On Skid Row, unhoused residents become first responders to homelessness crisis

When night falls on Skid Row, Samson and Joanna Swan know there’s no one else around to save them.

Three tents down, they met Gustavo. Gustavo loved art class in high school, he told them, and over the next few years, he often spray-painted signs with anti-police slogans to hang from their tents.

Last week, Swan memorialized him in graffiti, spraying “R.I.P Gustavo” in bold white paint and on fractured pavement, where he inexplicably died days after securing a spot in interim housing.

A few weeks earlier, Samson spent a sleepless night trying to resuscitate an unhoused neighbor violently struck in a hit-and-run during a scooter ride home. Swan helped document the accident and collect witness statements, but she said police never responded to the scene.

A week or two before that — Samson and Swan can’t recall exactly when, because the violence blurs together at this point — the two witnessed a Los Angeles Police Department officer fatally shoot a man in the chest for holding a plastic fork in his hand.

“We’re fighting a war out here,” Samson said. “People are passing away, because we’re subjected to these unlivable conditions, and it could happen any day to any one of us.”

Samson and Swan are members of Los Angeles Community Action Network, an advocacy project by and for unhoused residents on Skid Row, where an average of six people die every day, and where memorial graffiti stains almost every corner of every block.

For 4,400 unhoused residents on Skid Row, a network of mutual aid — from documenting encampment sweeps to reversing fentanyl overdoses at 3 a.m. — has become key to surviving homelessness.

Projects such as LACAN, Sidewalk Project and Blue Hollywood Street Sanctuary, born and bred inside the 50-block “containment zone,” aren’t just grassroots service providers in the community. They’re part of a political ecosystem brewing underneath — from the “gutter,” as Samson calls it — whose activism can take form in community cop watch, substance use sanctuaries and in-house policy audits delivered straight to city council.

“Services, Not Sweeps”

On the corner of Sixth and Gladys, Swan helps set up an outreach tent in front of LACAN’s headquarters, where unhoused residents pass by for supplies like clean socks, bottled water, blankets and tents — anything they need to make it through the night, she said.

She first encountered LACAN’s outreach tent in 2018, after she had been evicted by her landlord from a warehouse she lived in. In the next five years, Swan became wired into issues like tenants’ rights, trained in drug overdose prevention and memorized the city’s homeless encampment sweep schedule.

“I’ve learned pretty much everything I know from my people in Skid Row at LACAN,” she said.

As Swan spent more time next to neighbors on Skid Row, many of whom struggled with similar mental health and substance use disorders, she felt compelled to join LACAN as a community advocate and organizer.

“Now, I work with folks that have been recently released from jail and talk to them about overdose prevention as they go back into their communities,” she said.

Under a canopy next door, Samson stocks a donation table with tubes of pain relief cream. An unhoused veteran, who has severe nerve damage in the foot, had asked if he might have something to cool the pain for a bit. Samson has bad sciatica himself, which has left him unable to work, so he understands, he said.

“We live with everybody that we're outreaching to,” Samson said. “Right now, we’re getting them the resources they need, we’re also learning day by day how to better fight back.”

For Samson, that fight began during the pandemic, when he became unemployed and lost his housing. The day after finding a spot in a homeless shelter, he was stabbed in the neck. The trauma of that incident, combined with the precarity of his housing status, led him to LACAN.

Founded in 1999, LACAN is ground zero for a burgeoning solidarity on Skid Row. The nonprofit provides daily services, such as affordable food initiatives and overdose prevention training, as well as challenges systemic harms in the city’s response to homelessness.

“We’re taking care of each other,” Swan said, “whether in the streets or in court.”

Skid Row’s Community WatchDog

General Dogon, born and raised on Skid Row, has been on the block since 1962. He grew up bouncing back and forth between his parents’ homes in South Central — which he hated, because “it was only auto parts, chicken shops and 99 cent stores” — and Downtown L.A., where he spent most of his time, until he was sentenced to 18 years in state prison.

"I was one of the first generations of cocaine users to be convicted from the war on drugs,” he said. “And I never understood cocaine or the homeless fight until I went to prison.”

Dogon, who works as a human rights organizer for Skid Row, joined LACAN after becoming a de facto jailhouse lawyer in prison.

“I was doing monitoring and documenting [guards] for Human Rights Watch, and I won a lot of prisoner inmate complaints for a lot of people,” Dogon said. “Everybody loved it so much that the prisoners nicknamed me “general.”

In 2005, Dogon helped found LACAN’s Community Watch, an alternative security presence in the community which trains and deploys residents to document police, sanitation and private security teams, particularly during encampment sweeps and street arrests, to respond to any human rights violations. The initiative provided crucial evidence for a 2016 lawsuit, where the city was found guilty of illegally arresting unhoused residents on Skid Row, often for sitting, sleeping or lying on sidewalks and destroying personal property like clothing and medication.

General Dogon fixes up the bike he uses during community watch. (Photo by Vani Sanganeria)

“We had support personnel [collect] documents, get witness interviews and contact information, pass out flyers. We got a videographer, did role plays for the point person communicating with the police, walking around, reporting back to home base,” Dogon said. “We let [the city] know, ‘we’re on the verge of filing a federal complaint against you.’”

