A 2003 newsletter from former Los Angeles, California, mayor James Hahn cited fears of many L.A. residents that "these shoes indicate sites at which drugs are sold or worse yet, gang turf," and that city and utility employees had launched a program to remove the shoes. A 2015 study of shoe-tossing data in Chicago found that the rumor and relationship between dangling shoes and drug dealing were correlational, not causal.
