Treats unleashed creve coeur

LOS ANGELES — Just before 10 a.m. on a sunny Sunday in November, a crowd gathered in front of a white modernist building here on Hollywood Boulevard. An inscription on its side, “H/N,” short for “Here and Now,” stood out from a block away.

Twenty- and 30-somethings spilled onto the steps and the lawn, dressed in crop tops, moto jackets, and jeans torn deliberately at the knees.

“How was your party last night?” a young woman in a shirt dress and bootees asked a guy in aviator sunglasses and a swath of chains. “I heard it was amazing.” He replied: “Girl, can you stop losing weight? You’re going to disappear .”

They sought not physical but spiritual nourishment. The building? Mosaic, a church that counts thousands of young people among its congregants, offering sermons rife with pop-culture references, musical performances that look like Coachella, and a brand cultivated for social media. (Church events are advertised on Instagram; there’s a “text to donate” number).

While Christianity is on a decline in the United States , at Mosaic and other churches like it in the Los Angeles area, the religion is thriving.

“We have a hundred people every week who come to faith in Jesus,” Erwin McManus, Mosaic’s founder and lead pastor, said after the first of four services that Sunday.

This being Hollywood, famous faces are among the faithful. Joe Jonas has been to Reality LA, a new-age church in Hollywood that meets in an unadorned high school auditorium. (There, congregants send prayer requests via text messages.) Viola Davis is a regular at Oasis, a neon-hued service inside a Koreatown cathedral. Justin Bieber supports Hillsong .

But Mr. McManus, 57, insists that his congregants are there for the message, not celebrity-gawping or networking. “This isn’t sanitized,” he said. “This is not Jesus-lite.”

Services start with music from a live band, their lyrics projected onto a giant screen. Lit by multicolored spotlights, they bring the crowd to its feet, hands in the air.

A few singers take turns leading songs, most of which are originals that praise God’s glory. Mr. McManus’s daughter, Mariah, 23, is a regular frontwoman, belting out breathy “hallelujahs” on a recent Sunday to a packed house of over 700 people.

After a half-hour, Mr. McManus emerged onstage dressed in black skinny jeans, black leather high-top sneakers and a long black T-shirt, his hair slicked back in a trendy undercut style . He could easily have passed for a pop star swanning through the doors of the Chateau Marmont. In fact, one of the early iterations of Mosaic, back in the ’90s, was held in a Los Angeles nightclub owned by Prince.

“I thought it was kind of iconic,” Mr. McManus said. “It was really nasty. I wanted to take what people considered to be a safe haven to the most profane space possible.”

Born in El Salvador, Mr. McManus grew up with a variety of religious influences: His maternal grandmother was Roman Catholic, his mother Buddhist and his father Jewish. He studied philosophy and psychology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and at 20 decided to follow the word of Jesus. He went on to receive a master’s in divinity from Southwestern Theological Seminary.

Soon after, he moved to Los Angeles to work as a futurist and found himself helping friends, as he put it, “come to faith.” He had an epiphany at a screening of “Braveheart,” watching Mel Gibson’s character rally his troops for battle.

“I had this visceral response and I thought to myself, ‘I can’t let the most meaningful moment of my life be watching a movie,’” Mr. McManus said. “Sunday needs to feel like this. You go to church on Sunday and you don’t have any sense of the heroic. We have a really powerful heroic narrative here, of the extraordinary good you can do in the world.”

The nightclub gathering expanded into a network of nontraditional churches throughout Southern California that grew so big that in 2009, Mr. McManus stepped away. “I didn’t want to manage it,” he said.

He dabbled in film and fashion — producing men’s wear, leather goods, bags and jeans — before his children persuaded him to start a scaled-down version of Mosaic in 2012. (He sometimes relates fashion to faith, likening the cracks in his white-painted Maison Margiela Converse sneakers to the way God reveals himself in curious ways.)

The church doesn’t adhere to a specific strain of Christianity and encourages followers to unleash their creative spirits. Mr. McManus attends TED conferences and invokes Burning Man.

“The Bible was taken and used as a manuscript for conformity and we want to turn it into a manifesto of creativity,” he said after a recent sermon. “We want, whenever someone hears the name Jesus, to go: ‘Oh. Creativity, beauty, imagination, wonder,’ instead of, ‘Rules, laws, conformity, judgment.’”

Earlier this fall, at a Wednesday-night service known as the “50-yard line to Sunday,” Joe Smith, another Mosaic pastor, called on congregants to trust God the way they trust Waze, the Google-owned traffic navigation app crucial to getting anywhere in Los Angeles.

“What Waze is doing is navigating the scene,” he said, to a chorus of “yeahs” and “mm-hmms.” “It’s taking in all the information, it’s taking in other people’s traffic patterns, it’s taking in, what’s happening that we don’t even know behind the scene, and Waze makes decisions for us that we don’t realize is for our benefit.

