Celeste Fremon

Photo by Sobodan Dimitrov Meeting with the LAPD’s new chief, Bill Bratton, for the first time, one hardly knows what to expect. Is he the enlightened police reformer the city has desperately been searching for over the last decade? Or just one more stop-’em-and-frisk-’em cowboy, clueless in confronting the city’s......

Dedication Day has arrived for L.A.’s first official Graffiti Free Zone. The mayor, the city attorney, City Councilwoman Jan Perry and the Newton Division of the LAPD are all sponsoring the event. In terms of luminaries, only the commanding officer of Newton, Captain Thomas Maeweather, actually showed up last Saturday......

It‘s just after 9 p.m. last Friday. Six LAPD officers, including two in plainclothes, plus eight civilian volunteers, have gathered in the parking lot of the Hollenbeck Division station for a graffiti stakeout. The idea is fairly simple. The group will position themselves near a wall that is chronically plagued......

AS PART OF HIS PUSH TO GET CONGRESS and the United Nations to sign off on war with Iraq, President Bush has repeatedly promised that the Iraqi people are clamoring for liberation by U.S. forces. Likewise, the State Department has been holding regular meetings with a half-dozen Iraqi-American exile groups,......

Photos by Anne Fishbein IT IS WEDNESDAY, JULY 10, THE LAST DAY OF THE Los Angeles Police Department's West Point Leadership Program. Twenty-two officers are crammed into a small, overbright classroom near the back of the old Elysian Park Police Academy. Some of the officers are high-ranking law-enforcement types from......

The King Fahad Mosque, located on Washington Boulevard in Culver City, is a gracefully domed structure with an imported marble facade, a 72-foot-high gold-leafed minaret and intricately painted Turkish tiles adorning the place both inside and out. The facility was completed in late August of 1999, funded by a donation......

So few grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance. —Jane Hirshfield, "The Weighing" 1. His was a true hero story. In the Pico-Aliso housing projects where he grew up, Roman Gonzalez was a symbol of redemption, a countersign against the rest of the city’s......

In 1996, the U.S. Congress and the Clinton administration took an ax to America’s existing welfare structure. Some two years later, social critic Barbara Ehrenreich was nibbling an upscale Manhattan lunch with Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper’s magazine, when the conversation drifted to the roughly 4 million women who......

Illustration by Geoffrey Grahn & Richard Louderback ABOUT 10 YEARS AGO, I began accepting collect calls from prison. It was not that I'd recently acquired felons in the family. I was working on a book about East L.A. gang members, and a number of the young men I was following......

As this Alice-in-Wonderland inauguration approaches, during which a president who may or may not have actually been elected will be gloriously and officially sworn into office, it would be nice to be able to trust somebody -- like maybe your tire company. For four months straight I tried my best......