Monthly Archives: May 2016

Hollywood BID Patrol

“Hold Your Beer Up and Smile.” Video Suggests that So-Called “Referral” Arrest is Actually Just a Warning, Demonstrating that 2015 BID Patrol Arrest Rate is Down 70% from 2014; Far More than Previously Thought

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The BID Patrol orders a woman on Hollywood Blvd to perform for the camera as a condition of not being arrested.
The BID Patrol orders a woman on Hollywood Blvd to perform for the camera as a condition of not being arrested.
“Hold your beer up. HOLD YOUR BEER UP. And smile, if you want to.” These are the words of an anonymous1 BID Patrol officer caught on video confronting a homeless woman on Hollywood Boulevard about the fact that she’s drinking in public. However, this is more than a particularly lurid demonstration of the BID Patrol’s almost ludicrously unprofessional reign of misrule in Hollywood. It also helps shed some light on a long-standing mystery about just how many people the BID Patrol arrested in 2015.

I’ve reported before that the BID Patrol’s arrest rate in 2015 was over 40% smaller than it was between 2007 and 2014. The new evidence in this video suggests that actually only 313 of these were full custodial arrests (as opposed to 606, as I previously thought), making the actual decrease from 2014 to 2015 more than 70%. Here is the spreadsheet containing the 2015 totals. Note that there are 606 total arrests listed, and that these include 313 “Al Ref” arrests. You can see the arrest total summary spreadsheets from 2007 through 2015 here.

The phrase “Al Ref” almost certainly refers to “alcohol referrals.” These were discussed by Steve Seyler at the March 2015 Joint Security Committee meeting, where he stated:

We are starting to see some early trends. Arrests are down by 56 compared to this time last year. This is largely due to a strategy change in our enforcement of drinking in public. These arrests have accounted for about 60% of our arrest year after year. That number is holding true for this year as well. We still believe that it is important to curtail public drinking as this has a direct effect on assaults and other crimes.

Our new approach involves more warnings and more importantly referrals. We have
made 56 such referrals so far. If the person is agreeable, we give them a warning and
information about local Alcoholic Anonymous meetings and other resources. We will
attempt to gather data to see if this will bring positive results.

This theory is further confirmed by the fact that the arrest report number included in the title of the video file is #15-0517R, where the “R” almost certainly stands for “referral.” Add that to the fact that there seem to be NO arrest reports with an “R” appended to their numbers among the 2015 BID Patrol arrest reports I recently obtained from Kerry Morrison, so that either those numbers don’t refer to custodial arrests or Kerry Morrison was lying when she told me that she’d produced all of them.2 Continue reading “Hold Your Beer Up and Smile.” Video Suggests that So-Called “Referral” Arrest is Actually Just a Warning, Demonstrating that 2015 BID Patrol Arrest Rate is Down 70% from 2014; Far More than Previously Thought →

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Announcements, Hollywood BID Patrol

Many Years Worth of New Documents: Arrest Reports, Daily Logs, Photographs, Videos, Fashion District Emails

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MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERAI’m pleased to announce a huge amount of records, mostly from the Andrews International BID Patrol. These include arrest reports and daily logs, which bring our coverage up to the end of 2015. I put these on the Archive because the amount of material would overwhelm our hosting plan. There are individual links after the break and also here.

Note that there’s something fishy about the 2015 arrest reports. There are fewer than 350 of them, when the 2015 totals spreadsheet claims 606. This may have something to do with a new category for 2015 called “alcohol referral.” If these turn out to not be genuine custodial arrests we will have reduced the BID Patrol arrest rate by far, far more than I previously thought.

Also there are:

And some more emails from the Fashion District BID. These are prepared in the inimitably complete manner of Rena Leddy and cover the time from January 2015 through March 2016. They have to do with street vending and such topics:

Finally, there are over 6 GB of 2015 BID Patrol videos. I will be putting the videos on our YouTube channel soon, but that takes a lot of time, so I thought I’d make them available here first.

As I said, look after the break for individual links to our complete collection of A/I BID Patrol arrest reports and daily logs 2007-2015.
Continue reading Many Years Worth of New Documents: Arrest Reports, Daily Logs, Photographs, Videos, Fashion District Emails →

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Lawsuits

Settlement Talks in Street Vending Lawsuit Seem to be On Track; Judge O’Connell Extends Response Deadline to July 18

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Pico and Santee.
Pico Blvd. and Santee Street.
Recall that there is a settlement conference in the street vending lawsuit scheduled for June 22, 2016. Today the parties filed a joint stipulation asking the judge to give the defendants more time to respond. The reason given is:

The parties have made substantial progress in settlement discussions: they have held two settlement conferences with Magistrate Judge Charles F. Eick and have scheduled a third settlement conference for June 22, 2016;

On April 11, 2016, the Court granted the Fourth Stipulation filed by the parties to extend the time to file responsive pleadings to the Complaint, with the current extension set to expire on June 1, 2016.