LACAN is home to the city’s longest-running citizen cop watch team, which entered its 19th consecutive year in 2024. The need for a community watchdog, Dogon said, has only escalated with the city’s response to homelessness.

In 2007, the first year of the city’s Safer Cities Initiative, LAPD issued 12,000 citations on Skid Row, primarily to residents who crossed a street after the red hand signal started flashing at an intersection. The LAPD also made 750 arrests each month that year, mostly for drug violations. Skid Row surpassed Baghdad, Iraq that year as the most heavily policed area in the world.

“We get a lot of calls from the public defender’s office asking us for footage,” Dogon said. “Because we video everything.”

Dogon said a blind man came to LACAN for legal advice, because the police gave him a ticket for walking across the street at night. He later saw an LAPD officer issue a crosswalk violation to someone in a wheelchair, because she couldn’t cross the street in time.

One time, he said he’ll never forget, an officer ticketed a man for littering, after the ash from his cigarette fell onto the ground. “We framed that ticket,” Dogon said.

For Swan, community watch extends from the streets to the halls of power. After city lawmakers neglected to release a promised report on 41.18 — the municipal code which bans sitting, sleeping, standing and storing property on designated areas in the city — she crashed a city council meeting. Swan and a dozen other unhoused residents from Skid Row held up signs saying “services, not sweeps” and wore shirts saying “I am Gustavo.”

At the end of the Feb. 28 meeting, LACAN delivered its own community report on 41.18 to city council. Swan and Samson, who sit on the Human and Civil Rights Committee at LACAN, helped survey hundreds of unhoused residents on their experiences with LAPD and the Bureau of Sanitation, who carry out encampment sweeps and are tasked with connecting unhoused residents to resources like housing.

General Dogon reviews LACAN's findings from their 41.18 community report. (Photo by Vani Sanganeria)

“While [the city’s] report is well over[due], we hope that [they] will present their findings soon,” Adam Smith, an organizer with LACAN, commented to L.A. City Council. Two days later, a portion of the city’s official report on 41.18 was leaked. The report echoed LACAN’s survey: 41.18 interventions were “generally ineffective in permanently housing individuals” and often displaced residents from their communities.

On May 2, the Bureau of Sanitation sweeped the encampment on Sixth and Gladys, where LACAN stations its donation tent. “[The city] provided us no warning or notice,” Samson said. All the supplies he had set up — socks, bottled water, blankets and pamphlets about tenants’ rights, for example — disappeared.

Donations can be replaced, Swan said, but the refuge of a community can’t.

“People get swept, and we lose touch with them,” Swan said. “We’ve lost people to overdose when their encampments get swept.”

Unhoused residents hold up signs at L.A. City Hall, where LACAN delivered its community report on Municipal Code 41.18 on Feb. 28. (Photo by Vani Sanganeria)

Of the 2,200 unhoused residents that died in 2021 in L.A. County, more than a third died from drug overdose. In zip codes encompassing Skid Row, overdose deaths shot up from 13 in 2017 to 148 in 2022 — an increase of over 1000 percent over five years — with fentanyl accounting for more than 70 percent of those deaths, according to the L.A. County Medical Examiner-Coroner.

Russia Reilly, an unhoused resident on the corner of Wall and Seventh, remembered the temperature when her friend collapsed from a fentanyl overdose. She grabbed a box of Narcan, lunged towards him and felt ice cold.

“We lost a whole generation of people here,” Reilly said. “And since I’ve been here so long, I knew most of them.”

Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, is up to 50 times stronger than heroin and a notoriously cheap, potent additive to drugs like heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine. Naloxone, known by its brand name Narcan, is a nasal spray that reverses nine out of 10 fentanyl overdoses and has become residents’ first response to overdose.

But when the city conducts multiple encampment sweeps every week, everything goes in the trash — including Narcan boxes. That’s when Reilly, who has lived on Skid Row since the 80s, decided to make use of the only permanent fixture on her street: trees.

“Nobody knew where to get Narcan, nobody could get it at the pharmacies, so I started stapling it to trees,” she said. “And it suddenly became more accessible to people all the time.”

On what she calls the "Tree of Life," Russia Reilly staples Narcan, fentanyl test strips and condoms on Wall Street. (Photo by Vani Sanganeria)

Reilly, who uses herself, joined Skid Row-based advocacy group Sidewalk Project to learn the blueprint to harm reduction — practical strategies for keeping drug users alive and healthy without punishment or coerced abstinence, a step away from the state’s court-ordered treatment program. Both Reilly and Swan, for example, pass out clean syringes and pipes on the street, so community members don’t catch viruses like hepatitis or HIV during their use.

“Drug users are a large section of society that’s been seen as disposable,” Swan said. “People are using those substances, and they deserve to be included in outreach and made to feel like they can be as healthy as possible.”

Since her first stint with a stapler, Reilly has reversed over a 100 overdoses herself, she said. Those that pick up Narcan kits from “Tree of Life,” which she named her outreach, have likely reversed over a 1,000, she said.

