Watch and listen here to his report at yesterday’s meeting of the HPOA Board of Directors, as, while telling the Board that the funding from O’Farrell doesn’t seem to be coming through, he slips into unhinged fantasies about how much money they might get and how many guns on the street it might pay for. Details after the break, friends!
John Tronson: Sure, well, we had our security meeting on March 9th. And we had all of our usual reports. The one main update relative to our last meeting is that we were contemplating launching a pilot program for night-time security. We were hoping to secure some funding from the Councilman’s office to do something meaningful. That commitment has not come in.
See, this is already weird. Kerry Morrison is sitting right next to the guy. This meeting was on March 17. On March 8, vis-a-vis this pilot program, she told the Central Hollywood Coalition on March 8 “Yeah…it’s not happening.” But John only thinks the funding hasn’t come in. He doesn’t seem to be aware that the whole thing’s off. This becomes even more clear later on.
…we have decided to postpone the pilot program until some time in the future. The security committee will come back to this board with some recommendations on length and scope and mission. Ideally it’s after the ACE program is put into place, so we think it would be most effective then.
ACE seems to stand for “Administrative Code Citation Enforcement.” No one here is sure what that is, but we’re working on finding out.1 There’s been some speculation that it’s a way for the BID Patrol to be able to cite citizens for infractions (as opposed to misdemeanors, which they use their powers of citizen’s arrest to deal with; as far as we know, you can’t citizen’s arrest someone for e.g. riding a bike on the sidewalk because it’s not possible to get jail time for it), but we don’t actually know. It would make sense, though, eh? Later in the same meeting they all blabbed on about how they got hoverboards outlawed on the Walk of Fame, and they’re well known to hate all things hip-hop. What would even be the point of having armed minions out at night on weekends if they couldn’t pop hoverboarders? Anyway, we’ll see what happens with this.
Mark Echevarria: Was there any indication from O’Farrell’s office that they’re going to…
And check Tronson’s reply:
Initially the meeting that Bill Farrar from Andrews and I had with them was very positive. But there hasn’t been any commitment yet. I don’t know whether that, in reality, is trying to make everybody feel like he really wants to help and at the end of the day can’t, or whether he’s still thinking about it, or whether it’s imminent and he just can’t process it quickly enough. I really don’t have any guidance on why it hasn’t come in. But he had a pretty large pool of money he was talking about being able to play with. We weren’t sure how much of that if any of that was going to come our way. So it could be absolutely nothing. It could be, you know, an amount to fund a three month program, or it could be something more significant to go through, originally he had talked about going through the summer, when it’s the busiest season. That had, you know, indicated being a six month commitment. But until we hear some definitive answer from Mitch’s office it just doesn’t really make sense for us to roll out something for thirty days on a skeleton crew. I’d rather do it once and do it right.
O’Farrell was so nice to me and Bill! Why isn’t he calling us back! It’s so mysterious! And then the power of fantasy takes over as he slips into the warm comfort of the counterfactual present tense: “It could be ever so much money!” “He might be gonna give us a zillion dollars!” “We’re waiting desperately by the phone!!” Well, anyway, no one knows yet why the plan was sunk, but this is like four weeks after Dan Halden and Marisol Rodriguez took their concerns to Mitch O’Farrell, which, if O’Farrell has enough sense to listen to the advice of this counselors, and he does certainly seem to at least in this case, is approximately when Tronson and Farrar’s plans started to circle the drain. Kerry Morrison seemed awfully darn sure nine days before this that all was lost. Why didn’t John Tronson know? Well, if we find out, we’ll fill you right on in!
Complete transcription of John Tronson’s remarks:
John Tronson: Sure, well, we had our security meeting on March 9th. And we had all of our usual reports. The one main update relative to our last meeting is that we were contemplating launching a pilot program for night-time security. We were hoping to secure some funding from the Councilman’s office to do something meaningful. That commitment has not come in. And also, Captain Palka was here, there’s a turnover at the top of the LAPD and this request was made by Captain Zarcone. So given that those two variables have occurred we have decided to postpone the pilot program until some time in the future. The security committee will come back to this board with some recommendations on length and scope and mission. Ideally it’s after the ACE program is put into place, so we think it would be most effective then. And even more ideally we need to secure some outside funding or we’re going to have to pull some money away from daytime, which we already discussed really doesn’t work. So that’s on hold, and we’ll continue to try to make that happen at some point in the future.
Mark Stephenson: John, question. Since that was a vote, that had been approved by the Board, do we need to take any action?
JT: No, we, not at this time. We can still implement it, but we don’t have to implement it immediately. And if we decide we don’t want to implement it down the road we can take that vote at that time. I think it’s still the will of the Security Committee to try to gather data of how effective the nighttime security presence would be. It’s just that the biggest struggle is we need to do it right for officer safety purposes, ideally for some meaningful amount of time where we can gather a meaningful database of how many interactions and how the relationship is with LAPD and what the environment is out there. So yeah, we’ll just table that until the time comes to fire it back up again or to just say “you know what, we’ll wait till the next BID, if we even do it then.”
Mark Echevarria: Was there any indication from O’Farrell’s office that they’re going to…
JT: Initially the meeting that Bill Farrar from Andrews and I had with them was very positive. But there hasn’t been any commitment yet. I don’t know whether that, in reality, is trying to make everybody feel like he really wants to help and at the end of the day can’t, or whether he’s still thinking about it, or whether it’s imminent and he just can’t process it quickly enough. I really don’t have any guidance on why it hasn’t come in. But he had a pretty large pool of money he was talking about being able to play with. We weren’t sure how much of that if any of that was going to come our way. So it could be absolutely nothing. It could be, you know, an amount to fund a three month program, or it could be something more significant to go through, originally he had talked about going through the summer, when it’s the busiest season. That had, you know, indicated being a six month commitment. But until we hear some definitive answer from Mitch’s office it just doesn’t really make sense for us to roll out something for thirty days on a skeleton crew. I’d rather do it once and do it right.
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