If Los Angeles and other troubled cities in the U.S. collapse into dystopian Third World hellscapes, it will not be with a bang — but a series of whimpers.
That became evident once more when a city garbage truck pulled up last week in front of my apartment, located on the city’s west side in a neighborhood populated by UCLA students, retired seniors, and young couples with preschool children.
As I sat at my desk, I watched the driver remove a small green bag of dog excrement that somehow was stuck to the outside of his truck, a vehicle designed for the sole purpose of consuming trash.
He examined the bag for a moment — then threw it on my lawn.
“Hey,” I said, scrambling out my door. “Don’t throw trash on my property.”
“It’s not my job,” he said, inexplicably.
Then he drove off.
Critics of Democratic leadership in the city and state typically blame the exodus of more than a million people from California since the 2020 census on “sky-high taxes and a sweeping regime of costly and onerous regulations,” as the California Post’s editorial board described it this week.
As someone who moved to L.A. in 2003, I have watched the city in two decades change into something I no longer recognize. But I will argue it’s not just regulations and monetary policies that have negated the promise of the Mama and Papa’s song “California Dreamin’.”
It’s the small stuff.
Angelinos are intransigent residents. They will tolerate wildfires, earthquakes, mud slides, traffic congestion, long lines everywhere, and a high cost of living, all in exchange for 10 months of sunshine, a Mediterranean climate, and a topography that can have you surfing in the Pacific in the morning and hitting the snowy ski slopes by late afternoon.
I certainly have tolerated it all, and still do, even despite the Pacific Palisades fire incinerating my home and all my possessions in 2025.
But when quality of life and flagrant lawlessness begin to resemble something out of John Carpenter’s Escape From L.A., people finally start looking elsewhere.
I could list a dozen things that have changed since I came here under contract to adapt my first true crime book to film. Many of the changes are the result of policy and funding decisions of Mayor Karen Bass and her city council, but previous administrations as well.
Ironically, I left the Detroit area where twenty of my years were spent reporting on the decline of a once-great Motor City, only to watch another one go downhill.
But instead of offering an L.A. laundry list, I will stick to two items officials consider the ‘small stuff’ they no longer sweat — cleanliness and behavior on the city’s streets.
First, a little background.
When I arrived in L.A., the mayor was Antonio Villaraigosa, who billed himself as an “unabashed progressive” but governed more towards the center as he pushed to hire more police and reform the city’s schools.
Not long after I arrived, HBO launched a show called Entourage. It was about a fictional young actor and his three pals who moved to L.A. so he could pursue a career in Hollywood. It was loosely based on the experience of its executive producer, actor Mark Wahlberg, who came to the city from Boston with his pals.
The show highlighted L.A. at its best and often most glamorous, as well as portraying the absurdities of the industry.
When I secured work as a screenwriter for films and creating shows for television, I found myself living a less flamboyant version of that show, which often used guest appearances by real Hollywood personalities and highlighted L.A. studios and hot spots.
I attended film premieres. I made many trips to famous studio lots to pitch films and TV shows. I worked with actors, first with David Schwimmer from Friends and lastly with Michael Douglas, both gracious and supportive producing partners any writer would cherish, not to mention immense talents.
On weekends I had to negotiate the congestion of the Sunset Strip packed with club-goers hitting famous music venues, places like the Whiskey which launched rockers over the decades from The Doors to Guns N’ Roses.
On any given night I could see household-name comics working out their material at intimate comedy venues. I enjoyed a weekend in Las Vegas as the guest of one of America’s top sitcom stars, treated like a VIP everywhere we went.
That kind of excitement aside, the areas of Los Angeles in the early 2000s where I spent much of my time were not only postcard perfect with its palms, mountain peaks, and sparkling night vistas from the Hollywood hills, they were very clean.
Signs were everywhere: “Littering $500 Fine.” “$1000 Fine For Littering.” “Keep L.A. Clean. Please Don’t Litter.”
Those signs are still there, but they are meaningless now, a threat from bygone era.
