Los Angeles, CA

Built environment, Community safety and policing | 2025

Investigating noncarceral solutions that improve traffic safety and support reparative urban planning.

This project emerged from the tragic loss of Bruce Phillips, a beloved local leader, in a vehicular accident on the street next to Ted Watkins Memorial Park in Los Angeles’s Watts neighborhood. The Watts community has long been affected by overpolicing, a legacy deeply intertwined with systemic inequities, and has remained one of the most heavily policed areas in Los Angeles. Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiative (LANI) will investigate how street and sidewalk infrastructure around Ted Watkins Park can be redesigned to replace police-driven traffic enforcement with design-based solutions that slow traffic and improve safety for pedestrians, cyclists, and motorists alike.

LANI and its community partners aim to implement cohesive traffic and pedestrian safety improvements informed by data collection and community outreach. This project will produce a community needs assessment by collecting traffic collision data from California’s Transportation Injury Mapping System, the Los Angeles Medical Examiner, and news media sources. LANI will also produce novel survey and focus group data from community members to create a prioritization framework for selected infrastructure interventions and projects within the park.

The ultimate goal of this project is to ensure that residents, particularly those living near Ted Watkins Park, have a direct role in shaping safer streets through a community-centered data collection process that fosters community ownership, trust, and long-term stewardship of public spaces. This project will present the data to key decisionmakers, including city councilmembers in Districts 8 and 15, the county supervisor of District 2, and agencies responsible for the public right-of-way around the park, to elicit their support and strengthen advocacy for funding and implementation efforts.