Uncool
Whacking L.A. trees in a mistaken effort to reduce crime
By Sam Bloch
In the late 2010s, Nicole Deering, a community resource specialist in the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Neighborhood Prosecutor Program, began a push to remove a shabby turquoise shelter covering a bus stop on Vermont Avenue near 54th Street. The problem, she wrote in an email to the city’s streets department, was the “persisting and increasing” number of transients the shade and benches attracted to the South L.A. sidewalk.
The city attorney had empowered Deering’s division to take loiterers and other minor offenders to court. But sometimes, the attorneys and their staff took a different approach, attempting to prevent the offenders’ presence by taking away the shade that shielded them on blistering days. “I’m a true believer in environmental design and how it can increase the opportunity for crime,” Deering wrote in an email to the urban forestry division.
Her effort failed that time, though the city took away some benches and put up armrests on what remained, making it more difficult for homeless people to take advantage of the shade. But in many other cases, especially in the poorer neighborhoods of L.A., Deering and other city officials succeeded in removing precious sources of shade to discourage the homeless, shoo away day drinkers, and drive drug users elsewhere.
That included trimming the leafy canopy on Main Street in South L.A. and cutting down a Pico-Union street tree. A bus shelter was removed from another Vernon Avenue stop.
Emails and internal spreadsheets obtained by L.A. Reported through public records requests reveal how city attorneys, police officers, and city council and department staff manipulate shade — a too-rare public resource in Los Angeles that is seldom thought of until we need it — to move people where it wants them. Their goal: to curb so-called quality-of-life infractions that are blamed for making neighborhoods feel unsafe.
The short-sighted removal of shade, especially by cutting down trees, detracts from efforts to make Los Angeles look less like a landscape of beige and gray concrete; it contributes to climate change; and it deprives people of a source of cool comfort when they must be outside or don’t have air conditioning at home.
Perhaps more important, this also appears to be a policy rooted more in personal belief than on solid ground. In fact, a large body of research tells us the reverse: A 2017 study by the U.S. Forest Service found that trees in urban environments appear to reduce crime, not add to it. Other studies around the nation have confirmed this, and another 2012 study by the Forest Service found that even when comparing neighborhoods of very similar demographics, neighborhoods with 10% more tree canopy had 12% less crime.
Indeed, the tree removals in L.A. generally don’t seem to work well in the long run. Neighbors interviewed by L.A. Reported at several spots where trees had been removed said it hadn’t made a difference in the prevalence of sometimes annoying or occasionally criminal behavior. Despite the reduction in seats at the bus shelter on Vermont Avenue, it still was filled with transients on a recent hot, sunny day, leaving no space for the mother and three children who were waiting for a bus.
What it has done is make some neighborhoods less hospitable, residents said.
“It’s part of a larger project of making people disappear, and if you make people disappear, then you don’t address the real problems,” said John Raphling, a Los Angeles-based advocate for the homeless and former associate director for Human Rights Watch’s U.S. Program. “Rather than, ‘Let’s try to find some place where someone can sleep,’ it’s ‘let’s make it uncomfortable for him, so he will go somewhere else.’ ”
Crime deterrence is another reason cited to justify the cutting back and removal of shade trees. Police have long opposed trees in high-crime areas, claiming their canopies inhibit visibility and interfere with surveillance. Lisa Sarno, the former executive director of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s million-tree campaign from 2007 to 2013, said that LAPD’s neighborhood liaisons called senior lead officers resisted her efforts to expand the urban canopy in poor neighborhoods.
Some LAPD liaisons told Sarno not to plant empty tree wells, and others demanded that existing trees get “trimmed to the point where there were no branches with leaves on them,” she recalled. “They were basically just tree trunks without limbs.” This happened in the least-green residential neighborhoods where large trees and park access were scarce.
Just four neighborhoods in L.A., all of them affluent and totaling just 1% of the city’s population, accounted for 18% of the city’s tree canopy, a 2019 study found. (One of those neighborhoods was Pacific Palisades, where many trees were destroyed by the 2025 fire.)
