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      L.A. Skyscrapers Covered in Graffiti

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      The graffiti has brought attention to the empty buildings, which have been abandoned since 2019 and are across from the venue where the Grammy Awards will be hosted on Sunday.More than a dozen people broke into the Oceanwide Plaza skyscraper development in Los Angeles, covering the windows of the glossy, unfinished buildings with spray-painted colorful block letters that read, “Crave,” “Dank” and “Amen,” among other phrases, the police said on Thursday.The spray-painters made their way up multiple floors in the 40-story buildings, which were once set to be the tallest residential towers in the city, according to Forbes. It was not immediately clear how long the people were inside the buildings, or how they had entered, but the police were called about the graffiti on Tuesday.The buildings, which have been unoccupied since 2019, are across from Crypto.com Arena at L.A. Live, where the Grammy Awards are set to take place on Sunday.The Oceanwide Plaza project was intended to be a mixed-use space with retail shops, a hotel and luxury apartments, but the project was halted in 2019 after the developer, Oceanwide Holdings, ran out of money, The Los Angeles Times reported.The graffiti has only emphasized the unfinished buildings, which critics say are an eyesore and a source of frustration for many residents.Kevin de León, a member of the Los Angeles City Council, called on the owners of the buildings to do something about the vacant property.“The city of L.A. has already served the property owners in order to comply with a deadline instructing them to fulfill their responsibilities,” Mr. de León said during a news conference on Friday morning. He could not be reached for comment on Saturday.Stefano Bloch, a cultural geographer, a professor at the University of Arizona and a former graffiti artist, said the graffiti had helped draw attention to the incomplete project, while noting that the intruders did still break the law.“This is people taking it upon themselves to use a space that in many ways was abandoned by people with money and power,” said Mr. Bloch, who is a Los Angeles native.The police said that more than a dozen people had been involved in the graffiti incident. All but two had fled before officers arrived, the police said, adding that two men were cited for trespassing and then released.Those responsible for the graffiti might not face the same harsh legal repercussions as in the past, Mr. Bloch said. Decades ago, graffiti artists faced prison sentences, but now they are more likely to be fined for vandalism and trespassing, he said.“In the 1990s, there was this moral panic about graffiti being linked to gangs, but times have changed,” Mr. Bloch said. “Even if people don’t like it — and they’re entitled not to like it — they understand that graffiti is not connected to violence.” More

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      Child’s Remains Found Encased in Concrete, Prompting Search for 2 Missing Children

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      The police declined to say what the connection was between the child whose remains were found in a storage unit in Pueblo, Colo., and two children last seen in 2018.The remains of a child were found encased in concrete in a storage unit in Pueblo, Colo., last month, and the police said Thursday that they were searching for two other children last seen in 2018 as part of the homicide investigation.The grisly discovery was made on the morning of Jan. 10 at a storage facility downtown, the Pueblo Police Department said in a statement.The police said they were called to the facility, about 45 miles south of Colorado Springs, after a person found a metal container “filled with hardened concrete.” A search of the container revealed the remains of a child.The authorities said they were now searching for two children, Jesus and Yesenia Dominguez, who were last seen more than five years ago. Jesus would now be about 10 years old, and Yesenia would be 9, the police said. They would not provide information about how the two children might be connected to the child whose remains were found or to the homicide investigation.The Pueblo County Coroner will identify the remains, the police said. The coroner’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday afternoon.Sgt. Franklyn Ortega of the Pueblo Police Department said by phone that while no report had been filed regarding the two missing children, the police had been called on to make welfare checks for the children but could never locate them.When asked why the police had not then inquired further about the children’s whereabouts, Sergeant Ortega said that there were “custody issues” regarding the children, and that he could not provide further details. He said that the police had questioned two people of interest regarding the homicide, but that they did not have anyone in custody. More

