---
title: "Skid Row's Toll of Violence Fuels a Fraught Debate Over Clearing Encampments"
description: "Murders in downtown's Skid Row ran far above the citywide rate last year, according to an LAPD data analysis — a toll that has sharpened a long-running disagreement over whether clearing homeless encampments would make people safer or simply scatter the danger."
category: "Los Angeles"
category_url: https://herald.la/category/los-angeles
author: "Camila Reyes"
published: 2026-07-02T08:08:35.000Z
updated: 2026-07-02T08:08:35.000Z
canonical: https://herald.la/article/skid-row-s-toll-of-violence-fuels-a-fraught-debate-over-clearing-encampments
tags: ["homelessness", "Skid Row", "public safety", "Inside Safe", "Los Angeles"]
---
# Skid Row's Toll of Violence Fuels a Fraught Debate Over Clearing Encampments

Murders in downtown's Skid Row ran far above the citywide rate last year, according to an LAPD data analysis — a toll that has sharpened a long-running disagreement over whether clearing homeless encampments would make people safer or simply scatter the danger.

Skid Row, the roughly 50-block district on downtown Los Angeles's eastern edge that has concentrated the city's homelessness for generations, is also where its violence falls hardest. And that grim fact has revived one of the most contested questions in local policy: does breaking up encampments reduce the danger, or move it somewhere else?

## The numbers

An analysis of Los Angeles Police Department data found that Skid Row's murder rate in 2024 was about 17 times the citywide figure, [LAist reported](https://laist.com/news/housing-homelessness/skid-rows-murder-rate-encampments-clearing) — a concentration of killings around the neighborhood's dense encampments that has put new pressure on City Hall to act. The people living there are among the most exposed to that violence, not merely its bystanders.

## The case for clearing

Those who favor dismantling encampments argue that packing many vulnerable people into a small, chaotic space breeds conflict. A recovery advocate quoted by LAist, Tom Wolf, said that "the longer that an encampment exists in the same place, the worse it gets — more trash, more violence, more drugs." A former LAPD lieutenant, Jeff Wenninger, made a similar argument to the outlet, reasoning that fewer people crowded together means fewer disputes that turn deadly.

Mayor Karen Bass's signature homelessness effort, Inside Safe, reflects that logic. Launched in December 2022, it moves people from encampments into hotel and motel rooms before the sites are cleared. By LAist's account, the program had served nearly 6,000 people as of the spring of 2024 at a cost of more than $391 million, with roughly 3,100 still in some form of housing — meaning a substantial share had returned to the street.

## The case against

Advocates for unhoused residents counter that clearances without permanent housing simply displace people and the harm they face. "What criminalization does is it moves people into the shadows, it isolates people, and therefore they become more susceptible to violence," Donald Whitehead Jr. of the National Coalition for the Homeless told LAist. Organizers with the local group Ktown For All argue that abruptly scattering an encampment severs the informal networks unhoused people rely on for safety and mutual aid, leaving individuals more alone and more at risk.

## An unresolved fight

The city runs other programs too, including the CARE and CARE+ sanitation-and-outreach teams that manage encampments. But none has meaningfully brought down Skid Row's homicide rate or the scale of street homelessness, and the evidence has not settled the underlying dispute. What both sides tend to agree on is the scale of the gap between need and supply: without far more permanent housing and mental-health and addiction treatment, each new round of clearances risks moving the crisis rather than ending it — which is why, more than two years into Inside Safe, the argument over Skid Row's violence is as unresolved as ever.

## Sources

- [Skid Row's murder rate is 17 times higher than LA overall. Would clearing encampments change that?](https://laist.com/news/housing-homelessness/skid-rows-murder-rate-encampments-clearing)