Traci Park's Latest Newsletter Proves She’s Not Looking Out for You — She’s Building a Westside Surveillance State

Traci Park’s latest newsletter paints a disturbing picture of her priorities as a City Councilmember. At a time when Los Angeles faces deepening inequality, skyrocketing housing costs, and renewed threats to immigrant families, Park is choosing to invest in expanding LAPD’s surveillance capabilities, defending exploitative wages, and parroting Trump-style fear tactics. It’s not just tone-deaf—it’s dangerous.

She leads the newsletter with a claim about protecting children by reassigning crossing guards to higher-enrollment schools like Nora Sterry and Brentwood Science Magnet. On its face, it sounds like basic governance. But her broader agenda actually puts many children and families in greater danger. Park says nothing about the fear undocumented parents feel when dropping their kids off at school while ICE lurks in neighborhoods. She’s silent on what it means to be a student in Los Angeles today—especially for those living under the shadow of Trump’s revived mass deportation plans. Her version of “safety” ignores the very real danger of family separation, raids, and surveillance that disproportionately target immigrants and communities of color.

So what is Park actually prioritizing? As usual, it's the police, who have shoveled hundreds of thousands of dollars into her campaign coffers. She wants to expand  LAPD’s Real Time Crime Centers across all 21 divisions, with West LA and Pacific on deck. These centers aren’t about public safety--they’re about police control. They allow the LAPD to pull in footage from thousands of surveillance sources: automated license plate readers, drones, helicopters, gunshot detection systems, and even private homeowners’ cameras. All of that data is piped into centralized monitoring hubs where officers track people in real time, often using AI-enhanced analytics and predictive policing software.

This is the same policing model that civil rights experts have warned will lead to greater harassment and profiling, especially against Black and Brown residents. These surveillance centers aren’t being rolled out in Beverly Hills or Pacific Palisades—they’re targeting the neighborhoods that LAPD and politicians like Park label as “high crime” in order to justify extraordinary levels of scrutiny. It’s not just bad policy—it’s a blueprint for institutionalized over-policing. And it comes as the federal government, under Donald Trump, is rolling out an aggressive new law enforcement directive aimed at “unleashing” police to pursue so-called criminals—a category that, under Trump’s worldview, often includes entire immigrant communities.

Traci Park isn’t resisting this trend—she’s actively building the local infrastructure to carry it out. Back in 2023, she pushed for teachers and social workers to join the LAPD, and urged the city to support the purchase of a military-style “robot dog” for surveillance. The following year, she led the charge to bring a Real Time Crime Center to the Westside, after LAPD secured \$15 million for a new surveillance network. Now, she’s proud to say that rollout is expanding citywide. This is not about community safety—it’s about consolidating law enforcement power, with almost no democratic oversight.

And when she’s not championing surveillance, Park is using her platform to undermine basic economic justice. In her newsletter, she criticizes a proposal to raise the minimum wage for tourism workers to $30/hour—calling it political theater and claiming it will damage a “critical economic sector.” What she fails to mention is that this sector survives off the backs of low-wage workers who wake up at 3:30 a.m., commute for hours, and keep LAX and the city’s hotel industry running—especially as Los Angeles gears up to host the 2026 World Cup, the 2027 Super Bowl, and the 2028 Olympics.

Park’s argument that this wage increase would threaten essential services like police and sanitation is misleading at best. The truth is, the real threat to our budget is the $100 million the city pays out annually in LAPD misconduct settlements. If she were serious about fiscal responsibility, she’d be talking about reining in those costs—not defending the right of billion-dollar hotel chains to pay poverty wages. Her opposition to the living wage exposes who she’s really fighting for—and it’s not working Angelenos. She’s protecting the same corporate interests that bankroll her campaigns and benefit from her deregulation-first, pro-surveillance, anti-worker platform.

Traci Park likes to present herself as a pragmatic problem-solver, but her track record—and her own words—reveal something else: a politician who is accelerating the worst trends in local governance. More policing. More surveillance. More corporate appeasement. And more danger for the very people she claims to serve. This is not about keeping kids safe. This is not about fairness. This is about power—who has it, who watches us, and who gets left behind.