The kind of items routinely left as litter by vagrants even in desirable Los Angeles neighborhoods. Photo by Lowell Cauffiel.
Every morning, I emerge from my apartment to find a variety of items tossed in the street, the sidewalk or into my landscaping. Most frequent? Modelo beer cans. But, also, empty food containers and even items of clothing.
The scofflaws seem to roam at night like zombies. They are transients or homeless and — this is an educated allegation — illegal migrants who are quite unlike any of my great neighbors who come from a variety of European, Asian, Middle Eastern, and Hispanic backgrounds.
I say this, because just a few weeks ago, a group of four to six transients began showing up every morning to sit on buckets across the street from my building, drink Modelo and cheap tequila, and blast Latin music from a boom box.
I asked them to turn the music down. Not only did they not comply, one told me to fuck off and yelled, “Viva Mexico.”
Other perps are addicts who roam the city, who often leaving behind their government-provided syringes, pipes, and other drug paraphernalia.
What used to be encampments limited to downtown’s skid row now pop up everywhere.
About a mile from me, a west side World Market has had an ongoing battle with an encampment that lines the entire outside of its store. Workers periodically remove the tents and large piles of litter, only to have the addicts and mental patients return.
The result for the city has been an armada of rats and the return of more than a half dozen “medieval diseases” like typhus and typhoid, according to one report.
But getting a response from Los Angeles authorities to do anything is fruitless. I no longer call the Los Angeles Police Department for vagrants who make trouble, even those threatening me or female students in my complex.
A call to 911 gets you sent to a “non-emergency” dispatcher. I have never spoken to one. I’ve always hung after an hour or two on hold.
Quite simply, statutes on the books outlawing litter, loitering, and open use of intoxicants are no longer enforced in the city of Los Angeles.
And while the offenders near me have been showing up daily for only a month, it doesn’t take much to destroy a good neighborhood. I’ve seen three moving crews on my street in the past two weeks alone.
Another of the many other profound changes I’ve seen in L.A. in the past two decades had to do with the street itself, where the so-called “laid back California lifestyle” ends at the pavement.
While the frequent street “meetups” or “sideshows” like one recently that resulted in the looting of a family-owned convenience store, there’s something more subtle going on.
Personally, I have not seen a single traffic enforcement stop in Los Angeles for nearly five years now.
I recently found out the reason in an investigative piece by two independent reporters on a Substack account called L.A. Reported. LAPD’s Traffic Division is responsible for keeping the city’s 1,139 miles of city roads safe.
But according to the report, there’s not enough cops to do the job. Before the George Floyd debacle, 40 officers were assigned to Central Traffic. Since 2020, it has dropped to 20.
According to that report:
In 2026, the understaffed and overstretched Central Division is not the exception, it’s the rule. Citations for moving violations plummeted citywide from over 213,000 in 2019 to just 79,000 in 2025, a decline of 63 percent. Tickets for speeding, a critical factor in most fatalities, have dropped roughly 40 percent over the same period.
Reporters also noted something called the 2023 Freedom to Walk act, which decriminalized jaywalking.
Officers say they have no time for proactive patrols.
“You seldom get time to do traffic enforcement specifically against speeding and right of way violations,” Sgt. Doug Panameno told the publication. “We definitely don’t have the resources to make a dent in making the city safer.”
The result is more than noticeable. As a life-long motorcyclist, I’m constantly on alert for the cars that routinely run red lights and stop signs.
I see Ferraris and Lamborghinis routinely hitting speeds of a hundred miles an hour on residential stretches of Sunset Boulevard.
Deafening groups of a hundred or more unlicensed gas-powered small motor scooters take over Santa Monica or Wilshire boulevards, ignoring traffic lights and various rules of the road on jaunts from the east side to the sea.
As for jaywalking, I’ve experienced the same predictable result at least dozen times in my car when I’ve had to slam on the brakes and hit my horn.
They don’t say thanks for saving them from injury or death. They flip me off or yell, “fuck you.”
When I was working in Detroit, you didn’t dare flip anyone off on the street. In Detroit, you were likely to get shot.
