The Brief

California recently awarded $91 million in grants to local organizations that help prevent hate crimes or support survivors, part of an unprecedented effort to combat hate in a state that saw a 20% increase in such crimes in 2022.

Despite its progressive reputation, California last year reported steep increases in hate crimes against transgender people (up 55%), Muslims (up 39%) and Black people (up 27%), according to the Attorney General’s office.

That growth outpaced similar hate growth trends in 42 major cities, according to a soon to be released study by Cal State San Bernardino’s Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism.

The state’s latest Stop the Hate grants bring its non-law enforcement anti-hate spending to more than $200 million since 2021, more than any other state, advocates say.

The grants will go to more than 170 community groups at a time when the state is experiencing a steady clip in high-profile hate incidents — from the August murder of a Southern California store owner who flew a rainbow flag, and the recent evacuation of an Oakland elementary school after a racist bomb threat, to the fiery debates over rights of transgender students at various school boards.

California in the past year created a commission to study the state of hate and set up a hotline for people to report incidents to its Civil Rights Department. The state also put together a team of mediators to address conflicts in communities.

'Swap meet of hate'

Both Sacramento and Los Angeles saw record levels of hate crimes in 2022, according to the study by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, which independently analyzes data from local law enforcement agencies.

Researchers say that while the state’s reported hate crime numbers appear to be dipping slightly in 2023, the upcoming presidential election is likely to turn up the temperature even more.

“We are very concerned about an increase next year,” said Brian Levin, a study author and member of the 9-month-old Commission on the State of Hate. He told fellow commissioners last month: “Mainstream politics has gotten not only more tribal, but also more bigoted.”

Levin said in an interview with CalMatters that hate crimes historically rise in response to political speech and current events. But in recent years such spikes have lasted longer, such as when anti-Black crimes remained elevated months after 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests.

Social media provides “a 24-7 swap meet of hate,” he said. “We’re having a significant increase in hate crimes, and hate crimes are getting more violent. But we’re also having more reporting, particularly in certain areas.”

Hate crimes are notoriously difficult to track. Survivors often don’t report them, and local law enforcement agencies vary in how well they monitor them and how much they report to state and federal authorities.

California’s grants aim to help reduce or respond to hate crimes, and to incidents that may not rise to the level of a crime but nevertheless take a toll on an individual or community.

Anti-transgender hate

Terra Russell-Slavin, chief impact officer at the Los Angeles LGBTQ Center, said that center is receiving more hate mail than in the past and recently experienced a credible bomb threat.

“There definitely is increased fear among the community,” she said, adding that the rise in reported hate crimes against transgender people, while troubling, is not surprising.

“This is part of a nationally coordinated attack against our community, and it’s very much targeted at transgender people and particularly trans youth issues,” she said, adding that anti-transgender rhetoric by elected officials “has been field-tested, and frankly it feels like attacking the transgender community is helping rally their base.”

Equality California, an LGBTQ civil rights organization, received a wave of phone calls at the start of pride festival season from people organizing such events in small towns wondering if it was safe, said program director Erin Arendse.

Equality California is using its $630,000 state grant to create a rapid response network that can send staff and resources to local communities when issues arise – such as when a school board is deciding on policies that would out transgender students or ban rainbow flags in classrooms.

“We want to make sure they understand these policies,” Arendse said, “both in terms of how it impacts an individual student and how it turns up the temperature of anti transgender and LGBTQ sentiment and indicates that it’s OK to discriminate against this group of people.”

Black Californians most often affected

In California and nationwide, Black people and communities are the most frequent target of reported hate crimes, data show.

Black people represented 6% of California’s population but about 30% of its reported hate crime victims in 2022, according to the Attorney General’s office. Yet organizations focused on the Black community appear to be receiving a fraction of the grants the state is disbursing.

One group, the Black Youth Leadership Project in Elk Grove, a Sacramento suburb, will use its Stop the Hate funds to provide mental health services — from art therapy to support groups — to Black children who experience racism in school, said Lorreen Pryor, its president.

Lorreen Pryor, president of the Black Youth Leadership Project, said her group was the only Black-led organization on a conference call about the state’s anti-hate hotline. She attended a festival in Elk Grove on Sept. 9, 2023.

