Screenshot of LA City Approval for a public toilet at Hollywood Blvd and Orange Drive.Well, long-time readers of this blog will recall a number of shrill screeds on our part about how the BID Patrol keeps arresting people for public urination but the HPOA doesn’t do anything to get public toilets installed. And aren’t we embarrassed now. We had assumed that the HPOA had so much political juice that they could get anything they wanted out of the city, so the fact that Hollywood has no public toilets, we wrongly assumed, was proof that the HPOA was opposed to them.
White skin and red blood on Skid Row.I recently started requesting documents from the Central City East Association (CCEA), which runs the Downtown Industrial District BID. I’m not sure why, it was just a whim, but the executive directrix, a lady named Raquel Beard (who long-time readers may remember for her stunningly weird remarks about sidewalk vending), turned out to be so delightfully trollable that I’m just going to keep it up for a while. I can already see a couple of ways it might develop into a long game, but I’m keeping schtum about that for now. Meanwhile, take a look at what I got today. You can begin with CCEA in the Documents menu above. Also, here is a page for the new subdirectory. After the break I describe things in more detail, if you’re interested. Continue reading Downtown Industrial District BID / Central City East Association Documents Now Available→
Another street vendor arrested, shackled, jailed, and abused by the Hollywood BID PatrolYesterday, the National Lawyers Guild Los Angeles filed suit in Federal Court against the City of Los Angeles and the Fashion District BID on behalf of the Union Popular de Vendedores Ambulantes. First of all, I set up a page to collect filings. I managed to track down a copy of the initial complaint (OK, I mean I bought it from PACER for $1.70, you’re welcome!), and you can read about it in the LA Times here if you want. The title of this file claims that it’s abandoned property and that it was donated to Blessed Sacrament. It’s obvious from the context, though, that it’s really stuff that was confiscated from a street vendor by the BID Patrol or else abandoned when the vendor ran away because the BID Patrol was threatening to arrest him. In any case, it did not belong to them and they stole it when they took it to give to the church.
There’s an excerpt from the complaint after the break, but it’s really worth reading the whole thing.
One of the main points is that the LAPD and the BID conspire to not only cite and/or arrest the vendors, but to destroy their stuff. We’ve written before about how the Hollywood BID Patrol does the same thing. They not only arrest the vendors, but without any kind of due process, they ruin all their stuff, or even worse, appropriate it and steal it. You can see an example of this in the photo somewhere near this sentence. I would imagine that, now that the Fashion District BID is being sued, the HPOA is getting a little nervous. Turn the page to hear why!
Jittery little psychopath and Hollywood McDonald’s queen Carol Massie who, in direct contradiction to high McDonald’s corporate-level mucky-mucks, thinks her business is not all about the bucks. Despite its appearance this is not a surveillance picture. It’s just a picture with that surveillance aesthetic!Remember back in March 2015 when we reported on the weirdly racist meanderings of Hollywood Chamber of Commerce flunky Marty Shelton as filtered through the unrepressed id of jittery little psychopath and Hollywood McDonald’s queen Carol Massie, who, in a surprising-even-for-her outburst at a meeting of the Sunset-Vine BID Board blamed Hollywood nightclub owners for ruining everything because they run “…these businesses who don’t really care about anything except that they make a profit.”??
At that time, we responded, quite reasonably even if we do say so ourselves, to the effect that:
Carol, here’s a newsflash: your company destroys rainforests, destroys the health of the world’s people, exploits its employees, destroys everything, because it doesn’t “really care about anything except that [it] make[s] a profit.” That’s what McDonald’s does.
The HPOA just after destroying Selma Park in order to save it.If you’ve been following the Selma Park story you’ll recall that, even as we’ve discovered that the park was illegally made off-limits to all but adults with children, even as we’ve uncovered a stinking, sordid history of both roustings-out and illegal arrests, it hasn’t been exactly clear who was actually, explicitly responsible for this ugly situation. Well, amongst the documents laid on you the other day by our faithful correspondent we found the actual smoking gun in an email written on January 22, 2008, by Kerry Morrison to Heather Repenning and Helen Leung, then-council-president and CD13 representative Eric Garcetti’s District Director of Community Development and Hollywood Field Deputy respectively. Exceedingly crazy-looking Heather Repenning in 2003, when she worked for Eric Garcetti as a “Community Organizer” which, on first hearing, sounds like some kind of lovely, angelic, St. Saul Alinsky kinda job, but a mere five years later she was conspiring with Kerry Morrison to steal away our freaking park! Times change and people change with them
Heather — wanted to see if you had an idea as to how we might be able to communicate with the families located around Selma Park…As you may know, with the help Helen [sic] and the rest of your team at CD-13, we’ve been able to designate the entire park as a children’s play area.
So that settles that. HPOA and Eric Garcetti’s staff illegally excluded everyone without kids from Selma Park at some time before January 22, 2008.
An official BID Patrol photo of the Selma Park playground on April 27, 2011, entitled SELMA PARK VANDALISM. Because everyone knows that drawing on a playground with freaking chalk is vandalism. Fucking savages.First of all, I reorganized our documents. I think the new system will make it easier for you to find things. I know it’ll make it easier for me to add new material, and I have a lot of stuff coming in soon. The “Document” menu in the header now leads to a link and an iframe pointing at this page, which is just a raw files and directory set-up. For now I’m only allowing http access, but I might set up ftp access in the future. In any case, have at it! The only problem left unsolved is how to host the 15+ gigs of photos I have on hand. I’m working on a solution involving dropbox, since archive.org has turned out to be pretty slow for that many images and Flickr seems complicated for bulk uploads and metadata editing. I could be wrong about this, though. More news soon. Second, there’s a bunch of new stuff about Selma Park. Read on for details. Continue reading New Documents About Selma Park From the HPOA, New Document Storage System→
As the mohel said about the knick-knacks displayed in the window of his storefront: “So, what do you want me to put there?”This is just a brief announcement that I have the Media District BID’s tax returns for tax years 2011 and 2012 and 2013. Nonprofits have to put quite a bit more information down than do private parties, so these are not only intrinsically interesting, but they are a little bit like menus for public-records-act-requesting banquets.
Man without children enjoying Selma Park freely, as befits a free citizenry, on a beautiful Tuesday afternoon in OctoberWe have today a list of all cases referred to the City Attorney for prosecution for arrests in Selma Park for violating 653b(a) PC which, as you may recall, is the statute referenced on the recently removed and completely phony signs forbidding adults without children in the park. The list is an excel spreadsheet which we’ve edited from the original spreadsheet obtained today by Mike. That document lists everyone arrested in the park for any reason, and if you want it, you can get it from the city attorney’s office, or even just drop us an email. On July 1, 2008, Jesse Gutierrez became the first human being in history to be (falsely) arrested at Selma Park for violating 653b(a) PC and having his case referred to the city attorney for prosecution, subsequently rejected for who knows what reason.
There are 46 people on the list, which means that at least that many were arrested, possibly more. We can’t tell yet who arrested all of these people, but since the arrests started in July 2008 (the list we obtained began in 2002) we’re guessing it’s the BID Patrol rather than the LAPD who’s responsible. Some of them we can be sure were arrested by the BID Patrol because we have their pictures. In any case, note the fact that every single one of the 46 case numbers begins with the letter “R.” The ever helpful Mike Dundas, who’s the CPRA contact over there, tells us that that means the case was rejected for prosecution. Unfortunately records which explain why cases were rejected are exempt from production. Oh well. Continue reading At Least 46 People Arrested for Being in Selma Park Without Children Since July 1, 2008, All 46 Cases Rejected for Prosecution by LA City Attorney→
