When crime began increasing in recent months along trendy Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles City Councilman Paul Koretz requested a larger police presence there — and tapped funding from his District 5 office to pay for it.
Koretz spent $30,000 on LAPD overtime in the Wilshire Division, where the Melrose corridor is located, as well as $30,000 in West L.A. and $10,000 each in West Valley and Pacific divisions, records show. When robberies continued along Melrose, he spent another $20,000 there.
“Once we had the issue of a lot of folks coming to Melrose to do crime, we said, ‘We have to hit this with everything we have,’ so we put in some extra funding,” Koretz said. “They gave us foot patrols and bike patrols and undercover folks and horse patrols.”
Across town, Councilman Joe Buscaino directed nearly $1.3 million in District 15 funds toward police overtime to address crime increases there — including $500,000 for foot patrols in San Pedro and more than $785,000 for such patrols in Wilmington, where a 12-year-old boy was recently killed in a triple shooting that also left a woman and a young girl injured.
Read the full story at LATimes.com.