Monthly Archives: November 2015

Selma Park

Update on Selma Park Situation: Kerry Morrison Makes Crucial Admission Against Interest, Andrews International Misleads Regarding Past Actions, Records Requests from LAUSD and Neighborhood Council Still Pending

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Selma Park in April, 2007, after it became a target of the BID but before they opened fire. We have no hard evidence yet, but we'd say that this photo of a man dancing happily in the park was intended to depict the kind of thing that must be STOPPED!
BID Patrol surveillance photo of Selma Park in April, 2007, after it became a target of the BID but before they opened fire. We have no hard evidence yet, but we’d say that this photo of a man dancing happily in the park was intended to depict the kind of thing that must be STOPPED!
Long-time readers of this blog will recall that in late 2007 the HPOA put signs up in Selma Park in Hollywood which stated ominiously:

Children’s Play Area Only
Adults Not Accompanying Children Prohibited
Sec 653b, subdivision a, CA Penal Code

We discovered in September 2015 that these signs were placed illegally, informed the LA Recreation and Parks Commission, and they were removed within 14 days of our communication with RAP. Read here for more background.
Close-up of former sign in Selma Park falsely claiming it to be a "Children's Play Area Only."
Close-up of former sign in Selma Park falsely claiming it to be a “Children’s Play Area Only.”
Our correspondent, Mike has made and continues to make innumerable requests for public records in order to help us sort out exactly what happened in that park. Today we’re going to update you on some requests that did not result in the production of records, but whose outcomes yielded interesting information nevertheless.

First, on November 16, 2015, Kerry told our correspondent that “A/I says that after looking into this, it is unlikely that any arrests ever were made by A/I in Selma Park with specific regard to the signs and penal code section you recite (as opposed to public urination, drinking, and other reasons)…” While we have no doubts at all that that’s what A/I (Andrews International) told Kerry Morrison, who on all evidence is a scrupulously honest person, their statement is flat-out not true, which to us indicates consciousness of guilt on their part. The details follow after the break.

Furthermore, in that same response, Kerry Morrison admitted that she has no records proving that the elements of the statute cited were ever met for anyone arrested for being in that park without children. If this is accurate, and we have no reason to doubt that it is, then even if the BID had had some authority for placing the signs, which they did not, any arrests made by the BID in the park for violating PC 653b(a) were false arrests. The explanation of this is a little wonkish, and can be found after the break.
Continue reading Update on Selma Park Situation: Kerry Morrison Makes Crucial Admission Against Interest, Andrews International Misleads Regarding Past Actions, Records Requests from LAUSD and Neighborhood Council Still Pending →

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Downtown Center BID

You Know those Millions of Pages of Frenzied-Zillionaire-Elite-Police-Industrial-Complex-Pearl-Clutching-Hysterical-Media-Manipulation over Prop 47? Watch Carol Schatz Distill it all into 15-ish Short, Cynical Words

