Why a fictional crime boss and your CD11 councilmember read from the same script.
Millions of people just spent two seasons watching Wilson Fisk — Marvel’s Kingpin — use the language of “safety and prosperity” to seize control of New York City in Daredevil: Born Again. The show’s creators knew the parallels they were aiming for. Trump flags on lawns, “Drain the Swamp” rhetoric, and a private police force wearing public badges. Showrunner Dario Scardapane told Entertainment Weekly they leaned into the political commentary on purpose. The very real political reality was clear to the audience and critics. The Wilson Fisk-as-authoritarian reading became the dominant conversation around the show.
While watching the last three episodes, especially, I couldn’t help but be reminded of what Traci Park said whenever Wilson Fisk disingenuously tried to defend his actions and policies. If you live in Council District 11 — Venice, Mar Vista, Del Rey, Westchester, Brentwood — you’ve been hearing it from your councilmember’s press releases, campaign site, and carefully staged press conferences for the last three years.
Traci Park isn’t Kingpin tho. She doesn’t smuggle arms or punch protestors in courthouses. It’s not about a literal equivalent. It’s about the language, the infrastructure, and the direction. The show’s writers built Fisk’s rhetoric by studying how real authoritarian politicians talk. Traci Park uses the same deceptive political language. Not because she’s a crime boss — though her lies and her track record of advancing systemically racist policies make the ‘criminal’ label feel less like hyperbole every day. But because this is how carceral populism sounds — whether it’s coming from a fictional mayor or an elected councilperson.
1. The Brand
Fisk created the “Safer Streets Initiative” — his signature policy as mayor. It was designed to look like official city business, but it was actually the legal cover he needed to set up his own private police force, declare martial law, and run a smuggling ring. In the season 2 courtroom scene, Matt Murdock exposes the Safer Streets Initiative for what it was: created in furtherance of a criminal agenda.
Park branded her public safety package “A Safer 11 for a Better 11.” Same formula. It sounds like a community safety plan. What it actually built is a surveillance network — 100 automated license plate readers across the Westside, Real-Time Crime Centers feeding live camera data to LAPD, specialized task forces funded from her discretionary budget, and $200,000 in police overtime — deployed specifically around interim homeless housing sites. Clear the encampments, move people into temporary shelters, then pay cops extra to patrol them there.
Notice the formula. “Safer [location] for a Better [location].” It’s the same construction. Safety becomes the brand. The brand becomes the justification. And once “safety” is the umbrella, anyone who questions the surveillance cameras or the overtime funding or the task forces is positioned as anti-safety. See how that works? Question the cameras and suddenly you’re the bad guy who doesn’t care about people’s safety.
This is what political scientists call carceral populism — when politicians use the language of “the people” to justify policing, surveillance, and incarceration as the primary tools of governance, despite decades of research showing these approaches don’t reduce crime or make communities safer. It sounds like community care. “Safer streets.” “Protecting our families.” “Bold action.” But the infrastructure it builds doesn’t serve the community as most originals know it. Rather, it serves the property interests, the police unions, and the de facto segregation-minded gentry who bankroll Park.
2. The Strongman
Fisk, from the mayor’s podium in season 1, episode 4: “Remember I told you that I’d get things done? Well, here I am getting them done.”
Park, from her 2026 reelection site: “Traci Park didn’t run to be a politician — she ran to fix what was broken. The results speak for themselves: safer neighborhoods, cleaner communities, and a city government that finally listens.”
Same energy. The leader isn’t a public servant accountable to a system — the leader IS the system. I’m not a politician, I’m a fixer. I don’t play games; I get results. The implication being: if you question my methods, you’re questioning the results. And who would question safer neighborhoods?
Mind you, in the show, Fisk’s “getting things done” meant consolidating a private enforcement apparatus. In CD11, Park’s “results” include a surveillance network installed with minimal public input, LAPD overtime bankrolled from her personal discretionary fund, and a press conference where she stood flanked by LAPD’s chief and the DA to announce it all — not as policy, but as a show of force. Every authoritarian movement wraps itself in the imagery of law, order, and patriotic duty — the badges, the uniforms, the podium, the flag. Fisk did it from a fictional mayor’s office. Park makes it a regular part of her public appearances. Police chiefs and DAs on one stage. And when Trump showed up in LA after the fires — while he was literally threatening to withhold federal disaster aid — Park was there asking him for “ongoing partnership.” Not pushing back. Not standing up for her district. Asking for a partnership with the man holding LA’s recovery hostage.
