On September 28, 2010 Media District BID safety patrol officers handcuffed a man because he was drinking in public and wandering around in traffic. This triggered an extensive investigation by Universal Protection Service, the company which manages security for the BID. You can read all 13 pages of it here. The level of concern on the part of the investigator, Daryl Whitt, is remarkable:

Here is the recap of my interviews with the officers involved with the detainment/arrest on 9-28-10.

There are still some gaps in their stories that I have been unable to close. The main issue as I see it is that CPL Garcia reacted in the wrong manner. He should have never advised the officer to place handcuffs on the subject as there was no threat towards any officer.

Obviously UPS doesn’t take it lightly that their employees handcuffed a man. Nor should they. Also, fully three pages out of the 13 comprise an “Initial Notice” of “General Liability” sent by Daryl Whitt to his supervisors at UPS. Furthermore, The state of California putatively doesn’t take handcuffing lightly either. Just look at the 83 page training manual published by the Bureau of Security and Investigative Services detailing every procedure, concern, legal obligation, and liability involved with the handcuffing of people by private security.¹

So the real question is, given all the blethering blither-blather of Andrews International about their consummate professionalism, their ability to turn shitty neighborhoods into golden ones like Christ, water, and wine, the fact that their big bad bigwig Steve Seyler is the fookin’ poet of the century, and so on, why don’t they worry at all about chaining over a thousand people a year to that bench? Why does UPS do a days-long investigation over one wrongful handcuffing while it would take A/I more than nine years to investigate one year’s arrests at that rate? Well, if you’re looking for answers, we don’t have em. Just more questions, unfortunately.

1. I mean it’s long, and it’s super-detailed, but possibly the most interesting thing is that not only is it an open book test, but the examiner is allowed to prompt the examinee until he gets the right answer. It’s a sad commentary on the skill-level of people who end up being empowered to handcuff their fellow human beings to a bench in Hollywood just for enjoying their natural right to drink a goddamned beer in the sunshine that God gave all of us.

N.B. The figure of 649 people arrested by A/I BID Patrol for drinking in public in 2010 comes from this report by Steve Seyler to the Joint Security Committee of the HED BID and the SV-BID. Take it for what it’s worth.

Photographs of people arrested, handcuffed, and chained to a bench by the A/I BID Patrol in 2010 are in the public domain, having been provided in response to a California Public Records Act request. There are more such photos available at the Archive, but we’re holding multi-gigabytes more that we haven’t had time to process and make available. We’re working on it!