Speaking of the Motor City, ironically the city I left behind has been going through quite a transformation. Areas that were unsafe or filled with drug addicts and street prostitution featured in my first nonfiction book, Masquerade, have now been gentrified and occupied by hipsters, artists, and professionals.
When I mentioned some of these problems of lawlessness to a liberal associate of mine, he, of course, blamed President Donald Trump.
“Trump doesn’t follow the rules,” he said. “So, people feel they don’t have to, either.”
A more plausible explanation is something called the “broken windows theory of policing.”
While the lack of enforcement for littering, traffic, and jaywalking may not seem like much, the theory postulates that ignoring “minor” transgressions not only destroys quality of life, it inevitably leads to more serious crime.
When you enforce the small stuff — traffic, broken windows, graffiti, littering — it sends a message to those with ambitions for serious crimes like burglary, robbery, and homicide. Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani is credited with using “broken windows” policing to clean up New York in the 1990s.
L.A. in 2026 has a lot of “broken windows.”
As for the Entourage experience, that no longer exists.
Since Covid, writers no longer go to film lots to pitch their shows. It’s all done on Zoom. Work for those not on camera but able to make a good living in development or on crews has plummeted. An industry that employed 150,000 has laid off 45,000 in Los Angeles County since 2022.
Talented and hardworking people with decades of industry experience have lost their homes and are serving coffee at Starbucks, presuming they can even get that job (or one like it) as they are seen as “overqualified.”
As for other lost highlights, the music scene on the Sunset Strip is largely finished, with that stretch of Sunset in West Hollywood only a ghost of its former vibrancy. The comedy clubs are still active. Comedy, one could argue, is always popular when everything goes to hell.
I recently spotted a popular Instagram account called Based in Malibu and run by a MAGA commentator and real estate professional named Lizzy Benichou. A while ago she launched a social media campaign called “Make L.A. Entourage Again.”
She’s even selling a hat with the saying.
Benichou has blasted California leaders. But her commentary most often focuses on examples of the wheels coming off from civil society.
If you think we are exaggerating about what is happening to the second largest city in America, you only have to look to Entourage’s creator, Doug Ellin. He reminds everyone he is “not MAGA” but argues “liberals” are delusional by continuing to elect the same people in California.
A supporter of the unsuccessful campaign of former reality star Spencer Pratt for mayor, Ellin announced in a couple of blistering rants how the city has “collapsed” in the past five years. His Beverly Hills home was burglarized in 2023 by “animals” wearing ski masks, he told his social media followers.
He said he didn’t believe the “bullshit” statistics in a Los Angeles Times article about crime being reduced because “everyone in my neighborhood has the same problem.”
He alleged that news media regularly “gaslights” Angelinos that all is well.
Ellin’s picturesque portrayal of the city, its culture, and the ambitious vibe that anything was possible if you had some talent and worked for it, were the hallmarks of Entourage.
“I’m one of the people who made this city look great [with the show],” Ellin said. “I did it for years. I glorified it. I meet people all the time who moved here because of the show I fucking created — and they hate it here now. Hate!”
Ellin says he doesn’t want to leave. He doesn’t want to be forced out. In fact, he says he moved to Nashville for six months where there is a “better life” but decided to come back to “fight” the decline.
“The status quo is destroying,” the city, he said in one appearance. “And we need to try something different.”
Nor do I want to leave.
I have many connections here with family and friends. I also have much work to do and somebody telling me I should go only evokes genetic defiance from Scotts-Irish family members who fought in the American Revolution.
I just want L.A. fixed.
It is now up to November’s election, a contest between incumbent Karen Bass and Democratic Socialist councilwoman Nithya Raman, who when running for the city council in 2020 campaigned on defunding the police.
The city council’s solution to the vagrant encampments? It just eliminated the restrictions on homeless camping in more than a dozen city parks normally reserved for taxpayers and their children.
Like Entourage’s Doug Ellin, I am not optimistic about the “status quo.”
Breitbart contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the best-selling author of the Los Angeles crime novel Below the Line and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.