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Rahul Lal

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for CalMatters

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The organization often mediates between schools and outraged parents, advocating for administrators to take parents’ concerns seriously. School bias can range from a teacher using the N-word in class to a Black student being disciplined for behavior that is tolerated from other students, she said.

She added she was surprised to discover that hers was the only Black-led group on a conference call of organizations consulting on the state’s hate hotline.

“We have to focus on the group that is most impacted, and that happens to be Black people,” Pryor said. “And until they do that, it’s all for naught.”

Early focus on anti-Asian hate

California originally created the Stop the Hate grants in response to a surge in anti-Asian hate incidents reported during the Covid-19 pandemic. The coalition Stop AAPI Hate has documented more than 11,000 such incidents nationwide since 2020.

Gov. Newsom signed the Asian Pacific Islander Equity budget in 2021 funding the grants at the urging of the state’s Asian American and Pacific Islander Legislative Caucus. Early grants primarily went to organizations serving that community.

The state broadened its most recent round of grants to fund organizations that reflect California’s diversity, said Manjusha Kulkarni, executive director of AAPI Equity Alliance, the lead organization distributing grants in the Los Angeles region. (The California Department of Social Services awards the grants.)

California’s declining Black population may have depressed the number of Black-led organizations applying for and receiving funding, Kulkarni said.

Some grants will address workplace hate. The NAACP’s California Hawaii State Conference is sponsoring legal consultations for people experiencing discrimination on the job or in housing. And San Francisco-based PRC, which helps Black transgender women reenter the workforce, is using its grant to make a film about its clients’ quest to overcome stigma and find jobs.

Another documentary, produced by teen filmmakers, will chronicle the impact of hate crimes on immigrant and refugee communities in San Diego. Somali Family Service, the non-profit spearheading the project, said it could empower other refugee communities and inspire policymakers to think about solutions.

Most Middle Eastern and North African teenagers the organization serves have experienced or witnessed hate incidents, said Rachel Evans, the group’s youth program manager. Many tell her they stay home from school on September 11, hoping to avoid the racist and anti-Muslim taunts that have come from students, teachers and administrators on that day.

“Many of these youth were not even born when 9/11 happened and they’re experiencing this unjust, ridiculous blame,” said Evans. “They don’t feel welcome in the country based on something that has nothing to do with them.”

Inspiring victims to report hate

California’s hotline offers people who have experienced hate incidents an opportunity to report them, whether or not the incidents were crimes. From its launch in May through the end of August, it has received 361 calls, said the Civil Rights Department, which runs it.

One goal is to reach Californians who are reluctant to contact police or who live in remote areas with few community groups to turn to, department officials said. Callers can learn about the reporting process, file a civil rights complaint, and access counseling, legal services and other support.

Hong Lee knows from experience how important such support can be. Three years ago, while standing in line at a restaurant, Lee turned down a man’s offer of a lunch date and he began yelling anti-Asian and sexist slurs at her. Lee captured the incident on video but a responding police officer called it “normal” and refused to take a report, she said.

A month later Lee realized she was experiencing post-traumatic stress.

“I wasn’t sleeping at night, just staring up at the ceiling,” she said. “I was in complete denial that I needed help at first.”

A friend connected her with LA vs Hate, a Los Angeles-based precursor of the state’s hotline.

It helped her get mental health counseling.

Now Lee works with other hate incident survivors and has started a nonprofit organization, Seniors Fight Back, that provides self-defense classes to elderly Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Her group is not getting a state grant.

Los Angeles-area seniors learn self-defense techniques from Seniors Fight Back, a nonprofit formed in response to attacks against elderly Asians and Pacific Islanders.

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Photo courtesy of Kevin Trinh

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Often people at her classes share that they’ve been physically assaulted, she said, and Lee encourages them to report it, saying that in her case, several other victims recognized the man in her video and he ultimately faced hate crime charges from another incident.

Still, she said, many are reluctant to report. One woman in a self-defense class said she had been assaulted on public transit.

“She had bruises all over her body, but she didn’t want to tell anybody about it,” Lee said. “Two years later, she’s still inside her apartment, because she’s afraid to go outside.”

The Attorney General’s report said anti-Asian hate crimes fell in California by 43% in 2022 but they’re still far above pre-pandemic levels.

