The body lay unsecured for more than 10 hours while burglars twice picked through the dead man\u2019s room.<\/p>\n
So goes the the story circulating among veterans living on the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs campus in West Los Angeles. <\/p>\n
Residents say their reports of the theft \u2014 like their complaints of other crimes \u2014 go unheeded because their 2-year-old apartment building lies in a law enforcement no man\u2019s land where no police agency has the power or resources to investigate and prosecute run-of-the-mill crime.<\/p>\n
The unincorporated island is surrounded by the city of Los Angeles but outside the jurisdiction of the Los Angeles Police Department. Technically, the Los Angeles County Sheriff\u2019s Department polices its 388 acres, but the distant West Hollywood Station rarely responds to calls, if ever. The VA Police Department, which is mostly tasked with providing security at the hospital, is prohibited by an obscure federal rule from being \u201cdeputized\u201d to enforce state law. <\/p>\n
The need for policing is becoming more acute as residences for hundreds of disabled veterans have been built in recent years and the campus population grows from the hundreds to potentially thousands under President Trump\u2019s 2025 executive order to create a National Center for Warrior Independence<\/a> with housing for 6,000 veterans.<\/p>\n In the absence of an official investigation, the incident last September has been magnified, and perhaps embellished, in the minds of veterans living on the campus, a community defined by the vulnerability of physical disability, substance use and trauma.<\/p>\n \u201cEvery time we turn around we\u2019re doing an incident report,\u201d said Tammy Chelossi, a resident service coordinator for the company that manages the building that opened in 2024. <\/p>\n \u201cWe call the VAPD all the time,\u201d Chelossi said. \u201cThey don\u2019t do anything. They come out [but say], \u2018Our hands are tied.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n In public forums and interviews, veterans living on the campus have spoken of a culture of impunity. Among their complaints: non-residents coming and going to buy and sell drugs, prostitution, crime brought on campus from outside and unruly behavior by residents.<\/p>\n In May, a man pushed a wounded and visibly bleeding woman in a wheelchair out of the entrance of a building. In one version circulating, attributed to a source in the VA police, she had already been stabbed by the time she arrived at the VA. Chelossi said she was disappointed the police didn\u2019t consider the man who pushed her out a suspect.<\/p>\n \u201cThey shook his hand and said, \u2018Good job taking her outside to the ambulance,\u2019\u201d she said.<\/p>\n The VA Police did not respond to a call requesting reports of the two incidents.<\/p>\n Residents who spoke to The Times on condition of anonymity and veteran advocates say the lack of information on reported crimes and follow-up investigations feeds their anxiety about safety. <\/p>\n Although federal law requires the VA to publish statistics on arrests, citations, investigations and prosecutions by local agencies, the campus police website<\/a> has no link to crime data. The VA responded to a Freedom of Information Act request from a campus advocate for data with a demand for $20,004.36 in programming costs to retrieve the data.<\/p>\n The Times filed a Freedom of Information Act request on June 2 for VA Police records of the hallway death and the stabbing. The VA acknowledged the request but has not turned over any materials.<\/p>\n For the decades after the historic Old Soldiers\u2019 Home was shut down in the 1970s, the two-thirds of the campus north of Wilshire Boulevard remained a collection of vacant deteriorating buildings<\/a> and residential programs for physical and mental health recovery. VA Police focused on the third of the campus south of Wilshire Boulevard where the VA Medical Center rose.<\/p>\n VA Police enforcement was long concentrated on the southern third of the campus south of Wilshire Boulevard, where the VA Medical Center stands. For decades, the north campus had no resident population, remaining a collection of vacant deteriorating buildings<\/a> and residential programs for physical and mental health recovery. That changed in recent years as legal actions forced the agency to begin repopulating the north campus. <\/p>\n A 2011 lawsuit<\/a> filed by disabled veterans began a slow but now accelerating movement by the VA to restore the north campus as a veteran community. First came a federal court settlement requiring 1,200 units to be built (about half are now completed), then a second lawsuit<\/a> resulted in an order to add 2,500 more, a ruling now under appeal<\/a>. Last May, President Trump issued an order to build housing for 6,000.