For weeks (months?) now, people on local social media have been complaining about illegal fireworks being set off in their Los Angeles neighborhoods (and, yes, it’s a problem all across the city, not just in our own back yards). And with the Fourth of July just a couple of weeks away, we can probably expect the trend to build as we approach the holiday.
LAPD and other city officials do try each year to stem the tide of illegal fireworks activity, but it’s difficult. As our Senior Lead Officers have told us many times, unless people who report the activity can pinpoint the precise address the fireworks are coming from, or identify a specific person launching the fireworks, there’s not much they can do except patrol a general area and hope they’re in exactly the right place at exactly the right time to witness the violation and identify the violator. It’s hard.
In the meantime, however, the City Attorney’s office and our local Neighborhood Prosecutors this week launched their annual anti-illegal-fireworks campaign, and they’re urging residents to distribute paper copies of the following notices, share them electronically, and post them in visible points around their neighborhoods. It’s not a perfect solution, but awareness of the problem and how to report it always helps.
Here’s the full letter from the Neighborhood Prosecutors Program (a printable PDF version is available here)…and an anti-fireworks flier to post where you can (PDF version is here).
I would like to suggest an addition to your Share links.
I think it would be a good idea to add a Share button for the Nextdoor app.
I’ve commented to three conversations about the nightly fireworks vendors displays.
I know that you share your articles on Nextdoor and I would like an easy way to share your posts to those conversations I’ve contributed to.
I hate to contribute to the Karens, but the PDF links you posted are TOO GOOD to pass up and I have shared this on Facebook and Twitter, making note of the downloadable PDFs.
The JPGs you posted are perfect for social media and the PDFs are perfect for printing and posting IRL anywhere and everywhere. (But please, don’t be a Karen.)
Anywho, any way that you can make it easier to share those perfect PDF and JPGs would be A Good Thing.
Thank you.
Hi, Matthew — We’d love to be able to have a share button for NextDoor, but I’ve looked into it and they don’t seem to exist yet. Might have something to do with the way NextDoor accounts are segmented into neigborhoods, which might make it harder for a single share button to feed into all the different individual user neighborhoods. Not really sure, but it’s definitely something we’ll be on the look out for – and if they do add the option at some point, we’ll take advantage of it!