In a no man's land for law enforcement, hundreds of disabled veterans are moving in
This is read by an automated voice.Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.
See more from the L.A.Times in Google Search.
Set us as preferred The body lay unsecured for more than 10 hours while burglars twice picked through the dead man’s room.So goes the the story circulating among veterans living on the U.S.Department of Veterans Affairs campus in West Los Angeles.
Residents say their reports of the theft — like their complaints of other crimes — go unheeded because their 2-year-old apartment building lies in a law enforcement no man’s land where no police agency has the power or resources to investigate and prosecute run-of-the-mill crime.The unincorporated island is surrounded by the city of Los Angeles but outside the jurisdiction of the Los Angeles Police Department.Technically, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department polices its 388 acres, but the distant West Hollywood Station rarely responds to calls, if ever.
The VA Police Department, which is mostly tasked with providing security at the hospital, is prohibited by an obscure federal rule from being “deputized” to enforce state law.The need for policing is becoming more acute as residences for hundreds of disabled veterans have been built in recent years and the campus population grows from the hundreds to potentially thousands under President Trump’s 2025 executive order to create a National Center for Warrior Independence with housing for 6,000 veterans.In the absence of an official investigation, the incident last September has been magnified, and perhaps embellished, in the minds of veterans living on the campus, a community defined by the vulnerability of physical disability, substance use and trauma.“Every time we turn around we’re doing an incident report,” said Tammy Chelossi, a resident service coordinator for the company that manages the building that opened in 2024.
“We call the VAPD all the time,” Chelossi said.“They don’t do anything.
The...