“What we need to do when we interact with God,” he said, “and he tells us to go somewhere, we need to be like Waze, where we are excited about the journey, to take turns that we didn’t even realize were ahead of us. We’re going to go to places that we weren’t even certain we wanted to go.”

Mary Tanagho Ross, a lawyer and longtime Mosaic congregant, said the church’s style of preaching resonates. “I love that I can understand what they’re saying, and I don’t need somebody to interpret that for me,” she said. “It just feels really real, really authentic. I think that’s what people want: authenticity and simplicity.”

Kristina Van Dyk, a wardrobe stylist, chimed in: “There’s something that Erwin has said,” she said, referring to Mr. McManus. “‘Relevance to culture is not optional. Culture is always changing, and if we’re not creating a space that has anything relatable, it wouldn’t be enjoyable.’”

Other churches employ similar tactics to “really meet people where they’re at,” Reality LA’s head pastor Jeremy Treat said, “instead of saying, ‘You need to convert to being a 1950s American Christian.’”

Talking about Christian hymns during a service last month at Oasis, the pastor Philip Wagner joked that Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” was one of them.

“What we’ve found is that this generation, particularly the millennials, they don’t want to know the theory,” said Holly Wagner, Mr. Wagner’s wife, who founded Oasis with him in 1984. (It was born out of a Beverly Hills Bible study that counted Donna Summer among its attendees). “We make the Bible very practical and helpful and find humor in it. To the best of our ability, we’re trying to have fun while doing this.”

Inspiring and entertaining thousands of people every Sunday is a production. At Mosaic, two dozen assistants hustle through the aisles, talking into headsets and waving flashlights. Between services, Mr. McManus retreats to a makeshift green room behind two doors with punch-code locks. Inside, on a Sunday in November, there were bowls of raspberries, blueberries and granola. A live feed of the stage played on a small television; Mr. McManus sat in a plastic chair and sipped a smoothie from the Body Factory. He gets louder as he preaches and can grow hoarse, bordering on hysterical, when making a point.

Mr. McManus’s son, Aaron, 27, heads Mosaic’s design team, finding minimalist photos of palm trees and dreamy Los Angeles cityscapes to project on the big screen to encourage people to donate and get involved in Bible study groups. A Mosaic music video with cool kids skateboarding through Hollywood plays as people file to their seats.

“Sometimes at Mosaic, it can feel a little commercial, when it’s just, like, this really homogeneous hipster-y space of selling Mosaic and they kind of get into this mode of ‘Hey, fill this out, tweet, link up with us,’” said Bobak Cyrus Bakhtiari, an actor who commutes to Mosaic from his home on a yacht in Marina del Rey, Calif. “When that happens, I think it’s a little obnoxious. But I try not to think about that and redirect my attention inside.”

Reality LA plays down the performance part of its music, lighting band members in such a way that their faces can’t be seen from the auditorium seats. “There’s a tendency to focus on the talent of the musicians rather than on God,” Mr. Treat said, “especially in Hollywood, where being on stage, that’s accentuated even more. We want the focus to be on Jesus, not on whoever’s playing lead guitar that Sunday.

“It’s not an event to come and watch,” he said. “And, unfortunately, some churches have turned into that, where the church is a show and the people who come are consumers.”

Reality LA is not particularly welcoming to openly gay members. “We have lots of people who say that they experience same-sex attraction but who are not acting on it because they’re following Christ,” Mr. Treat said.

Mosaic is more accommodating. “We have people in our community who are gay and live openly gay lifestyles,” Mr. McManus said. “We have people here who would say, ‘Homosexuality is clearly against the scriptures and is wrong,’ and we’re teaching them how to walk together. Our position is, you have to be for each other.”

At a recent Mosaic Bible study for young professional women, Ms. Van Dyk, the wardrobe stylist who hosted the event at her home in West Hollywood, Calif., began by asking if anyone had bought the new Justin Bieber album. Two women burst into one of his songs. “What about his hair, though?” another asked. This prompted a brief discussion of his cross tattoos.

Before opening their Bibles, Ms. Van Dyk laid out a couple of house rules: “Whatever’s said here, stays here,” she said. “We all have beautiful and interesting lives, and we don’t need to be gossiping or talking about someone else’s.”

Despite the neon lights, social media accounts and the casual style of dress, these churches preach about the same God and the same things that, as Reality LA’s Mr. Treat put it, “most Christians have believed for the last 2,000 years.” But they can scramble the signals of traditional churchgoers, even young ones.