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Carol Schatz in 2009 looking, as cynics habitually have done throughout the ages, down to the gutter rather than up to the stars.
Carol Schatz in 2009 looking, as cynics habitually have done throughout the ages, down to the gutter rather than up to the stars.
Sixty percent of comatose Californians and virtually one hundred percent of the non-comatose are aware that last year’s Proposition 47 is causing massive freakouts amongst California’s cops, the zillionaire elite who rely on those cops to stave off the slavering locustoid hordes of marauding homeless people who inhabit their fevered imaginations, and the zillionaire elite’s hired flunkies, among whom are to be found the staffs of the Business Improvement Districts of Los Angeles. If you haven’t heard about this kerfluffle, the Los Angeles Times has helpfully run about nine zillion op-eds covering every sane point of view on the issue and most of the more popular less-than-sane ones. The gist of it is that in November 2014, about 20 minutes after the election results were in, the cops of California pitched a toys-out-of-pram tantrum and essentially stopped arresting anyone for anything and everyone, including all BID-associated people everywhere, started blaming the proposition for every crime committed anywhere in the state along with petty thefts and suspicious fires, broken windows, pissed-in gutters, aggressive panhandling, open bottles of cheap vodka, and probably the disappearance of freaking Amelia Earhart.
Amelia Earhart, mere moments before Proposition 47 reached back in time, grabbed her right out of her airplane, and made her vanish into thin air, never to be seen again, just like it's doing to our quality of life right here in sunny Los Angeles. Curse you, bleeding-hearted liberals!
Amelia Earhart, mere moments before Proposition 47 reached back in time, grabbed her right out of her airplane, and made her vanish into thin air, never to be seen again, just like it’s doing to our quality of life right here in sunny Los Angeles. Curse you, bleeding-hearted liberals!
We haven’t gone out of our way to report to any great extent on this BIDiabolical whining because there’s just so much of it, it’s so freaking repetitive, and, anyway, who has the time? However, our faithful correspondent assures us that nary an HPOA Joint Security Committee meeting he’s attended in 2015 has gone by without someone mentioning it, and the same goes for other HPOA/CHC meetings. Kerry Morrison even once admitted on camera that she’d voted for it but now she regretted it. In any case, Carol Schatz has unexpectedly provided us with such a distilled, such a quintessential, such a blatantly, screechingly, cynical example of the genre that we finally felt moved to address the subject. Everything we’re quoting here comes from this email chain, which is one of the many recently obtained for us via the California Public Records Act. And the details, as they will do, follow after the break.
Continue reading You Know those Millions of Pages of Frenzied-Zillionaire-Elite-Police-Industrial-Complex-Pearl-Clutching-Hysterical-Media-Manipulation over Prop 47? Watch Carol Schatz Distill it all into 15-ish Short, Cynical Words →

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Announcements, Central City East Association, Downtown Center BID

DCBID Shift Summaries, Carol Schatz Emails, CCEA Safety Team Materials

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Carol Schatz about to grasp and crush someone or something and making the guy behind her on the right a little queasy.
Carol Schatz about to grasp and crush someone or something and making the guy behind her on the right a little queasy.
This evening I have the pleasure of announcing a big bunch of new documents, mostly from the DCBID, but a couple of choice bits from the CCEA as well.

• Over 500 shift summaries prepared by Universal Protection Service between January 1, 2015 and early October, 2015. You can browse them directly from here where you’ll also find a zip archive of the whole batch, or look for that same directory in the menu structure above at Documents/DCBID/Universal Protection Service/UPS Shift Summaries. No one here has had the time to look through these in detail yet.

• Fifty-three emails from/to Carol Schatz of the DCBID. These are available directly from here, and there’s also a zip archive of all of them. You can also get to them from the menu structure above if necessary. These are redacted mercilessly and almost certainly illegally (I’m working on that), but there’s a lot of interesting stuff here. These are purportedly all of Carol Schatz’s DCBID emails for the third quarter of 2015, but, you know, I don’t think everything’s here. I’m working on that too. You’ll be hearing much more about this material in the near future.

And turn the page for the latest from the Downtown Death Star BID itself!
Continue reading DCBID Shift Summaries, Carol Schatz Emails, CCEA Safety Team Materials →

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Lawsuits

National Lawyers Guild LA Street Vending Case to Stay with Judge Beverly O’Connell for now, Petition for Transfer to Judge Philip Gutierrez Denied

