By Laddie Williams

I read and reread last month’s article, It’s Spy Camera’s vs. Street Dealers in Oakwood, and I have these thoughts as a born and raised Venetian. 

I will tell you that the demise of our community is not just the drugs and the homeless, it is the lack of total respect for the entire community of Venice. They complain of the drugs being sold and the people who are hanging on their corners and bringing their precious property values down, and all I can think is, what about actual humans caring about humans. 

The Big Brother is watching you idea just takes me over the top because here we live in a free society and we are being watched by cameras (we have one at 678 San Juan Ave attached to a light pole), and are being told with posters with skull and cross bones that you are being filmed and this will be given to the LAPD and you will be prosecuted (check out the signs on Westminster and 6th Ave – attached to electric poles and posted on fences). 

That huge grant that was given to buy cameras could have been used to assist people with better ways of living and educating them making them feel that someone behind those tall insidious fences cares, and that they are willing to assist instead of jailing people for a victimless crime. If these people care to hug them talk, to them assist them in some small way, this would be the greatest gift of all. 

Please don’t tell me it cannot be done because I have done it all my life and to see individuals come back and say “Laddie, you don’t know what that did to me for you to hug me and say you care. It changed my life forever. I am clean and sober and doing well.” That is love – not cameras posted so you can take and give to LAPD – to do God knows what with? 

The entire vibe of our precious community has changed and “Big Brother Watching You,” is another nail in the coffin of humans caring. It is being eroded away because you want to talk about property values more than human values.

Secret meetings – let me know that you have more to say behind closed 12-foot fences (illegal according to the Los Angeles Penal Code) about your neighbors who don’t fit the mode and life style that you deem important to you. 

Eradicate drugs? Well if that is the real attempt in the great USA/Oakwood Community we all know how the government/LAPD can end this epidemic. The cameras are a temporary band-aid to a very old, old business.

Love One Another!