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      Pieces of Jackie Robinson Statue Are Found Burning in Kansas Park

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      The life-size bronze tribute to the legendary baseball player who broke the color barrier was stolen from a different park last week. What was left of it “is beyond repair,” officials said.Parts of a life-size bronze statue that celebrated the legacy of the legendary baseball player and civil rights figure Jackie Robinson were found dismantled and burned early Tuesday after it had been stolen from a Kansas park last week, the authorities said.Remnants of the statue were found after a city worker reported a fire in a trash can at Garvey Park in Wichita at around 8:38 a.m., Andrew Ford, a police spokesman, said in a statement.The Wichita Fire Department responded and, “while assessing the damage, they found pieces of the Jackie Robinson statue that had been stolen.”The Fire Department immediately notified the police, who collected the pieces at the scene, he said, noting that “unfortunately, the statue is beyond repair.”The police are continuing to investigate, Mr. Ford said, and they have “already interviewed over 100 people.” The department is also looking into how the statue was dismantled and how the pieces ended up at the location of the fire. Mr. Ford had previously said that the motive for the theft of the monument was not known.Additionally, the Fire Department’s arson investigators are looking into the trash can fire, he said. In a statement posted on Facebook, the department said that “additional parts of the statue have not been recovered at this time.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Woman Charged With Hiding Corpse Over Body Parts Found in Refrigerator

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      Heather Stines told the police the head, arms and legs belonged to a man her husband had killed in September, according to court records.A Brooklyn woman was charged this week with concealing a human corpse after the police found a head and other body parts in garbage bags stuffed in her refrigerator, officials said on Friday.The remains were discovered by officers responding to a tip from someone who said they had seen what looked like a human head in a black bag in the refrigerator at the apartment of the woman, Heather Stines, according to court records.Ms. Stines was alone at the apartment, in the East Flatbush section, when the officers arrived just after 7 p.m. Monday, court records show. The refrigerator was taped shut at the time, Joseph E. Kenny, the Police Department’s chief of detectives, told reporters on Tuesday. Ms. Stines pleaded with the officers not to open it, according to a police report.After the grisly discovery, Ms. Stines told the officers the body parts had been in the refrigerator for several months and belonged to a man her husband had killed during a dispute in September, according to the police report. She told the police she had not witnessed the killing, the report says.The police identified the victim as Kawsheen Gelzer, records show. The New York City medical examiner’s office had not announced a cause of death as of Friday.Ms. Stines was evaluated at a hospital after being taken into custody on Monday, Chief Kenny said. She had open warrants related to shoplifting and bail-jumping charges, court records show. She pleaded not guilty at an arraignment in Brooklyn Criminal Court late Thursday night, according to a spokeswoman for the Brooklyn district attorney’s office.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      In Tense Election Year, Public Officials Face Climate of Intimidation

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      Colorado and Maine, which blocked former President Donald J. Trump from the ballot, have grappled with the harassment of officials.The caller had tipped off the authorities in Maine on Friday night: He told them that he had broken into the home of Shenna Bellows, the state’s top election official, a Democrat who one night earlier had disqualified former President Donald J. Trump from the primary ballot because of his actions during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.No one was home when officers arrived, according to Maine State Police, who labeled the false report as a “swatting” attempt, one intended to draw a heavily armed law enforcement response.In the days since, more bogus calls and threats have rolled in across the country. On Wednesday, state capitol buildings in Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi and Montana were evacuated or placed on lockdown after the authorities said they had received bomb threats that they described as false and nonspecific. The F.B.I. said it had no information to suggest any threats were credible.The incidents intensified a climate of intimidation and the harassment of public officials, including those responsible for overseeing ballot access and voting. Since 2020, election officials have confronted rising threats and difficult working conditions, aggravated by rampant conspiracy theories about fraud. The episodes suggested 2024 would be another heated election year.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Los Angeles D.A. Gascón Is Running for Re-election in a Very Different Climate