“I think it kind of bedazzles people,” said Mr. Bakhtiari, who once brought four foster children he works with to Mosaic. “When I first mentioned it, they were like, ‘I don’t want to go to church.’ But they were into it. They were super-confused in a cool way.”

For many familiar with the ebb and flow of policing in the United States, the brutal beating of Tyre Nichols by five police officers in Memphis after a routine traffic stop last month was reminiscent of tactics used in the 1990s era of gang warfare and crack cocaine, when special crime-fighting units, acting with bravado and impunity, were unleashed in high-crime neighborhoods.

Atlanta’s infamous Red Dog unit was responsible for a series of scandals, including the shooting death of a 92-year-old grandmother in a botched raid, before it was shut down in 2011. Elite police units were involved in some of the most notorious episodes of police misconduct in the 20th century, from the brutalizing of Amadou Diallo in New York to the Rampart Division scandal in Los Angeles , when officers stole drugs and money, beat suspects and even pulled off a bank robbery .

In more recent times, though, in the age of Black Lives Matter and high-profile police killings that provoked nationwide protests, policing began to center on the mantra of reform and accountability. Some of the elite units were disbanded, or ordered to operate less aggressively. The murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis in 2020 led to nationwide protests and calls for defunding the police.

But the last two years have seen yet another significant shift in policing in many American cities, experts say, as the calls for reform and accountability have given way to demands for aggressively confronting a new nationwide rise in violent crime.

Cities like Memphis are once again commissioning specialized crime-fighting units to tackle the spikes in crime that accompanied the coronavirus pandemic, a strategy that has had some success in bringing down homicides, thefts and other crime in targeted neighborhoods but that risks returning, critics say, to the problems of the past.

The Scorpion unit in Memphis, five of whose officers are now charged with murder in Mr. Nichols’s death, quickly developed a reputation for pretextual traffic stops and aggressive treatment of detainees after launching in November 2021, and the department announced last month that it was disbanding the unit .

The new or revamped units in Denver, New York, Atlanta, Portland and elsewhere are a reflection of how much has changed since the racial justice protests of 2020.

“When we have tragedies like Michael Brown and George Floyd, it’s all about justice and fairness and people’s lives matter and we’re here to protect and serve and we’re going to get this right,” said Shean Williams, a civil rights lawyer in Atlanta who represented the family of Kathryn Johnston, the grandmother who was killed in 2006 by agents of the Red Dog unit.

But as violent crime rose in 2020 and 2021, he said, the mind-set changed: “Now we’ve got to show the numbers.”

In 2020, about three weeks after George Floyd’ death, New York’s police commissioner at the time, Dermot F. Shea, announced the disbanding of the department’s anti-crime units, plainclothes teams that had been involved in numerous police killings, including the death of Eric Garner in 2014.

Mr. Shea described the move as “a seismic shift in the culture of how N.Y.P.D. polices this great city.” A year ago, facing rising crime rates, Mayor Eric Adams announced he was restoring a version of the units, declaring, “we will not surrender our city to the violent few.”

In Chicago, the police department has launched and quashed several specialized units over the years, either as a result of scandal or because they created tensions with their aggressive tactics. The most recent units — the Community Safety Team and the Critical Incident Response Team — launched in 2020 and are still in operation, although the department declined to answer questions about their size or mission.

At the time the new teams were announced, the Chicago police superintendent, David Brown, made a point of differentiating the new units from those of the past, saying they were not “a roving strike force like what C.P.D. has had in the past,” according to The Chicago Tribune . The city’s most notorious unit, the Special Operations Section, or S.O.S., was disbanded in 2007 after several officers were convicted of an array of offenses , including theft , federal civil rights violations and, in one instance, seeking to have a fellow officer murdered.

Anthony Driver Jr., president of the city’s civilian police oversight board, said his group had questions about the units even before Mr. Nichols’s death in Memphis, and is pressing for more information.

“We have concerns and we need answers,” he said.

Atlanta’s renewed use of specialized units — which have operated under the names Apex and Titan — has come under scrutiny in the wake of Mr. Nichols’s death because Cerelyn Davis, the Memphis police chief, once worked in Atlanta and oversaw the Red Dog unit, which was blamed for a series of policing abuses, including the killing of Ms. Johnston, for which three officers were sentenced to prison.

“If anybody in the Memphis government would have reached out to Atlanta, we would have told you that Red Dog is not a good idea,” said Gerald Griggs, the president of Georgia’s chapter of the N.A.A.C.P.

The new or rebranded units are sometimes variations of a strategy known as “hot spot” policing, a tactic that has been shown to produce small but measurable reductions in crime. Denver, for example, saw a reduction in homicides and shootings in three of the five “hot spots” targeted by new police units last year, when the city saw an overall reduction in homicides of 15 percent.

