Making Nuisance Neighborhoods: Exposing the Effects of Community Policing in Los Angeles

Lauren Harper (Urban Planning) in partnership with Anti-Eviction Mapping Project

This project creates a story map that accompanies research conducted by the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy and the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project about the Citywide Nuisance Abatement Program (CNAP) in Los Angeles. Using the spatial data, court records, and interviews collected by researchers, the fellow created a story map to tell the narrative of the research and make it accessible for a wider audience. The research team chose six case study locations that they felt highlighted key aspects of CNAP and they worked together to identify common themes to connect throughout the story map: racist community policing, surveillance, real estate speculation, banishment, and tenant power. The resulting story map, “Making Nuisance Neighborhoods: Exposing the Effects of Community Policing,” combines multiple data sources to tell a complete story of CNAP. Interviews with tenant organizers provide a lived perspective to legal language that erases the agency of tenants, while spatial data connects individual experiences to citywide patterns. The team chose to use the word “exposing” in the subtitle of the map because the City of Los Angeles had so deliberately obscured information surrounding the CNAP program. The story map was presented at an event alongside research conducted by the Root Cause Research Center about policing and gentrification in Louisville, KY. You can view the full story map here.