Under City Attorney Mike Feuer, neighborhood prosecutors worked with LAPD’s Rampart Division to thin out street trees in targeted areas outside downtown. For example, in 2016, deputy city attorney Andrew Said asked urban foresters to trim canopies on Kenmore Avenue because police were “concerned about the foliage providing an overly comfortable hangout for gang members.” In 2020, deputy city attorney Maria Aguillon was informed by senior lead officer Carlos Diaz that the city “eliminated” the sidewalk tree at “our problematic location” on 11th Place, hoping it would curb “the intoxicated groups and gang activity.”
In 2017, Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson’s staffer Albizael del Valle asked Lance Oishi of the streets department to dismantle bus shelters at Western and Vernon to deter drug use and gambling.
In the San Fernando Valley, council offices and neighborhood police targeted parking lots, believing their trees attracted homeless encampments. In 2018, Councilman Bob Blumenfield’s district director Michael Owens asked the urban forestry department to trim a carrotwood tree at Darby Avenue and Sherman Way in Reseda, noting in an email that it created a “shady area for individuals who are causing problems for businesses.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Topanga Division senior lead officer Jose Moreno advised businesses to “take away the comfort level” from the homeless. In 2020, he told a Canoga Park librarian to trim “down any trees that provide shade.” A neighbor passing by the library on a recent day said the reduction of shade had helped lower the numbers of homeless people but had not eliminated it. Indeed, several homeless people were sitting on the curb adjacent to the library.
In 2021, Moreno gave similar advice to USPS Postmaster Harv Jandu, whose Canoga Park parking lot was used for overnight sleeping. The post office chopped down three mature trees, potentially violating a city ordinance requiring businesses to shade their parking lots to mitigate urban heat.
It is understandable that Moreno turned to environmental design to manage L.A.’s homeless crisis. During the pandemic, the city suspended encampment sweeps to slow the spread of the virus. Arrests and citations had not dispersed the unhoused from city streets and parking lots. “The open container tickets and drinking in public tickets will never go anywhere,” Moreno complained in a 2020 email. “They never become warrants, and if they do, they are almost out immediately.” Cutting back trees would at least make a parking lot a “less desirable place to stay.”
City council offices declined to comment to L.A. Reported on the removals they ordered or to give their views on whether or not those worked.
Moreno and other LAPD neighborhood liaisons also did not respond to similar questions from L.A. Reported or address their current policies on taking away shade to fight crime. (In an email to L.A. Reported, LAPD’s public information office stated that senior lead officers generally “resolve conditions that contribute to crime or disorder” and “focus on enhancing safety, visibility, and community well-being.”)
Deering and deputy city attorneys declined to comment to L.A. Reported on street tree and bus shelter removals, referring inquiries to the city attorney’s communications staff. Deputy communications director Ivor Pine did not address the incidents identified by L.A. Reported, which occurred under a previous attorney, and did not respond to multiple inquiries about current policies on reducing shade.
Echoing studies on the subject, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, a UCLA urban planning professor and interim dean of the Luskin School of Public Affairs, argued that depriving poor neighborhoods of shade doesn’t make them safer, but more dangerous — especially for children, older residents, and those with chronic illnesses — by worsening heat exposure. Residents of South L.A. and the San Fernando Valley already suffer more heat-related emergencies due to higher ambient temperatures and limited green space and cooling options. Studies also have found that lack of shade keeps residents from going outside. Those empty streets invite more crime, researchers concluded.
Loukaitou-Sideris was equally skeptical that neighborhood crime could be prevented by felling trees and throwing out bus shelters. “I would find this very surprising, to be honest,” she said. “If the police have data to show that trees represent criminogenic items, we have to see it.”
Sam Bloch is author of the 2025 book Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource (Random House).
Los Angeles freelance writer Emily Beyda contributed reporting.