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By Maya Mackey
Assembly Bill 3206, authored by Tina McKinnor and approved by Governor Gavin Newsom, will permit the sale of alcohol until 4am at Intuit Dome. This bill has raised a few eyebrows, as it doesn’t seem to take public safety into account. The bill has been revised, but currently the bill has 4 criteria. The.sale of liquor must:
• take place in a private area no longer than 2,500 square ft,
• be exclusively sold to members of a private club,
• be sold in a space with a maximum capacity of 100 people,
• take place only after an evening concert, sporting event or other event not open to the public.
Public safety has been a hot topic since the 2020 Uprisings following the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police. People diverged into two groups shortly after–either wanting to divest from oversupplying funds to police departments and or wanting to ‘“reform” police through additional funding for cultural sensitivity training. The divide between people who want police and those who don’t hasn’t healed, but it is imperative that we come to understand that public safety is more than police answering calls of crimes that have already taken place. A huge part of public safety is preventing community harm from taking place.
Inglewood City Councilmember, Alex Padilla claims that there are “checks and balances” that will prevent harm but didn’t disclose what they are. Councilmembers Gloria Gray, Dionne Faulk and Padilla are focused on promoting, in their own words, “the new Inglewood” and said the benefits that the bill will bring to the entertainment district outweighs any potential harm of drunk driving.
Mayor James T. Butts exclaimed “Driving while intoxicated is illegal at any time of the day so this bill isn’t creating any more harm.” The Council professes that nobody wants a DUI, yet the very people that are in power to curb some of this behavior are standing down on making a margin of profit over partnering with safety officers and the community at large to keep our streets safe from recklessness.
This is yet another example of how the city’s council, mayor and commissioners are more concerned with making Inglewood a “city within a city,” competing with the rest of L.A. instead of investing in community safety, investing in and leveraging the small businesses that make the city run and innovating programs and departments that can both sustain the new growth and the residents that make the neighborhood what it is.
