![]() Rajendran filmed what he calls “the game” of Skid Row, played not just by “the drug dealers and people looking to exploit things” but by the public safety officers “who go around looking for dirty homeless people who have crept out and tell them to go back”, in an effort to maintain the rest of downtown’s new “clean, touristy image”. “Driving through for the first time, I was in complete awe,” says the Australian filmmaker, whose shock at seeing such a place in “America, the greatest country in the world” led him to start recording all he saw and heard there. Shanks Rajendran’s documentary Los Scandalous offers an up-close-and-personal look at the pimps, prostitutes, drug dealers, and hustlers of every type who work Skid Row by night. The smells - that’s the part that will get you.” Then you go into Skid Row and it’s the bottom of anything you can think of. “On one block you can see the new downtown: all these new restaurants and bars and shops. “The contrast is shockingly stark,” says Brigham Yen, a downtown Los Angeles real-estate expert and chronicler of the area’s revitalisation on his site DTLA Rising. ![]() One wrong turn out of a trendy night spot or the Disney concert hall and you can find yourself in another world, where encampments of the drug-addicted and mentally ill spill out on to the sidewalk for block after block after block. Every Angeleno has seen these tents – always between the hours of 9pm and 6am, when police look the other way about camping on the streets. We know the victim lived in a tent he’d pitched it near the corner of San Pedro and 6th street.
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