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      George Gascón is running for re-election in a very different climate, where concerns about crime have overtaken demands for equity and accountability.Three years ago, George Gascón rode a wave of collective outrage following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis to become district attorney of Los Angeles by promising to make the criminal justice system fairer and, most crucially, to rein in the police.Now, to win re-election and stay in office, Mr. Gascón will need to tap into a different type of emotion: fear — in particular a perception that Los Angeles is less safe and that his policies as district attorney have made it so, an argument advanced by many of his challengers but largely unsupported by data. “I think that this race now for 2024 has gone back to, for a lot of people, law and order, lock ’em up,” Mr. Gascón said in an interview. Mr. Gascón’s victory in 2020 was one of the most consequential electoral outcomes from the movement for social justice and police accountability galvanized by Mr. Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer. And for the national movement that in recent years has helped elect progressive prosecutors in jurisdictions across the country, the victory in Los Angeles was momentous: The county has the nation’s largest prosecution office, the largest jail system and a long history of police abuses.But Mr. Gascón, 69, is running for re-election in a very different political climate. Demands for equity and accountability in policing and prosecution have been overtaken by concerns about what to do about crime — the question that has dominated the district’s attorney’s race in Los Angeles. “I think that this race now for 2024 has gone back to, for a lot of people, law and order, lock ‘em up,” Mr. Gascón said in an interview. Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesThe 11 candidates challenging Mr. Gascón include judges, attorneys in his own office and former federal prosecutors, nearly all to varying degrees running to the right of Mr. Gascón.“Yes, crime is up,” Jonathan McKinney, a prosecutor in Mr. Gascón’s office who is among the challengers, told the crowd at a debate this fall hosted by the Santa Monica Democratic Club. “That’s why you’re all here tonight.” The first round of the election is in March, and if no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote — unlikely given the low numbers each candidate is currently polling at — the top two candidates will face each other in November.Even as Mr. Gascón’s opponents paint a picture of out-of-control crime, the data indicates that Los Angeles, like much of the country, is becoming safer in crucial categories of violent crime, such as murder, as the social and economic disruptions of pandemic recede. In the city of Los Angeles, which accounts for about 40 percent of the population of Los Angeles County, most violent crimes are down substantially compared to 2021, Mr. Gascón’s first year in office. Murder, often a proxy for people’s wider views on crime, is down about 18 percent, while rape is down close to 19 percent. But property crimes, including burglary and car theft, have risen, the only crime tracked by the F.B.I. that has gone up in 2023.Back in 2020, progressives like Mr. Gascón often tried to use data to persuade voters concerned about crime that their feelings didn’t always match reality.This time, he is taking a different approach.“We can talk to people about data, and that doesn’t really resonate,” he said. “So I gave up on talking about data. I’ll throw it in there to sprinkle, but I immediately try to connect with people on a human level. Acknowledging their feelings, because their feelings are real.”Three years ago, Mr. Gascón rode a wave of outrage following the murder of George Floyd to become district attorney by promising to make the criminal justice system fairer.Bryan Denton for The New York TimesMr. Gascón is facing opposition not only from candidates to the right of him, accusing him of making Los Angeles less safe and failing to take a tough stance on crime, but also from liberal-minded voters who are either worried about crime or have become disenchanted by his policies. Growing up in Los Angeles, Mauricio Caamal says he was routinely harassed by the police. He was also a victim of crime when he was 4 years old, and his father was robbed and murdered in downtown L.A.When 2020 came around, and the nation convulsed with protests over the murder of Mr. Floyd, Mr. Caamal was drawn to the streets over a police killing closer to home: A sheriff’s deputy in Los Angeles shot Andres Guardado, an 18-year-old security guard, five times in the back, killing him. Mr. Caamal, 32, embraced the calls to defund the police, and supported Mr. Gascón. Mr. Gascón first rose to prominence as an assistant police chief in Los Angeles in the mid-2000s. More than a decade later, after serving as the police chief in San Francisco and then winning two terms as that city’s district attorney, he returned to Los Angeles to run for district attorney there. In office, Mr. Gascón has pursued dozens of cases against police officers, a rarity under his predecessor. But earlier this year, after a long investigation, he declined to bring charges against the deputy in Mr. Guardado’s case, determining there was “insufficient evidence” to support charges.“I think that, on its own, should be enough for me not to vote for him again,” Mr. Caamal said.Mr. Gascón beat back an early effort to recall him from office, which was supported by some prosecutors who work for him, after his opponents failed to secure enough signatures to force a new election. That allowed him to avoid the fate of his counterpart in San Francisco, Chesa Boudin, who was recalled last year amid an acrimonious debate in that city about property crimes and visible squalor in the streets.At a meeting of the San Fernando Valley Young Democrats, Mr. Gascón, right, talks with Walter García, a candidate for the California State Assembly,Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesTo win another term, Mr. Gascón says he must hone his message to connect reforms with public safety by arguing, for instance, that second chances and more lenient sentences reduce recidivism and improve safety over the long haul.“You cannot really have sustainable public safety if you don’t address the inequities in the system,” he said. He added, “So it’s a much more nuanced campaign in the sense that we have to, even to get to the same place, we have to go through a process of explaining a lot more” the connection between reform and public safety.“I feel less safe since he’s been there,” said Karim Bailey, 42, a middle-school teacher in South Los Angeles whose classroom discussions often center on neighborhood crime and policing. He has had his car’s catalytic converter stolen twice.Mr. Bailey said he couldn’t recall which candidate he voted for in 2020 but that he would not be supporting Mr. Gascón this time.“A lot of the cases that I’ve seen that have involved him, it just seems like he puts the interest of the criminal over the interest of the general public,” he said.In 2020, Maria-Isabel Rutledge knocked on doors for Mr. Gascón’s campaign. She is supporting him again this time around, arguing that he needs more time to carry out reforms she believes are necessary to make the system fairer.Ms. Rutledge, 70, is a retired teacher’s assistant and lives in South Central Los Angeles, the epicenter of the uprising in 1992 after the acquittal of several police officers in the beating of Rodney King.“I know that, if he continues in the same trajectory, that he’s going, hopefully, to be able to make change,” she said of Mr. Gascón. “It’s difficult and challenging to reform the dated institutionally racist system,” she said. “The system of racism is very, very embedded in the United States, but we have to keep going in the right direction, we have to keep chipping at it a little bit at a time.” More

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      Trump Pushes Pro-Police Agenda, With a Big Exception: His Criminal Cases

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      Long a loud supporter of the police, Donald Trump is floating new protections for them. At the same time, he is raging against law enforcement officials who have brought felony charges against him.Former President Donald J. Trump has long spoken admiringly of police officers who use aggressive force on the job. For years, he has pointed to his unwavering support for local law enforcement, presenting himself as a “law and order” candidate who would help the police tackle violent crime.But now, as Mr. Trump campaigns again for the White House, he has added a new promise to his speeches on the trail: to “indemnify” police officers and protect them from the financial consequences of lawsuits accusing them of misconduct.