While scapegoating Asian Americans for the pandemic has receded nationally, anxiety about the economy and the U.S. relationship with China are driving other forms of anti-Asian racism, Kulkarni said. She cited Florida’s new law that bars Chinese citizens from owning property in much of that state.

Microaggressions still are a common experience among Los Angeles’ Asian-American and Pacific Islander communities, Kulkarni said, citing a state-funded study her group is conducting, but people are reporting declines in trauma symptoms when they speak out about their experiences. The AAPI Equity Alliance plans to use the study’s findings to launch support groups for Korean, Cambodian, Chinese, Filipino and Japanese Americans in January.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, the Coalition for Community Safety and Justice is using a state grant to build alliances among various ethnic communities to tackle issues that affect all of them, such as safety on public transit and within public housing complexes. Cynthia Choi, co-executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action, a coalition member, said they’re asking public housing residents such questions as “Would you like to have escorts when you’re running errands? Would you like more opportunities to get to know your neighbors?”

“Safety is a concern for all communities, and it’s the one rallying point for residents and neighbors to come together around,” Choi said. “If we don’t tend to people’s basic needs being met, we are going to continue to see harm happen, whether it’s racially motivated or due to other factors.”

Community conflict resolutions

To help with that progress, the state’s new strike team of trained mediators will provide “immediate, on-the-ground intervention to avoid violence and to reduce tension in something that is live, something that is happening,” said Kevin Kish, director of the Civil Rights Department.

That could mean stepping in after a hate incident to help community members and law enforcement respond or it could mean helping a city council or school board prepare for a contentious meeting, he said.

“Nobody takes a class on how to deal with difficult public meetings,” he said. “People don’t know what to do and sometimes they make mistakes. Part of the value of this program is talking to folks in advance to make a plan for what might happen and how they’re going to respond.”

The mediators are trained in both civil rights and government. They began working together in October, officials said, declining to discuss details of specific cases.

A makeshift memorial for store owner Laura Ann Carleton, 66, who was shot and killed following an argument about a pride flag hanging outside her business in Cedar Glen. August 24, 2023.

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Mario Anzuoni

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Reuters

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Meanwhile the state’s Commission on the State of Hate is monitoring hate activity and hosting public forums. Consisting of activists, researchers, community leaders and law enforcement representatives appointed by the governor and Legislature, it’s required to issue annual reports and to recommend solutions.

Will all this effort actually reduce hate in California? Researchers say that just as bigoted comments by public officials can fuel crimes, when government leaders take strong stands against hate, such incidents decrease.

The Stop the Hate funding to community groups is part of a three-year plan, however it’s unclear whether lawmakers will choose to renew it. The law establishing the Commission on the State of Hate requires it to sunset in 2027.

“The question is, can we make sure the state continues to sustain this level of investment?” Choi asked.

Lee said a key will be more state outreach to grassroots organizations like her self-defense group. “We have the one-on-one connections to people.”

Added Levin, from the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism: “This is not something that’s going to be solved by so-called experts and advocates. It’s going to be solved by soccer coaches, principals, community leaders, journalists. We need a whole-community response.”

MacArthur Park got an unexpected guest Tuesday: Justin Bieber, who joined several members of his band for an impromptu performance.

Social media videos show Bieber, 32, sitting on the grass, playing percussion and singing as people gather around. He performed several songs to a handful of people, including his 2025 hit “Yukon,” according to videos from the impromptu performance.

A source close to Bieber told E! News that he visited the park to distribute gift cards and other resources to unhoused people. A spokesperson for the singer could not be immediately reached for comment.

Bieber, who headlined Coachella earlier this year, played a stripped-down performance with his band. Some people in social media video walked by the set, while others recorded the set.

His surprise appearance adds a different kind of attention typically focused on MacArthur Park. In the last several months city officials, law enforcement and community groups have taken different approaches to addressing conditions at the park and activating the space.

For Brenda Aguilera, director of the Community Transformation Collective, the reaction to Bieber’s visit is part of a larger conversation about the changes at the park. 

Her organization has been working with a neighborhood volunteer group of about 60 MacArthur Park-area residents since March. The group includes parents, caregivers and vendors who meet regularly to identify neighborhood priorities and work with city agencies and community organizations.