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Federal Judge Beverly Reid O'Connell, in whose court the NLG's street vending case is being heard.
Federal Judge Beverly Reid O’Connell, in whose court the NLG’s street vending case is being heard.
This is just a quick note to alert you that there has been some action, albeit not that much, in the street vending lawsuit against the Fashion District BID and the city of LA. Some of the new documents, I think the interesting ones, but PACER is so clunky, not to mention expensive, that it’s hard to be sure, can be found here or directly here in static storage. Basically what seems to have happened is that the case was assigned to Judge Beverly Reid O’Connell and the plaintiffs asked to have it moved to the court of Philip Gutierrez. As you’ll know if you’ve been following things, Gutierrez is the judge in the Lavan case and also the LACW and LACAN case against the city of LA and the Central City East Association, which runs the Downtown Industrial District BID. The NLG argues that these two cases are similar enough to the instant case that they ought to be heard by the same judge. This request was denied, and they’ve filed a request for reconsideration. The request for reconsideration hinges on what is, I think, the crucial aspect of this case and the one against CCEA.
Continue reading National Lawyers Guild LA Street Vending Case to Stay with Judge Beverly O’Connell for now, Petition for Transfer to Judge Philip Gutierrez Denied →

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Announcements

New Los Angeles BID Wiki and also Some Media District Documents

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Amongst the many photos taken by the BID patrol we find four different images of this "officer" helping this blind guy across the street. It goes to show something. In fact, it goes to show many things. Probably none of them are what Steve Seyler meant it to show. Is this relevant to the subject of this post? Not especially.
Amongst the many photos taken by the BID patrol we find four different images of this “officer” helping this blind guy across the street. It goes to show something. In fact, it goes to show many things. Probably none of them are what Steve Seyler meant it to show. Is this relevant to the subject of this post? Not especially.
Today I have one ordinary announcement and one extraordinary announcement. First there are some new documents from the Media District BID. In particular, there are a bunch of policies, whistleblower, document retention, conflict of interest, and so forth. These seem to be essentially city boilerplate but I haven’t looked at them that closely. You can find them here or directly from storage here or from the menus above. The really big news is after the break!
Continue reading New Los Angeles BID Wiki and also Some Media District Documents →

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Announcements

Many New Documents: CCEA, Media District, and HPOA.

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Suzanne Holley, Chief Operating Something-or-Another with the DCBID and the Central City Association as well.
Suzanne Holley, Chief Operating Something-or-Another with the DCBID and the Central City Association as well. This image adorns this post for no reason whatsoever. I don’t even have any new documents from the DCBID.
Today is all documents, minimal commentary, no analysis:

  1. 2009 emails from HPOA about Sesame Street characters. See tag archive for context.
  2. Some new Universal Protection Service internal reports from the Media District. We already wrote about one of these. Here are a couple more.
  3. Many, many years worth of Board of Directors minutes from the CCEA provided by the ever-helpful-in-bizarro-world Raquel K. Beard. As always these people take no thought for making files sort properly in directories. I’ll fix this when I have time.
  4. A minimal number of CCEA committee minutes. According to Raquel K. Beard, “Committees do not meet monthly or quarterly, more so as needed,” whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. If you want a little puzzle to work out until someone around here gets time to write about it, you can think about why this item plus this email chain might add up to very, very bad news for the CCEA.


Image of Suzanne Holley is from a screenshot of this DCBID newsletter which, being a California public record, is in the public domain.

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Hollywood Property Owners Alliance

Garcetti Aide Alisa Orduna at the SVBID Part 2, in which she Proposes to “Empower” BIDs (Including the Freaking CCEA?!?!) to Deal with Homelessness and, No Joke, to Pay Homeless People’s Parents to Let them Move Back In

