Two People Stabbed Near Crenshaw's Taste of Soul Festival, Police Say

LAPD's citywide tactical alert lasted until just after 9:30 p.m.; organizers say the police activity stayed on the festival's outskirts.

About 20 young men were reported fighting at Crenshaw and Martin Luther King Jr. boulevards during Taste of Soul, police told NBC Los Angeles. It was about 2:45 p.m. Saturday, a few hours into the free street festival. At least one person had been stabbed, and the victim and the group were gone before officers could find them, police told ABC7.

Later came a second call. Officers went to the 4200 block of Crenshaw Boulevard on a stabbing report, and a person with possible stab wounds was taken from there to a hospital, the Los Angeles Fire Department said, according to ABC7. The LAPD went on a citywide tactical alert that stayed in place for hours, until just after 9:30 p.m.

Officers tracked down two people at a hospital Saturday night, talked to them and took assault reports, LAPD Media Relations told City News Service, according to MyNewsLA. The victims were expected to survive, NBC Los Angeles reported. Police haven't said whether the two stabbings are connected, and NBC said no details on a possible suspect were available.

The next call came at 5:34 p.m., police told ABC7: a large group at Crenshaw and Stocker in Leimert Park, nearly three hours after the first fight. The festival's own map, on the Taste of Soul website, stretched it about a mile along Crenshaw, from Obama Boulevard south to Stocker, with its gospel stage at Crenshaw and King and another stage at Stocker.

Organizers said, according to ABC7, that the "police activity happened on the outskirts of the event," that it didn't affect operations and that the festival finished on schedule.

Taste of Soul's leaders have talked up its safety before. In September 2025, founder Danny J. Bakewell Sr. told the Los Angeles Sentinel that "there has never been a criminal incident or any kind of unrest at Taste of Soul since we held the first festival in 2005."

In the same story, his son, Danny J. Bakewell Jr., the festival's president and the Sentinel's executive editor, said the team plans for months with the LAPD, firefighters and private security. The goal, he said, was a "spotless, crime-free record."

It wasn't the first big Crenshaw crowd this year to end with a stabbing reported at Crenshaw and King. After the MLK Day Parade in January, the LAPD said a man was stabbed near that same intersection at about 1:58 p.m., and officers set up skirmish lines, CBS Los Angeles reported.

Source: abc7.com, retrieved October 18, 2026. Other sources: nbclosangeles.com, mynewsla.com, the Taste of Soul festival website, lasentinel.net, CBS News.