Residents involved with the group have reported greater awareness of available services and said they feel safer in the park, Aguilera said. But she added that the people who live in and around the park should be at the center of any assessment of how conditions are changing.

“They’re not in the park. They don’t live in those neighborhoods, so they have to speak to the local community members to hear about their perspectives,” Aguilera said, referring to elected officials.

On Tuesday, Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman and First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli pointed to Bieber’s performance as a sign of progress at the park.

Bieber performing an impromptu set at the park is “a testament to the progress we are achieving to take back the park from drug dealers and enliven it for families,” Hochman wrote on X.

Essayli wrote: “Bieber in MacArthur Park. That’s progress. Amazing what can happen when criminals and drug dealers are removed from public spaces.”

Over the summer, the Los Angeles Police Department and federal agents carried out a multi-phase operation targeting drug activity in and around the park, including a June operation that resulted in 13 arrests. Hochman also held a picnic at the park over Labor Day weekend after saying he would return with his family if he believed it was safe enough.

Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez’s office, however, pointed to a longer history of work at the park in response to Bieber’s visit.

“We’re excited to see Justin Bieber enjoying MacArthur Park, just as countless other Angelenos do every day, experiencing what nearly four years of sustained investment and community partnership have made possible,” said Naomi Roochnik, a spokesperson for Hernandez.

The councilmember has invested more than $27 million in the park, including Peace Ambassadors, round-the-clock clean teams, overdose response, street medicine, youth programming, arts and culture and infrastructure improvements, according to Hernandez’s office.

“MacArthur Park’s progress belongs to the residents, workers, promotoras, outreach teams, and community organizations who do this critical, lifesaving work every single day,” Roochnik said.

Community Transformation Collective’s promotoras are among those working directly with residents, Aguilera said, helping connect them with services and providing what she described as “warm handoffs” to organizations that can offer support.

For Aguilera, that community perspective matters when officials assess what is happening at the park.

“It’s not up to us or these elected officials that are in these government bodies to just speak on behalf of our communities,” she said. “They could speak about their efforts, but they can’t speak about the entire perspective. It’s really those that live there that could share that perspective.”

The post You better Beliebe it. Justin Bieber played a set at MacArthur Park appeared first on LA Local.

Michael Angel Alvarez made headlines earlier this year when he was arrested while working as a peace ambassador for the nonprofit Healing Urban Barrios in MacArthur Park. Federal prosecutors alleged Alvarez was “leading a violent street gang, while claiming to be a gang interventionist for the City.”

But they didn’t charge him for violent or gang-related crimes.

He spent three months in custody under a different charge: illegally possessing body armor. He pleaded not guilty, and a trial date was set.

Alvarez was released from custody this month, nearly a week after a federal judge dismissed his case on Sept. 9, ruling that a juvenile court finding that Alvarez killed a man while a minor could not be counted as a violent felony conviction that would make owning body armor illegal.

Alvarez spoke with LAist after his recent release, saying he believes the case against him was politically motivated and shows a lack of understanding about what it takes to intervene with gang members to reduce violence in communities. He acknowledged gang affiliation, but said he was not a gang leader and had not committed any crimes since being released from prison in 2024.

Federal prosecutors told LAist in a statement they are looking into options to appeal a federal judge’s decision to dismiss the recent indictment against Alvarez. No one from the U.S. Attorney’s office in L.A. has responded to LAist’s requests for comment about Alvarez’s assertion that the case was politically motivated.

Before the federal prosecutors filed their case against Alvarez, the L.A. County District Attorney’s office filed a separate case against him on May 20 in Los Angeles Superior Court also based on possessing body armor. A preliminary hearing in that case is set for Oct. 27. He pleaded not guilty. A spokesperson for the District Attorney’s office did not comment on whether they intend to continue pursuing the case now that the federal case has been dismissed.

Why the federal case was dismissed

Alvarez was a minor when he was found guilty of a gang-related murder in 2002. At 15 years old he was charged and tried as an adult. He was convicted of first-degree murder for shooting and killing a man in Pico-Union. He was sentenced to 50 years to life. But after a change in state law increased the age at which minors could be sentenced as adults to 16, Alvarez’s case was sent back to juvenile court and he was released in 2024. At that point, he had served about 24 years.