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Alisa Orduna at the Sunset-Vine BID Board Meeting on Tuesday, November 10, 2015. Is anyone, anyone at all, listening to what's coming out of this woman's mouth?
Alisa Orduna at the Sunset-Vine BID Board Meeting on Tuesday, November 10, 2015. Is anyone, anyone at all, listening to what’s coming out of this woman’s mouth?
Yesterday we presented part 1 of our coverage of Garcetti aide Alisa Orduna’s visit to the Sunset-Vine BID meeting on Tuesday, November 10, 2015, in which, among other nonsense, she announced that part of what the state of emergency means to the BIDs is that Garcetti is going to spend a million bucks on iPads for the BID Patrol. Today we bring you part two, in which she proposes to empower the BID Patrol (as well as the currently-being-sued-in-freaking-federal-court-for-how-they-deal-with-the-homeless Central City East no less) to deal with homelessness since they’re front-line responders, according to her. As if, with their guns, their shackles, their COINTELPRO-style surveillance of their critics, their freaking blessing by the LAPD, their locking up of every harmless heladero that falls into their clutches, their arrests of over 1000 homeless people per year, they weren’t freaking empowered enough. What’s next? Nuclear weapons? DEATH RAYS? Anyway, you can watch the whole thing here (try Chrome if Firefox acts wonky) and, as always, there’s a transcription after the break. Here’s what Alisa said:

… but what’s the role for BIDs? I mean, so many of our BID officers are front line on the street. I met with Central City East BID, this BID, there was another BID, um, I forgot, but, you know, there was another BID that we’ve just been talking to, and the spike in violence, spike in substance abuse, the spike in, um, families, so it’s people with children that are out on the street in these encampments and often are abandoned, sometimes if their parents are active substance abusers, just the spike in the number of people, the spike in, the sense of permanency, I would say, with encampments, when before they’ve been, you know, none of this is [unintelligible], but someone may have been in a sleeping bag at the bus stop, but now, those coming in [unintelligible], they’re out in San Pedro, there was like a block-long encampment, that was pretty sturdy, you wouldn’t just be able to go in and take it down, you know, at some point, there was carpentry skills keeping it up, so it’s, it’s, how do we, how do we, adjust this, and what are, what do you guys see, and what’s, how can we empower BIDs so that, that information that they’re seeing and that experience that they’re having is fed back into us as policy-makers and we can together come [unintelligible] a solution.
Continue reading Garcetti Aide Alisa Orduna at the SVBID Part 2, in which she Proposes to “Empower” BIDs (Including the Freaking CCEA?!?!) to Deal with Homelessness and, No Joke, to Pay Homeless People’s Parents to Let them Move Back In →

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Hollywood Property Owners Alliance

Garcetti Aide Alisa Orduna at the SVBID Part 1, in which she Admits that Announced $100,000,000 for Homelessness Isn’t Real Money, State of Emergency Declaration will Ease Real-Estate Development for Zillionaires, Fund iPads for the BID Patrol

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Alisa Orduna free-associating unintelligibly on Tuesday, November 10, 2015, at the Sunset-Vine BID Board meeting.
Alisa Orduna free-associating unintelligibly on Tuesday, November 10, 2015, at the Sunset-Vine BID Board meeting.
Well, our faithful correspondent hasn’t had time to attend a BID meeting in a while, but he made it to the SVBID Board Meeting on Tuesday, November 10, over at the Hollywood YMCA (right across the street from the famed Selma Park). And what a witches brew of craziness he witnessed over there! They had brand-new Eric Garcetti aide Alisa Orduna there to talk to them about the mayor’s declaration of a state of emergency about homelessness. And can she ever talk. Does she make sense? Some of the time.1 But, as Sigmund Freud taught the world, even in incomprehensible free-associationalism, truth can be found by those who take the time to look. And it does take time. We were planning to cover Alisa’s entire 40-ish minute thing in one post, but after spending two days transcribing just the first 12 minutes, we found that our sanity requires us to lay it on you in increments. You can watch here and, as always, there’s a transcription of the whole thing after the break for context (for some reason these links to YouTube into the middle of videos don’t seem to work well in Firefox. If you get an error, try Chrome).

Thus spake Alisa Orduna: So with all of that said, on September 22nd, Mayor Garcetti along with City Council made an announcement declaring an emergency. And there was a commitment of a hundred million dollars in resources to finally address homelessness. And, looking at it since that time, what does that really mean?

