Los Angeles, CA
Built environment, Community safety and policing | 2025
Investigated 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) investigated 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. Over the course of the project, LANI engaged extensively with the community to create a prioritization framework for selected interventions and projects surrounding Ted Watkins Park. LANI hosted community events to raise awareness of the issue, including an angel-versary event to commemorate Bruce Phillips; led walk audits of the intersections around the park with community members; and surveyed community members about how they travel to the park and their priorities for traffic calming. LANI’s collaborators at UCLA collected traffic collision data from California’s Transportation Injury Mapping System, the Los Angeles Medical Examiner, and news media sources, finding that since 2014, there have been nearly 500 crashes within one block of Ted Watkins Park.
Through this project and its community-centered data collection, residents, particularly those living near Ted Watkins Park, are shaping safer streets for their community. LANI and the Los Angeles Street Safety Coalition, a group of local activists, 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. Community events have already caught the county’s attention, and they are considering temporary traffic-calming installations.
Data from this project will directly inform the LA County Department of Public Works’ Active Transportation Program (ATP) application, which will be submitted to the California Department of Transportation in June 2026. If the application is selected for funding, the grant would fund the permanent installation of traffic-calming measures around Ted Watkins Park, promoting community safety in Watts for years to come.