16 hours ago
4
On any given day there are:
tents upon tents upon tents cluttering up the sidewalks and
tarps attached to fences and the skeletons of awnings, and
trash and dirty clothes littering everywhere you look, and
remnants of little cooking fires built in small metal pots and pans or directly on the sidewalk, and
human beings wandering like zombies dangerously in the road
Yet when you look at Google's Street View of the area (like in any direction around San Pedro and 5th for example) it looks like a cleaned up version that might look nicer like you see in sitcoms representing homeless camps. Nothing like the densly overcrowded reality. And the sanitization of the images that I've noticed applies to the Street View images that show the area in past years, too.
Google's Street View shows a couple of tents on the sidewalk to be sure, but nothing like you would actually see if you went there in person today or any day. Google Street View shows drastically reduced amounts of trash, fire debris, littered clothing, animal waste, or zombielike humans choking the street.
How did they get these more pleasant images for Google's Street View scene?
Did someone at The City coordinate with Google to bring the cameras through following behind the street cleaning crews? (No, and it's ridiculous to even pretend such, for many logical reasons.)
Did Google just remove the visually unpleasant components of the scenes? It's trivially easy to remove unwanted stuff from images these days and this "cleaned up" version of Skid Row is reflected NOT just in the current Street View, but has been applied to past versions, too.
Why would Google do this?
Is Google's "Virtual Cleanup of Skid Row" part of a plan, essentially laying the groundwork to minimize an upcoming forced relocation of homeless people ahead of the 2028 Olympics?
A PsyOp?
At whose request?
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