“We are going to indemnify them, so they don’t lose their wife, their family, their pension and their job,” he said during a speech this month in New York.Legal experts say Mr. Trump’s proposal — which he first raised in an interview in October and has floated five times this month — would have little effect and would largely enforce the status quo. Police officers in most jurisdictions are already protected from being held financially responsible for potential wrongdoing. They also benefit from a legal doctrine that can shield officers accused of misconduct from lawsuits seeking damages.Since entering politics, Mr. Trump has often pledged his allegiance to the police as a way to attack Democrats, accusing them of being more concerned about progressive ideas than public safety. For decades, he has batted down calls for police reform, arguing that such changes hinder officers from using aggressive crime-fighting tactics.His promise to indemnify officers also reveals a contradiction at the heart of his current campaign. Even as he proclaims his steadfast support for rank-and-file officers, he has been raging against federal and state law enforcement officials who have led the four criminal cases against him, resulting in 91 felony charges.Two Capitol Police officers who were injured during the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, have sued him, accusing him of inciting violence, and Colorado’s Supreme Court ruled this week that there was enough evidence that he engaged in insurrection to disqualify him from holding office again.Those realities have not stopped Mr. Trump from courting the police, meeting with law enforcement groups on the trail and posing with officers who are part of his motorcade. He and his aides often post photos and videos of the interactions on social media.Supporters of Mr. Trump at an event in Edinburg, Texas, last month honoring service members who were working on the border over the Thanksgiving holiday.Meridith Kohut for The New York TimesDuring a speech on Sunday in Nevada, he proudly told the crowd that he “shook so many hands of policemen” before arriving. Later, when he promised to indemnify officers, he called them out: “All those policemen that were shaking my hand back there, you better be listening.”Mr. Trump frequently criticizes Democrats as too critical of law enforcement. He conjures up images of big cities as lawless and unsafe, laying the blame on liberal politicians whose calls for police reform, he says, have deterred officers from carrying out their duties. The police, he has argued in recent speeches, are being “destroyed by the radical left.”“They’re afraid to do anything,” Mr. Trump said recently. “They’re forced to avoid any conflict, they’re forced to let a lot of bad people do what they want to do, because they’re under a threat of losing their pension, losing their house, losing their families.”But legal scholars who have studied the issue say that police officers are already largely shielded from personal financial consequences when it comes to lawsuits brought against them.“The idea that officers need indemnification is frankly absurd,” said Alexander A. Reinert, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York. “Because they already have it.”Indemnification, in a legal context, refers to a process by which one party agrees to cover the liability of another party, essentially agreeing to pay for any wrongdoing by the second party.In the case of policing, many state and local governments have laws in which they agree to indemnify police officers for lawsuits. In other cases, police unions obtain indemnification agreements as part of their bargaining.Joanna Schwartz, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, published a study in 2014 looking at lawsuits against the police in 81 jurisdictions over six years. She found that 99.98 percent of the money paid to plaintiffs in these cases came from local governments or their insurance companies — not from the officers themselves.“Officers virtually never pay anything in settlements or judgments entered against them,” Ms. Schwartz said in an interview.Mr. Trump, as is often the case, has been vague about the specifics of his plan, making it difficult to know whether such a move would be feasible, though experts say that enacting it might require legislation from Congress rather than an executive order.In Nevada on Sunday, Mr. Trump said the government would pay the police “for their costs, for their lawyers.” Earlier this year, he said he would protect states and cities from being sued, a remark that suggested a broad expansion of existing legal protections for police officers accused of violating constitutional rights.Under a legal doctrine known as qualified immunity, someone who accuses the police of using excessive force or discriminating against them must not only show that misconduct occurred, but also generally be able to cite a closely similar previous case in which officers were held responsible.Critics say that qualified immunity offers blanket protections that prevent officers from being held accountable. Policing groups say these protections are necessary to keep officers from being so worried about personal liability that they fail to do their jobs.Mr. Trump has long expressed staunch support for qualified immunity for police officers, particularly during his 2020 re-election bid, when the nation was racked with protests after the murder of George Floyd. Several major police unions endorsed him during that campaign.A rally for Mr. Trump in Latrobe, Pa., during his re-election bid in 2020, when protests over George Floyd’s murder made policing a front-and-center political issue. Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesIn 1989, well before he entered the political arena, Mr. Trump bought advertising in New York claiming that concern over civil liberties had hampered the police and led to a rise in crime.In a newspaper ad, he wrote of being young and watching “two young bullies” harass a waitress in a diner. “Two cops rushed in, lifted up the thugs and threw them out the door, warning them never to cause trouble again,” he wrote. In 2017, when Mr. Trump was president, he urged the police not to be “too nice,” telling them not to protect the heads of people suspected of being gang members when putting them into squad cars. Law enforcement authorities across the country criticized those remarks.In 2020, as protests rocked Minneapolis, Mr. Trump called the demonstrators “thugs” on social media and wrote, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” The post was criticized for encouraging violence against protesters. Mr. Trump later said he meant to convey that looting generally led to violence, an interpretation that ignored the phrase’s racist history.As the protests spread across the country, he threatened to send the military to cities and states if he believed their leaders were failing to maintain order.This year, at a gathering of Republicans in California, Mr. Trump said he thought shoplifters should be shot on their way out of stores. “If you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store,” he said, to which the crowd responded with uproarious applause.Then, after calling for the extrajudicial shootings of petty criminals, Mr. Trump returned to a familiar message.“You know, our law enforcement is great,” he said. “But they’re not allowed to do anything.”Kitty Bennett More

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      Defining Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism

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      More from our inbox:Just Keeping Trump From the White House Won’t Save DemocracyPolicies on Curbing Drug AddictionLights Dim Off BroadwayAsia’s Disappearing SeaPartidarios de Israel en Los Ángeles, el mes pasadoLauren Justice para The New York TimesTo the Editor: Re “Is Anti-Zionism Antisemitism, by Definition?” (front page, Dec. 12):What is Zionism? To me, being a Zionist in 2023 means that I accept the right and the necessity of the survival of the Jewish people and the existence of a Jewish state that ensures their survival.Anything that undermines or threatens Israel’s survival also undermines or threatens the existence of the Jewish people and is, ipso facto, antisemitic.Philip B. BergerTorontoTo the Editor:I am a Jew by culture and ancestry, albeit a secular one. I abhor contemporary violence by both Hamas and Israel. Historically, however, I have found that in recent years, Israel’s aggressive behavior has been the more objectionable, and Israel seems more determined to demoralize and destroy the Gaza population than to surgically remove Hamas.In the 1950s, when I was a young child and Israel a struggling young state, I paid small sums to buy leaves that I pasted on a picture of a tree until I had bought enough for a tree to be planted in Israel in honor of my grandmother. My father bought Israel bonds — hardly the best monetary investment — in my name and those of my siblings. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, when I had my own children and when Israel had become an expansionist power, I asked him to stop.Although a Jew, I am emphatically not a Zionist, and I resent and fear the conflation of the two.Mark CohenPlattsburgh, N.Y.The writer is distinguished emeritus professor of anthropology at the State University of New York.To the Editor:Jonathan Weisman describes radically different interpretations of Zionism as, alternately, a movement ensuring Jewish sovereignty and safety, or an oppressive colonialism. What is often lost in the debate is the historic diversity among many Zionisms (plural), which continue to struggle with one another for primacy today.One version of Zionism is expansionist, deeply nationalistic and largely unconcerned about the human rights of non-Jews, while another version on the Zionist spectrum is profoundly humanist at its core and envisions an equitable coexistence between Jews and Palestinians.Supporting a Zionism that promotes pluralism and shared society is the only vision for a better future for these two peoples whose fates are intertwined.Andrew VogelNewton, Mass.The writer is the senior rabbi at Temple Sinai in Brookline, Mass.Just Keeping Trump From the White House Won’t Save Democracy Mark Peterson/Redux, for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “The Resolute Liz Cheney,” by Katherine Miller (Opinion, Dec. 10):While I appreciate former Representative Liz Cheney’s relentless opposition to Donald Trump because of the danger he poses to the nation, keeping him out of the White House won’t alone save