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8 Months At Venice Centennial Park



Venice Beach, filmed by Cop Watch Venice

How did Venice's smallest park become it's largest encampment? 8 months at Venice Centennial Park.

"This is a video compilation of the past 8 months at Venice centennial park AKA Venice library park. I hadn't planned on making a video about it, but had lots of footage, so this is random on different dates labeled inorder laying out a timeline of how Venice's smallest park, became it's largest homeless encampment.

The Venice of America Centennial Park was built in 1993 and has had homeless people randomly sleeping there ever since. I even slept there as a kid many times. But it's never been like this.

The city and LAPD keeps going against the supreme court orders and chooses to chase homeless people around, criminalizing their existence, rather than help anyone, so the places for people to go are becoming harder to find. The Venice centennial park is one of the few places not entirely fenced in by the city. Mike Bonin has fenced in and closed off nearly every area an encampment was, and he's spent $650,000 on private security patrolling overnight this year alone, keeping people out of other areas. That doesn't include the 2 am sanitation and LAPD clean ups where they don't clean anything.

According to the city, the park is now the site of the next "encampments to homes program" where the city supposedly takes entire encampments into a hotel, then gets them permanent housing. Problem is, most of these people have already been through the program and we're kicked out with no permanent solution. This is just another part of the city's revolving door homelessness response, where if they pretend they can't fix it, then they can rely on voters to get fed up and say chase everyone off or leave them to die instead of spending the billions in Homelessness funding on what it's actually intended for. Real question is, where's all that money?"


Cop Watch Venice follows LAPD pacific division on world famous Venice Beach, showing a point-of-view style cop watch and update on Venice's current conditions. We make edited shorts, full scenes and are working on a documentary about homelessness and city failures.

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