On Sept. 9, U.S. District Judge Anne Hwang found that same law that led to Alvarez’s release also bars the court from considering him to have been convicted of the killing, because juvenile court determinations are not criminal convictions. Without a violent felony conviction, Alvarez is not prevented from owning body armor by state or federal law. She dismissed the federal prosecutors’ case against him.

What Alvarez is saying following his release

In an interview with LAist last week after his release, Alvarez said he thinks federal prosecutors wanted to score political points by targeting community violence intervention work, not because he posed any risk to public safety.

“ I almost got killed as a result of trying to change the community for the best,” said Alvarez, who showed photos to LAist of what he described as stab wounds in his abdomen and arms that were taken in February 2025. He said that assault took place while he was working in MacArthur Park. “ And for whatever reason you had the individuals who are part of the Republican Party who went after me because of the Democrats, the people that I worked for.”

Alvarez’s former employer, Healing Urban Barrios, has not responded to LAist’s requests for comment since the case was dismissed. Christina Navarro, the nonprofit’s founder and executive director, said in a statement to LAist back in May of this year that Alvarez was innocent until proven guilty and that the organization was continuing its work despite the allegations against him.

“We are not stepping back,” Navarro wrote in the statement. “We are doubling down.”

Healing Urban Barrios was contracted to work at the park by Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, who is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America’s L.A. chapter. Her office says community violence intervention workers have been effective for decades in interrupting cycles of violence in ways traditional law enforcement cannot.

Naomi Roochnik, a spokesperson for Hernandez, told LAist in May they were not aware of allegations against Alvarez before his arrest and that peace ambassadors are employed and supervised by community-based organizations.

Alvarez was removed from the peace ambassador program earlier that same month, she said.

“We will always take misconduct seriously and hold our partners to high standards, but we will not allow an individual case, or efforts to politicize it, to undermine proven community-based public safety work,” Roochnik said Friday in an emailed statement.

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli, who heads the office that brought the case, has been critical of the city’s gang intervention program.

Federal prosecutor Bill Essayli heads the U.S. Attorney's office in L.A.

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Allen J. Schaben

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Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

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“The hardworking tax payers of Los Angeles deserve better than to see their money shelled out to a convicted gang murderer,” Essayli wrote on social media on May 29, the day his office announced the charge against Alvarez.

Essayli was appointed by the Trump administration to lead the U.S. Attorney’s office in L.A. and was previously a Republican member of the California State Assembly, where he represented part of Riverside County.

Spokespersons for the U.S. Attorney’s office in L.A. have continued to speak out against Alvarez since the body armor case was dismissed. In statements sent to LAist via email by spokespeople Ciaran McEvoy and Shawn Lewis, the department called Alvarez ”a convicted murderer and a documented member of the 18th Street gang” who was indicted by grand jury on the body armor charges.

“These facts are not in dispute. It is unfortunate that he now benefits from a California law that effectively allows him to erase his murder conviction, something his victim cannot do.”

Adding: “He has no legitimate role serving as a ‘peace ambassador’ in a public park or receiving taxpayer-funded compensation.”

The department said they are currently considering their options to appeal what they called “a narrow technical legal issue.”

About the case

Most people can legally own and wear body armor in the United States — it’s typically worn as a vest, either made of durable fibers like Kevlar or with steel or ceramic inserts designed to stop bullets. It becomes illegal to own or possess body armor under federal and state law if a person has been convicted of a violent felony.

But U.S. District Judge Hwang agreed with Alvarez that he did not have a violent felony conviction on his record.

Alvarez admits he shot and killed 22-year-old Mauricio Miguel Masis on Aug. 17, 2000.

He told LAist he was 15 and in a gang when he and a 13-year-old friend, who was not gang-affiliated, were approached by what he described as three older gang members. Masis was one of the men, he said.

“ They're already in their mid-20s and tried to kill both of us,” Alvarez said. He told LAist he shot Masis, but claims it was to defend his friend and himself.

Convicted as an adult in 2002, he could have spent his entire life in prison after being found guilty.

“ I was 17 years old when I was walking Supermax,” he told LAist, “level four maximum security prison.”

In 2018, Senate Bill 1391 passed in the California legislature, to only allow minors 16 years and older to be considered for adult court.