democracy. We also desperately need to stop Ms. Cheney’s fellow Republicans from undermining elections in their pursuit of permanent political power.Republicans have used extreme means to draw House districts in their favor and refused to join Democrats to stop those gerrymanders even though they deprive voters of fair representation and promote polarization by increasing the number of safe seats.Almost all Republicans voted against restoring provisions of the Voting Rights Act that would help assure protection against racial discrimination. They opposed measures to enact basic ballot access standards, instead allowing states to impose restrictive rules and locate polling places to make it harder for groups they don’t favor to vote.And they refused to support bills to stop the pernicious influence of big donors, opposing even basic disclosure rules to stop secret “dark” money from warping our political priorities.Standing up to Mr. Trump does little good if we allow Republicans to destroy our democracy by other means. Voters need to elect people to protect free and fair elections before Republicans succeed in rigging them in their favor. Otherwise, we will have rule by a party instead of rule by the people, and our experiment in self-governance will be at an end.Daniel A. SimonNew York Policies on Curbing Drug AddictionPolice respond to a man who died of a suspected overdose in downtown Portland in July.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesTo the Editor: Re “Rethinking Drug Policies in an Ailing Portland” (front page, Dec. 12):As a law enforcement veteran, I believe that the police have an important role in supporting community safety. But policymakers can’t keep relying on the police as a Band-Aid to every problem. We cannot arrest our way out of addiction. And increasing criminalization to solve public drug use, as some suggest in the article, won’t work.I worked and supervised police narcotics and gang units. Eventually, I saw that the laws I was charged with enforcing didn’t make my neighbors safer. No matter how much we ramped up enforcement or how many people we arrested, it didn’t stop the flow of drugs into our community or prevent people from dying.For over 50 years, the United States has prioritized criminalization as a response to drug use, yet stronger drugs like fentanyl have emerged, and our country is facing a health crisis with record-setting overdose deaths.To make any progress toward curbing addiction, we need to increase access to the addiction services and support people need: treatment, overdose prevention centers, outreach teams to connect people to care, and housing. More criminalization is a false promise of change.Diane M. GoldsteinLas VegasThe writer, a retired police lieutenant, is the executive director of the Law Enforcement Action Partnership.Lights Dim Off BroadwaySignature Theater, an important Off Broadway institution, had no shows this fall.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTo the Editor: Re “Off Broadway, Vital to Theater Scene, Struggles” (front page, Dec. 8):It saddens me to read about the struggles and closures of our city’s intimate theaters. These are the institutions that nurture new work. Losing them darkens our future.During this crisis, I hope artistic directors will remember that it doesn’t have to cost a fortune to put on a play. Even a bare-bones staging gives us something Netflix never can: a story shared by strangers in person in real time.Rob AckermanNew YorkThe author is a playwright.Asia’s Disappearing SeaRusting boats in the sand in Muynak, Uzbekistan. Muynak was once a thriving port on the Aral Sea but is now a desert town since the sea disappeared.Carolyn Drake/MagnumTo the Editor: Re “A Giant Inland Sea Is Now a Desert, and a Warning for Humanity,” by Jacob Dreyer (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, Nov. 28), about the shrinking Aral Sea in Uzbekistan:Together, we — an archaeologist, a geographer and a historian — have extensive experience in the Aral Sea region. We take exception to Mr. Dreyer’s description of this place as resembling “hell.” Rather than stereotyping the region as a wasteland that people should flee from (Mr. Dreyer stresses his desire to leave the region as quickly as possible), we must recognize the meaning and value that the Aral Sea and its environs still hold for its residents today, and we should center those residents’ desired futures.We also need to consider the Aral Sea region a vital knowledge zone. As we confront shrinking bodies of water in many other regions around the globe, we can learn from the perseverance of Aral Sea residents. If we listen, what lessons can we learn from them as we prepare for future ecological disasters?Elizabeth BriteKate ShieldsSarah CameronDr. Brite is a clinical associate professor at Purdue University, Dr. Shields is an assistant professor at Rhodes College, and Dr. Cameron is an associate professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. More