3. The Moral Panic
Fisk frames every power grab around an urgent criminal threat. Vigilantes. Chaos. An unsafe city. His rhetoric demands action, and anyone who questions the action is an obstacle — or worse, complicit. When Matt Murdock points out in the courtroom that rounding people up without due process is lawless, Fisk’s attorneys object.
Park, at her December 2024 press conference: “Angelenos demand real change and accountability. We want safer streets, stronger communities, and leaders who will take bold action to protect our businesses, families, and our children. We are tired of excuses for public criminal behavior, and we demand action.”
Standing next to her, DA Nathan Hochman added: “The group that is not here but needs to hear this message are the criminals. For far too long they have believed they can act with impunity, that stops today.”
Read that Hochman quote again. “The group that is not here.” He’s speaking to an invisible enemy — a vague, ever-present criminal class that justifies any level of enforcement. “Excuses” becomes code for due process, civil liberties, or questioning whether 100 surveillance cameras is the appropriate response to car burglaries. “Bold action” means you don’t get to ask questions first.
This is manufactured urgency. It’s the rhetorical engine that makes the surveillance cameras feel inevitable and the overtime funding feel necessary. Fisk used it to justify martial law. Traci Park uses it to justify a surveillance apparatus that tracks every vehicle in the district.
And this is not just CD11 drama. Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation’s roadmap for authoritarian governance — specifically calls for criminalizing homelessness and expanding local police power. Trump signed an executive order in July 2025 to do exactly that — “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets” — punishing cities that use housing-first solutions and rewarding the ones that sweep and criminalize. Mind you, decades of research show that criminalization doesn’t reduce homelessness — it makes it worse and costs more. But carceral populism was never about what works. Park was already running this playbook before Project 2025 put it on paper. 41.18 enforcement. Encampment sweeps. LAPD overtime around shelters. The MAGA agenda caught up to her, not the other way around.
4. The Political Loyalty Machine
In the show, Fisk’s Anti-Vigilante Task Force wears badges but answers to him. They’re a political enforcement apparatus dressed as public safety. As Reactor Magazine noted, Fisk and his task force claim a mandate to go after the worst of the worst, but their force is concentrated on people who challenge his power. The cops serve the mayor’s agenda, not the public’s.
Park doesn’t have a task force with a cool acronym. What she has is a political alignment between her office, LAPD, and the DA that functions the same way. Look at how the money moves: Park funds specialized LAPD operations out of her own discretionary budget. Not the city’s general public safety fund — her office’s discretionary dollars. She allocated $200,000 in LAPD overtime, deployed specifically around interim homeless shelters. Mind you, half the time a 41.18 sweep doesn’t even lead to a shelter placement — it just pushes people down the block. But for the ones who do get placed somewhere, the cops are already there on Park’s dime. She’s paying to displace people and paying to police wherever they land. She’s paying to displace people and paying to police wherever they land. And she calls it a public safety package.
Then there’s the December 2024 press conference. Park. LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell. DA Nathan Hochman. Standing together, announcing a “public safety package.” That wasn’t a policy rollout — that was a formation. It signals to the district: the council office, the police department, and the DA are aligned. Not around community priorities. Around an agenda. And if the priorities were really coming from the community, you’d see actual Westside community members at that podium — not just badges.
5. Surveillance as Governance
Fisk’s New York runs on cameras, informants, and an enforcement apparatus that makes dissent visible and punishable. The infrastructure exists before the crisis justifies it. By the time citizens realize what’s been built, it’s already operational.
Park’s CD11 is getting a version of that. 100 Automated License Plate Readers — installed across Venice, Mar Vista, Brentwood, and Westchester, funded from Park’s discretionary dollars. These aren’t crime-scene cameras. ALPRs continuously collect and store location data on every vehicle that passes through the district. Where you drive. When. How often. Whether you’re suspected of anything or not.
On top of that, Park introduced the motion to expand Real-Time Crime Centers across all 21 LAPD divisions — centralized facilities where officers get live feeds from ALPRs, CCTV, and private security cameras in one location. The council passed it 12-1.