The new law gave Alvarez a way out of prison, allowing his case to be resentenced in 2024.

By then he’d served about 24 years. Because of his age at the time of the killing, under the change in the law his case was sent back to juvenile court where his adult conviction was set aside and he was declared a ward of the court — or under its supervision and control.

Alvarez was released from prison and put on probation for two years.

The following year he was also sentenced to two years of probation for a separate felony offense in November 2023 that was considered non-violent — possessing a weapon while in custody.

Alvarez acknowledged having the weapon while he was in prison, and told LAist that most people had hidden weapons there, often as a deterrent from being attacked.

“Of course I had a weapon,” he said. “You would have one too if you were there. You're trying to do everything in your power to survive.”

In early 2025, Alvarez began working for Healing Urban Barrios as a peace ambassador.

“ They wanted individuals who had the respect, I suppose, of the streets [and] in prison,” he told LAist.

Alvarez said gang members are more willing to talk with someone from their own background than with police officers or city officials, and he said he was able to speak to them to avoid violence and other safety issues around MacArthur Park.

“There's hundreds — if not thousands — of gang members who flow through that area due to the fact that a lot of them are addicts now,“ Alvarez said.

He told LAist he believed the peace ambassadors in the area had made a difference in reducing the number of people using drugs, fighting and lighting fires in the park since he started working there in 2025.

“ There used to be a lot of fights,” he said. “ We're able to talk to the guys right there and be like, ‘Look, work something out with each other.’"

Alvarez showed LAist photos of people he said he had given CPR while on the job to prevent them from dying of drug overdoses and a woman he said he identified to authorities as a missing person and helped get to safety.

Federal agents arrested Alvarez in May, after LAPD officers found two body armor plates in his car during a traffic stop earlier that month.

Alvarez told law enforcement officers after his arrest that the plates were for an art project, court documents show, and his lawyer argued in court that Alvarez did not have a vest to wear the armor in.

Prosecutors argued in court documents that he could have used the armor plates without a vest, and that he may have had a vest for the plates elsewhere.

Alvarez told LAist he was planning to use his laser engravers to write poetry on the plates and his cousin was going to paint them with graffiti to get the attention of the youth he served.

“With youth, especially youth that are in gangs, you gotta show them some different type of art,” he said. “  It would've hit them hard, you know?”

The U.S. Attorney’s office charged Alvarez with possessing body armor. But they made additional allegations against him apart from the charges, which they have not proven in court.

For instance, prosecutors claimed in court documents that Alvarez was “leading a violent street gang, while claiming to be a gang interventionist for the City,” and that they were investigating him for additional crimes that would carry “great sentencing exposure.”

Prosecutors alleged in court documents that members of the 18th Street gang described him as a leader of the gang in recorded jailhouse phone calls. Alvarez claimed the way the prosecutors described the conversations wasn’t accurate. He told LAist he was never a gang leader and, instead, was using the respect he had with the 18th Street gang to prevent further violence.

No one from the U.S. Attorney’s office in L.A. responded to LAist’s questions about whether they intend to pursue other charges.

LAist asked Alvarez to clarify whether he was an active member during our interview last week.

“ When you're a gang member, for the most part, you're always a gang member, you know?” He said, “There's two types of ‘actives.’ There's active where you're actively involved in the violence and all that stuff, but there's also being active when you're actively involved in your community, and that's what I've been doing.”

Alvarez said he hopes to continue working in gang violence reduction programs now that the federal case against him has been dismissed.

“I know that what we did was good,” he said, recalling how parents of children he had worked with around MacArthur Park reached out to thank him while he was in federal custody as his recent case was ongoing.

“It'd be nice to have the support all the way around and not have, especially, people who are pushing politics,” Alvarez told LAist.

Councilmember Hernandez’ office and Healing Urban Barrios have not responded to questions about whether they would consider allowing Alvarez to return to his position as a peace ambassador.

After the Palisades and Eaton firestorms in January 2025, one story captured how Los Angeles County’s emergency management system seemed to have failed. Anthony Mitchell Sr., an 80-year-old man who used both a prosthetic and a wheelchair, and his 35-year-old son, Justin, who had cerebral palsy, died in their Altadena home waiting for evacuation assistance.

