The deadly toll on Los Angeles’ Skid Row underscores how homelessness, mental illness, addiction and gun violence continue to collide in one of America’s most neglected communities.
*There’s yet another deadly threat to Blacks. This time it’s the Blacks who make up a disproportionate number of those on Los Angeles’ Skid Row, which is arguably the largest in the nation. The threat is murder violence. The murder rate, almost exclusively from gun violence, is astronomically higher than that for Los Angeles as a whole. The nonsurprise is that there is so much violence on Skid Row. Many would say What else is new.
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According to LAPD figures, nearly three hundred people were victims of gun violence in the ten years from 2015 to 2025. Even this may be an undercount. The L.A. County Medical Examiner revealed that there were more than two dozen other possible victims of gun violence in the same area in 2024 and 2025. These victims were not included in the LAPD figures. Overall, the murder rate from guns was seventeen times higher than in the rest of the city…