And later she said: So the hundred million was an announcement, and that was just a commitment, so that was just kinda throwing a benchmark out there and saying how are we gonna rise to the occasion?

And then Fabio Conti proclaimed: Did anybody think, oh a hundred million! That’s [unintelligible]. There’s no hundred million.

And she replied: It’s kind of [unintelligible] is standing by that commitment, so everyone is looking for it.

No one had the hundred million, but don’t worry, it shows we take it seriously and also don’t worry, we’re all out looking for the money! So we guess this was known, kind of. We guess there’s not really a revelation here. The New York Times quoted Herb Wesson at the time of the declaration as saying “The $100 million figure was chosen in part for its symbolism, said Herb J. Wesson Jr., the City Council president, to show county, state and federal officials that the city was willing to make a significant contribution to an urgent problem.” Now we find out from Alisa that actually it was chosen not just in part for its symbolism, but it was entirely symbolic. We wondering if she’s talking out of school, being new and maybe not entirely broken to the plow. Time will tell, we suppose. Read on for the rest of the news. And iPads! When will the city learn that iPads are not only going to solve problems, they’re likely to lead to FBI raids on public buildings and speculation about indictments?
Continue reading Garcetti Aide Alisa Orduna at the SVBID Part 1, in which she Admits that Announced $100,000,000 for Homelessness Isn’t Real Money, State of Emergency Declaration will Ease Real-Estate Development for Zillionaires, Fund iPads for the BID Patrol →

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Announcements

The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce is to a Thousand Philistines as the East Hollywood BID Contractor Responsibility Ordinance Agreement is to the Jawbone of an Ass

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Even very strong people sometimes need the right tool with which to smite their enemies. And sometimes they just reach out their hand and there it is. Sometimes it happens like that.
Even very strong people sometimes need the right tool with which to smite their enemies. And sometimes they just reach out their hand and there it is. Sometimes it happens like that.
I’m just announcing a few new documents today. When I requested them it was almost an afterthought. I didn’t expect much of them. But one has turned out to be really interesting and potentially really important.

These are just routine Contractor Responsibility Ordinance pledges of compliance. Today I have three:

Now, one of these things is really not like the others.
Continue reading The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce is to a Thousand Philistines as the East Hollywood BID Contractor Responsibility Ordinance Agreement is to the Jawbone of an Ass →

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Selma Park

Since 2004, More than 19% of all Violations of Penal Code 653b(a) Brought to the City Attorney for Prosecution from the Entire Freaking City of Los Angeles Originated at Selma Park

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A sunny cold November day in Selma Park with grownups sans children, just sitting around enjoying the goddamned park like God and the Recreation and Parks Commission intended them to do.
A sunny cold November day in Selma Park with grownups sans children, just sitting around enjoying the goddamned park like God and the Recreation and Parks Commission intended them to do.
Please, friends, forgive the wonkish headline, and read on to understand why it’s so important. If you haven’t been following the tragic saga of Selma Park, catch up here in the archives. The TL;DR is that the HPOA illegally proclaimed adults in Selma Park without children in tow to be in violation of California Penal Code 653b(a) and then proceeded arrest a bunch of people on these trumped-up charges. Every last one of the people arrested at that park for that crime whose cases were sent to the city attorney for prosecution had their prosecutions rejected. While we can’t (at the moment) prove that all 46 people arrested for violating that law at that park since 2008 were arrested by the Andrews International BID Patrol under the auspices of the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, we can, as of now, prove something else that’s quite suggestive indeed. Right here, you can download a spreadsheet containing all PC653b(a) cases brought to the City Attorney’s office in the entire city of Los Angeles for as far back as electronic records are searchable. There’s one in there dated 2004, so perhaps that’s how far back they go.
Continue reading Since 2004, More than 19% of all Violations of Penal Code 653b(a) Brought to the City Attorney for Prosecution from the Entire Freaking City of Los Angeles Originated at Selma Park →

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