Anthony Mitchell had called 911 twice, identifying himself and his son as disabled, and was assured help was coming.

Of the 31 people killed in the fires, 27 were over 65, and at least six had mobility issues, according to news reports.

The tragedy led California and L.A. County to consider adopting “disaster registries,” an emergency management strategy used around the country for assisting people who might require additional help in emergencies due to their age, disability or other health conditions.

The California Commission on Aging issued a report in November that noted evacuation centers lacked data on older and disabled residents who would need assistance. That led to a shortage of equipment and expertise to address the specialized needs of those residents. The commission recommended that the state consider implementing a statewide registry.

Even before the commission’s recommendation, Los Angeles County supervisors had directed its Aging and Disabilities Department to study the feasibility of a registry.

But neither initiative has moved forward.

“We have not seen much movement on exploring a disaster registry,” said Patrick Smith, the state Commission on Aging’s legislative director.

The Los Angeles feasibility study was “paused” last year while the county reviewed its emergency operations with the McChrystal Group, said Liz Odendahl, a spokesperson for Supervisor Janice Hahn, who co-sponsored the resolution authorizing the study.

The arguments against registries

Some advocacy groups in California and the state Office of Emergency Services have argued against registries, Smith said. In fact, OES’ official guidance on registries is that “jurisdictions should not use them.”

Registries typically are voluntary, and registrants are responsible for keeping their information up to date. Because of that, they are unreliable sources of information, which is one reason some emergency managers and many advocates for older and disabled people oppose them.

They also point out that registries could give a false sense of security to people, who may assume assistance is guaranteed when it is not.

“This false assumption is dangerous and can lead to an overall decrease in personal disaster preparedness,” the California Office of Emergency Services says on its website.

Registries are hard to keep current, the office notes, and the personal information people provide may be challenging to safeguard.

Why some places have registries anyway

With data showing older people far more likely to die in natural disasters — and climate change making disasters more frequent and severe — several states have taken the opposite approach, establishing registries to better assist older adults and people with disabilities in emergencies.

Florida’s statewide Special Needs Registry is often cited as a model because it connects the state’s Health Department with emergency management in all 67 counties. Florida also requires its counties to establish shelters for people with special medical needs.

Delaware, New Jersey, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Texas and Utah also have statewide registries, as do many municipal emergency offices across the country.

In California, three of 58 counties have registries — Mono, Siskiyou and Butte.

Butte County’s registry was in place in 2018, when the Camp Fire killed 85 people, 67 of whom were seniors. Emergency managers can’t say how many or if any of the older adults who died in that fire were on the registry.

But they say the registry remains a useful tool.

“If we didn’t have the list, we wouldn’t have had any idea at all who needed extra assistance evacuating,” said Butte County Emergency Manager Angie Mannel, who was a 911 dispatcher during the Camp Fire.

Older adults, like many Americans, are not prepared for disasters. A 2023 AARP survey found that under one-third of older adults have a comprehensive plan for natural disasters, and only 10% have opted into apps or text notifications that alert people to emergencies.

“You can’t just throw a bunch of information out there and expect everyone to be able to act on it,” said Lindsay Peterson, a gerontology researcher at the University of South Florida. “Some people just can’t.”

Her research has shown that technology can be a barrier for older adults, especially those living independently but with limited technological skills and income.

While acknowledging that “registries are controversial,” Peterson said state and local governments must find ways to ensure the most vulnerable older adults will be protected.

Florida’s Special Needs Registry

That’s what Florida set out to do with its Special Needs Registry. But it does not guarantee emergency assistance, which the Health Department notes when people register. Still, the Florida Division of Emergency Management advises older adults needing this assistance to register, because registries can be useful planning tools and may save lives, even if they are incomplete.

Each of Florida’s county emergency management offices decides how it will use the registries to provide assistance. Seminole County, in eastern Florida, offers transportation assistance to registrants who request it. Three days before a tropical storm or hurricane is expected, the county Office of Emergency Management calls registrants about the approaching storm and advises them to evacuate. They must agree to leave at that time in order to receive transportation, said Steven Lerner, division manager.

“We’re like Enterprise; we’ll pick you up,” he said. The county uses a fleet that includes school buses and ADA-compliant vans.