<\/p>\n The jurisdictional conundrum grew only worse as the VA issued 99-year leases to local developers to build those initial 1,200 units. <\/p>\n \u201cAs the VA leases the buildings to an entity, that\u2019s no longer considered federal property,\u201d said Jim Zenner, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Military and Veterans Affairs<\/a>. \u201cSo they\u2019re not able to enforce laws in those buildings.\u201d<\/p>\n Zenner said the VAPD told him they were unable even to secure the dead body last September because they didn\u2019t have jurisdiction. <\/p>\n \u201cAnd so they had to literally wait for the Sheriff\u2019s Department to get here and the Medical Examiner to get here,\u201d Zenner said. \u201cThey didn\u2019t get here for 10 or 11 hours.\u201d<\/p>\n He\u2019s not sure their interpretation of the law is right.<\/p>\n \u201cI get mixed messages like, \u2018We can and we can\u2019t because of the jurisdictional thing,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201c\u2018Maybe we can, maybe we can\u2019t\u2019 is not allowing the VAPD to do what they need to do.\u201d<\/p>\n The future north campus remains a contest of differing visions. The housing now existing and being built is subsidized for the homeless and disabled. Some veteran groups are pushing for more diversity with housing for students, VA staff and veterans working off campus. Trump\u2019s order calls for veterans from around the country to come for rehabilitative services.<\/p>\n Whatever ultimately develops, there is little disagreement that future campus security will depend on expanded law enforcement and clearer lines of authority. <\/p>\n During a congressional hearing in May<\/a> on Trump\u2019s order, VA officials acknowledged a public safety problem and said they are taking steps to manage it.<\/p>\n \u201cWe want to make sure that veterans are living in a safe, drug free environment where they can thrive, and, as you all are aware, that\u2019s not happening,\u201d senior counselor to the secretary Danielle Ranyan testified. \u201cWe\u2019re taking care of that. But this didn\u2019t just happen overnight, and it didn\u2019t happen on President Trump\u2019s watch.\u201d<\/p>\n Under Secretary for Health John J. Bartrum testified that the VA police had been beefed up from the 50s and 60s last year to over 80 and will eventually reach 160 \u2014 a staff responsible not only for the campus, but for other facilities in the VA\u2019s five-county Greater Los Angeles catchment area.<\/p>\n \u201cSecurity is job one,\u201d Bartrum said. \u201cThe veterans have to feel secure on the campus.\u201d<\/p>\n As a stopgap, the VA brought on a private security firm in June to provide uniformed 24-hour \u201cobserve and report\u201d sentry posts and roving patrols.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m happy to see they\u2019re at least doing something,\u201d said Rob Reynolds, an Iraq war veteran who assists veterans to obtain services and housing. \u201cI would say it makes it feel safer.\u201d<\/p>\n But Reynolds and others, see security as a systemic problem.<\/p>\n Retired VA police chief Dave Weiner, who now owns a training business, was skeptical that the VAPD could sustain the necessary strength without increasing its pay scale.<\/p>\n New recruits must work years to equal starting pay at nearby departments, and retirement benefits only kick in after 30 years, compared to 20 years elsewhere, Weiner said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe pay has never been on par,\u201d he said. \u201cIt makes it very difficult for officers to live in the LA area. They have to live in Riverside or San Bernardino.\u201d<\/p>\n (On Thursday, the VA announced a package of national reforms<\/a> of the VA police force including an increase of entry-level pay. Weiner said the modest increase \u201cwould not do much to change the competitive picture here in LA.\u201d)<\/p>\n Weiner thinks one administrative change that could make VAPD more effective would be to revise the clause in VA Directive 0730<\/a> that prohibits the agency from being deputized or appointed as special officers \u201cfor the purpose of enforcing state laws and local ordinances on VA property.\u201d <\/p>\n That could clear up confusion of whether VAPD can respond to and investigate reported crime on the leased properties.<\/p>\n It would also clear officers to make mental health holds under California\u2019s Welfare and Institutions Code, both on the campus and across the region. VA police often respond to veterans in crisis seeking to get them into care but have no power, Weiner said.<\/p>\n \u201cThat is a tool for officers to utilize to get people into a system of care,\u201d Weiner said. Currently, \u201ceither we have to leave people in crisis or we have to incarcerate them. That\u2019s not a good situation.\u201d<\/p>\n