Unlike the Memphis Scorpion team, the “impact teams” in Denver work closely with community groups and regular patrol teams, said Doug Schepman, a Police Department spokesman.

The number of homicides in Memphis dropped the year after the Scorpion unit was launched, to 302 in 2022 from 346 in 2021, according to the Police Department. In early January, Chief Davis credited the drop to several factors, including the department’s focus on tracking down violent fugitives, the visibility of police in high-crime areas and wraparound services in the community. It remained unclear how much the Scorpion unit factored in.

The ability of such teams to produce major and long-lasting reductions in crime has not been shown, many crime experts said. The steep decline in crime across the country that began in the 1990s, some studies have shown , was attributable less to the “stop and frisk” policing and vehicle stops that accompanied some of the earlier hot-spot strategies and more to large overall increases in police staffing, greater rates of incarceration and the end of the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s.

Some of the cities bringing back specialized police teams say they will be able to avoid the mistakes of the past with strict controls, better training and stronger oversight.

Portland, Ore., disbanded its Gun Violence Reduction Team that had long been accused of over-policing Black neighborhoods, but as the city’s homicide numbers rose toward record levels in 2021, a new unit was formed: the Focused Intervention Team. This time, though, it was developed with a community oversight group devoted exclusively to the intervention team.

“We get the opportunity to weigh in on what they are doing, what they have done and how they go about doing their work,” said Ed Williams, a pastor who chairs the group. He said there have been some disagreements, with officers wanting to pursue hunches, while the oversight panel has wanted them to focus on using data and actionable information to decide which neighborhoods they work in and whom they decide to stop.

“They were feeling that we were holding them back,” Mr. Williams said. “And to some extent, we were.”

In Aurora, Colo., the interim police chief, Art Acevedo, said he recently called in the Direct Action Response Team that the city re-established last year to tackle rising gun violence and a surge in auto thefts. In the wake of what happened in Memphis, he said, he wanted his officers to know it was crucial to remember that “the rule of law matters” and that officers should not “stop and frisk everything that moves.”

In an interview, Mr. Acevedo touted the success so far of the new units, which were re-engaged last summer — 18 guns recovered, 81 felony arrests and no citizen complaints. But it has not been enough — at least not yet — to put a dent in the city’s overall violent crime picture. While the pandemic surge in violent crime ease last year for many American cities, Aurora experienced increases in homicides and aggravated assaults.

Some people in the community have said they are worried that there will inevitably be potential harm to Black and Latino residents with this type of policing — if not yet, soon.

Many activists in Atlanta say that the specialized police units, whatever they are called, remain synonymous with aggression and intimidation.

The Rev. Dr. Monte Norwood, a pastor at Bible Way Ministries on Atlanta’s south side, said there were multiple police officers in his congregation, “and they’re treated like family.”

Still, in the two-plus years since Atlanta police officers shot dead 27-year-old Rayshard Brooks during a traffic stop at a Wendy’s restaurant down the street from his church, and in the immediate wake of Mr. Nichols’s death in Memphis, Mr. Norwood has watched the relationship between his community and law enforcement become increasingly fragile.

Apex officers donning military garb and toting high-powered weapons do not help, he said. “It makes me afraid; it makes me wary.” Officers’ menacing equipment, Mr. Norwood said, emboldens them to prey on poor Black and brown communities, like his.

Clark White, an activist with the Atlanta Community Press Collective, said he could not shake the memory of an Apex officer manhandling the mother of a Black man accused of marijuana possession in a video that went viral.

“When police came out with Apex, they said it would be a departure from the violent nature of Red Dog,” he said. “But they’re still engaging in these same tactics.”

Barry Friedman, the director of the Policing Project at New York University School of Law, said the “hot spot” strategy can be effective, so long as it is a temporary presence in a neighborhood, and that the officers do not resort to aggressive “proactive policing” that can feel like racial profiling.

But that often happens, as officers in these units lean on a longstanding police tactic that studies have shown is rife with racial disparities, and has often led to deadly encounters : relying on traffic stops for minor infractions like expired tags or a busted taillight, in hopes of finding guns or drugs, or a driver with an outstanding warrant.

While some cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco have moved to curtail vehicle stops, other cities have maintained the practice — especially in recent years after an uproar over racist “stop-and-frisk” policies and a judge’s ruling that New York’s use of the policy was unconstitutional.

“What police departments did in some jurisdictions is trade auto stops for street stops,” Mr. Friedman said. “It’s hard to conduct the street stops because you need reasonable suspicion of a criminal offense. But with traffic stops, so many of the traffic laws are very minor traffic offenses that you can stop people on pretexts all the time.”

Part of the reason specialized units have made a return, Mr. Friedman said, “is that I don’t know that many police departments actually have any other idea of what to do about serious crime, violent crime.”

Reporting was contributed by