“It got to the point where paramedics would cross the street and ask me for Narcan, because they ran out,” Reilly said. “Where does that happen?”

Reilly has 106 stitches on her ankle and often pushes through debilitating pain during her daily outreach. She recently started ketamine infusions to alleviate trauma episodes that left her bedridden, because there’s no one else — not the paramedics, and not the city — willing to breathe for people when they die, she said.

“I have more courage to fight for others than I do for myself,” she said.

An unhoused resident asks Reilly if she has any fentanyl test strips. (Photo by Vani Sanganeria)

As Reilly completes her rounds on Skid Row, pulling a small wagon stocked with Narcan boxes, fresh socks, clean pipes and new syringes to staple to trees and pass out to residents — assisted by her dog Ruby Reversal — she turns back on the corner of Crocker and Sixth Street.

There, she passes the baton to Quincy Brown. He’s better known as Pastor Blue, co-founder of Blue Hollywood Street Sanctuary, a harm reduction space where residents can hang out, play dominoes and safely smoke high-risk drugs like heroin and meth in a supervised space.

“I have never experienced death on the volume that I have experienced here in Skid Row — for the lack of any proactive solutions in place,” Brown said. “Our mission is to save lives, point blank period.”

Brown, who has lived out of his van for the last three years, pulled up from Hollywood to Skid Row five years ago to serve sandwiches to the unhoused community. Since then, underneath three blue canopies and a dozen world flags draped around them (a “symbol of unity,” Brown said), Brown has treated around 30 overdoses and had no fatalities.

Brown has no formal training in overdose prevention. Through the folks at Sidewalk Project and LACAN, where he now sources his Narcan from, he learned to administer the spray, perform CPR and monitor the behavioral signs of an overdose.

“If we didn't have organizations that are able to share these tools to help save lives, that 30 that I’m bragging on — I know fatalities would be in that number,” Brown said.

Originally from Atlanta, Brown left behind a million dollar machine selling drugs and fighting pitbulls in his mid-20s to join the church ministry. In 2005, he was ordained as a pastor, and in 2018, he heeded a calling to move to L.A.

“I know without a shadow of a doubt that it was a predestined will for [Blue Hollywood Street Sanctuary] to come,” Brown said.

While Blue Hollywood Street Sanctuary is an emergency response to the moment’s out-of-control fentanyl crisis, it is also a political response, by virtue of its existence, to a decades-long war on drugs.

Despite over 120 successful overdose prevention centers worldwide, U.S. federal law still bans safe consumption sites based on a 1986 "crack house statute," which prohibits individuals or organizations from operating a space for the purpose of using controlled substances. In November 2021, New York became the first state to legalize safe consumption sites. Since then, the only two legal sites in the country have been utilized 130,000 times, and staff have intervened in nearly 1,500 overdoses with no deaths.

Last summer, Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would pilot safe consumption sites in L.A., Oakland and San Francisco. He said the unlimited number of sites that the bill would authorize could “worsen drug consumption challenges” without a more comprehensive plan.

“Addiction is a disability, and it should be treated as such,” Dogon said. “If a person gets cancer, do you send them to the radiation room or to Folsom State Prison?”

In the late 70s, Dogon worked as a shoe shiner at one of L.A.’s old Greyhound bus stations. On his morning commute to work, he’d pass by encampments of unhoused veterans, most of whom were white and alcoholics, not far from where the sanctuary is stationed today. LAPD even had a drop-in center on Crocker, he said, where intoxicated residents could lay down to recuperate.

“They’d have a sober-up day, where there’d be a nurse to check your blood and everything,” Dogon said. “And when [the unhoused] sobered up, LAPD would let them go.”

Dogon attributes the city’s lack of harm reduction to a clear racial discrepancy in the substance’s use. According to the L.A. County Department of Public Health, fentanyl overdose death rates are much higher among Black people than any other race or ethnicity groups. Black people account for 8% of L.A. County’s population and disproportionately accounted for 21% of fentanyl overdose deaths in 2022.

Police has also disproportionately arrested Black people for drug possession than any other race or ethnicity group, according to an investigation into the last 30 years of drug arrests by the USA Today Network.

Still, Brown feels optimistic about a path to legalizing Skid Row’s only safe consumption site. Many residents, and some public responders, have come around to seeing the site as an essential service for the community.

“LAPD knows people come here and smoke, and they patrol in peace. [Los Angeles] Fire Department has come here on numerous calls to help save lives,” Brown said. “When California follows suit with legalizing safe consumption sites, we’ll be first in line.”

Right now, Blue Hollywood Street Sanctuary is nowhere on the books. It doesn’t have a 501(c)(3) nonprofit status or an official website, and Brown doesn’t solicit donations from outsiders. But, in mutual aid, legitimacy is not the point.

“I want the community to know that this is solid, this is real,” Brown said. “With or without the papers, it's about saving lives.”

Despite scarce state support, Skid Row’s network of mutual care relies on pooled resources and a collective hope that something greater is to come.

“I feel more community on Skid Row than anywhere else I’ve lived,” Swan said.“If given ample resources, the community can absolutely take care of themselves.”