Lerner’s main concern about Seminole’s registry of 1,700 people is who is not on it. He focuses his outreach efforts on new residents who may never have experienced a hurricane season, and those aging at home who may overestimate their ability to evacuate themselves.

In Lee County on Florida’s western coast, the Office of Emergency Management used public transportation to help evacuate people when Hurricane Ian hit in 2022. More than half of Lee County’s 800,000 residents were ordered to evacuate a day before the hurricane made landfall. Many were forced to weather the storm at home or in shelters, as 10 inches of rain inundated areas, winds gusted up to 140 mph and storm surge reached 15 feet. The storm killed 149 Floridians, including 72 Lee County residents. Most of the fatalities were people over 65.

County spokesperson Betsy Clayton wouldn’t say how many registrants emergency crews helped to evacuate during Hurricane Ian. But she said the county has assisted about 1,000 registrants in each major storm Florida has experienced in the past two decades, providing paratransit and ambulance services.

A California example

In California’s Butte County, emergency managers believe the registry will save lives if a disaster on par with the Camp Fire strikes again.

After igniting on Nov. 8, 2018, the Camp Fire grew rapidly, overwhelming the county’s emergency management plans and destroying its communication systems. It incinerated Paradise, a town of 27,000 people, in four hours.

The California auditor’s 2019 after-action review of the county’s emergency plans recommended Butte use registry data in evacuation planning, so emergency responders know who will need help before a disaster.

Tiffany Rowe manages Butte’s Special Needs Awareness Program, which notifies registered people of emergencies and evacuation orders and assists in evacuating them if needed.

The voluntary registry pinpoints who will require assistance in particular evacuation zones and what they’ll need. Most warnings are automated, but if the emergency is expected to affect 10 or fewer registrants, Rowe calls them herself.

After the pandemic and the busy fire seasons of 2022 and 2024, the number of Butte County registrants increased by over 50%. Today, around 2,200 older adults and people with disabilities are registered.

“Being a disaster-prone county,” said Mannel, Butte’s emergency manager, “our perspective is always focused on the safety of our citizens.”

Timothy Lane is a writer with the Investigative Reporting Program at the UC Berkeley Journalism School and covered this story through a grant from The SCAN Foundation.

Insurance companies are starting to write new policies in California again after years of holding back as wildfire risk climbed higher.

The state Insurance Department says that means outgoing Commissioner Ricardo Lara’s new regulations, intended to boost insurance availability, are working. Each time a company declares its plans to sell policies again, the department touts it as a win. But the state has not released the number of new policies the companies have written so far.

Enter Consumer Watchdog, the advocacy group that often butts heads with the department. It released an estimate of new policy commitments: 12,189 since January 2025, when Lara’s so-called sustainable insurance strategy went into effect. The strategy allows insurers to use catastrophe modeling, which they say more adequately takes risk into account because it includes forward-looking models, and to factor in reinsurance costs when setting their rates.

Consumer Watchdog, whose numbers come from combing through insurance companies’ rate filings, says that number is low, considering insurers have requested or secured $571 million in rate increases under the new regulations.

The insurance department disagrees with the group’s analysis, saying it intends to release its own data and analysis, and discounting the group’s numbers as “incomplete and premature.”

Ben Armstrong, Consumer Watchdog’s actuary, is tracking voluminous but publicly available rate filings. He looked at insurers’ statements about the number of new policies they promise to write, and compared the new filings with each company’s previous rate filings. Armstrong told CalMatters it’s “not an exact science” because the filings mention commitments, not actual sales, and in some cases don’t include an exact timeline.

The new rules allow insurers to factor in catastrophe models and their reinsurance costs as long as they commit to increasing sales in high-risk areas. Of the 10 companies that requested rate increases under the new rules, only five have committed to selling more policies, the group’s analysis shows.

The regulations call for insurance companies to choose one of these options: Write 85% of their market share in high-risk areas; grow their policies 5% in such areas; or increase their number of policies 5% by taking customers out of the FAIR Plan. Some of the companies that have requested or secured rate increases claim they already meet the 85% threshold.

“What we’re looking at is the reality right now for Californians who have been saddled with rate hikes for the promise of more policies in the future,” said Carmen Balber, executive director of Consumer Watchdog.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.