Here’s where it gets real for Venice — specifically for the immigrant families, the street vendors, the working-class folks Park claims to serve. Nationally, the exact same ALPR networks have been documented as pipelines for federal immigration enforcement. ICE agents accessed Flock Safety camera networks through local police more than 4,000 times for immigration-related lookups. In San Francisco, police allowed over 1.6 million illegal out-of-state searches of their ALPR database — including searches flagged for ICE. Cities like Mountain View, Santa Cruz, and Flagstaff have since pulled their cameras entirely after discovering unauthorized federal access to the data.
Park opposes the sanctuary city ordinance. She has backed motions to penalize street vendors. She has not publicly addressed what safeguards — if any — prevent her 100 ALPRs from becoming ICE’s 100 ALPRs.
We can’t confirm that CD11’s specific cameras have been accessed by federal immigration enforcement. But the pattern is documented, the infrastructure is built, and the person who built it has consistently opposed the policies that would address its misuse. That’s a clear direction..
6. The Populist Mask
Fisk, to Matt Murdock, when challenged about his motives as mayor: “A rich man, by his very nature, is self-serving. A mayor — a mayor serves his city.”
Park has branded herself a “common-sense Democrat” — the reasonable center in a city gone too far left. Her mask: She’s not ideological, she’s practical. She’s not partisan, she’s results-oriented. She didn’t run to be a politician — she ran because things were broken and someone had to fix them.
It’s the same mask. Fisk insists he’s left his self-serving past behind because the office demands it. Park insists her politics aren’t politics at all — just common sense.
But let’s keep it 100. Park’s 2022 campaign raised approximately $580,000 — more than double her progressive challenger Erin Darling’s $228,000. Her largest donors: real estate interests and police unions. As of mid-2025, she entered the reelection cycle with a $649,000 war chest — the largest of any LA City Council candidate, representing roughly 15.7% of all council fundraising. The LA Times has described her as the most conservative member of the City Council.
Her supporters will tell you she’s not MAGA. And maybe she doesn’t wear the hat or wave the flag. But her donor sheet tells a different story. Gitta Nagel — matriarch of the Decron Properties real estate empire — maxed out to Park’s campaign and has given over $113,000 to Donald Trump and Republicans. In 2022, fifteen Nagel family members donated the legal maximum to Park on the same day. Brian Dror, a Brentwood landlord, funds both Park and a roster of hardline Republicans including Trump, DeSantis, and Ted Cruz. Lisa Korbatov and her family have contributed thousands to Trump, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, and Mitch McConnell — and thousands to Park. The New Majority PAC, California’s largest Republican political action committee, backed Park despite its explicitly partisan GOP focus. And then there’s the LAPPL — the police union that endorsed her and has its own well-documented history of right-wing alignment.
You don’t need a MAGA hat when your donors already wear them. And you don’t need a Project 2025 endorsement when your legislative record maps onto its priorities point by point. The ALPRs. The Real-Time Crime Centers. The sanctuary city opposition. The 41.18 enforcement. The street vendor penalties. The outcomes are the same. The surveillance cameras don’t check your voter registration before they log your plates.
But Traci Park’s Not the Kingpin. She’s the Character the Show Never Wrote.
Six examples. Same rhetoric. Same formula. Same outcomes. The only difference is one of them is fiction.
Daredevil: Born Again gave us the authoritarian — Fisk built the task force, armed it, declared martial law, ran the whole operation himself. The show gave us the enforcers — Powell and the AVTF, badges with no accountability. It gave us the loyalists — Daniel Blake, the true believer who built the political machine without asking what it was really for.
But the show never wrote the character who does what Park does: the local elected official who builds the entire architecture voluntarily, funds it from her own office, wraps it in “safety and prosperity,” and calls it public service the whole time. In fiction, the Kingpin builds his own infrastructure. In real life, he doesn’t have to — there’s always a councilmember willing to do it for him.
In the show, it took Murdock unmasking himself in open court, a journalist rallying the city, and citizens flooding the courthouse to end Fisk’s regime.
In CD11, the mechanism is simpler. June 2, 2026.
The season finale hasn’t been written. That part’s on us.