This was evidently good enough for Judge O’Connell, who, roughly contemporaneously, filed an order granting the request by extending the deadline to July 18. So that’s where we’re at with the street vending suit; another quiet month.
Continue reading Settlement Talks in Street Vending Lawsuit Seem to be On Track; Judge O’Connell Extends Response Deadline to July 18 →

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Lawsuits

Settlement Almost Finalized in LA Catholic Worker, LA CAN v. City of LA, Central City East Association

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California-centralRecall that, towards the end of March of this year, the parties to this case began making noises about a potential settlement. This evening, all parties to the suit, begun in 2014, filed a Joint Progress Report on the Status of Potential Settlement. They evidently reached a tentative agreement on April 5, and, according to this status report:

The parties have been diligently working to draft the final terms and language of the settlement agreement and to obtain approval from all parties to finalize the agreement.

The parties remain confident that they will be able to reach final agreement on all matters and will be able to obtain approval from all parties to settle this matter in its entirety.

They promise to update the court on the status of this settlement on July 26, 2016.

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Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, Miscellaneous

It Turns Out that LAHSA is Statistically Challenged When it Comes to Counting the Homeless, Not Just LAHSA Commissioner Kerry Morrison. Even Eric Garcetti, LA’s Technocrat, Can’t Count

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Peter Lynn, ED of LAHSA: "Math is hard!!"
Peter Lynn, ED of LAHSA: “Math is hard!!”
We have written before about LAHSA Commissioner and BID boss lady Kerry Morrison’s difficulties with statistical analysis, at least when it comes to counting the homeless population of the two BIDs she bosses. There was this little gem, where depending on how one looked at her chart the figure under discussion varied from about 25% to about 145%. And then just the other day she was seen waving about bar graphs and making wild claims about how many new homeless people would be attracted to her BID if Ted Landreth had his way with the Salvation Army. What these two incidents had in common was that they overcounted the homeless population of the BIDs. And this is not unexpected, since Kerry Morrison uses statistics for propaganda purposes only, and it is in her interest, the interest of her zillionaire masters, to overcount whenever possible, as it amplifies the hysterical atmosphere in which these BIDdies thrive.
Although she was much maligned for saying so, Barbie was right! Math class is, in fact, tough.
Although she was much maligned for saying so, Barbie was right! Math class is, in fact, tough.
But we had hitherto assumed that in her role as public servant she’d bring her best game to bear. If not out of a sense of service and public obligation, then at least out of caution given the level of scrutiny that attaches to LAHSA Commissioners over and above that to which BID bosses are subjected. But, according to a report in this morning’s LA Times, this is evidently not the case. It turns out that the Times and Eric Garcetti found some basic errors in LAHSA’s analysis of its 2016 homeless count. These led LAHSA to greatly overestimate the increase in the County’s homeless population. Of course, overestimates are good for LAHSA, just as they are for the BID. The more homeless people there are, the more money LAHSA gets.1 Continue reading It Turns Out that LAHSA is Statistically Challenged When it Comes to Counting the Homeless, Not Just LAHSA Commissioner Kerry Morrison. Even Eric Garcetti, LA’s Technocrat, Can’t Count →

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Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, Hypocrisy

Kerry Morrison Goes Straight to LADOT Boss in Attempt to Fix Parking Tickets for Board Members, Admits to Habitually Flouting City Parking Laws, Whines About Food Trucks Being Subject to the Same Laws as Everyone Else

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Seleta Reynolds, general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation and the very first person you should email ( seleta.reynolds@lacity.org) if you get a parking ticket on Hollywood Boulevard.
Seleta Reynolds, general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation and the very first person you should email if you get a parking ticket on Hollywood Boulevard: seleta.reynolds@lacity.org
What would you do if you got a parking ticket for feeding the meter on Hollywood Boulevard? Pay it? Complain about it to your friends? Yell at the parking enforcement person? Not if you’re Evan Kaizer, President and CEO of the Sieroty Company! In that case you get your personal lobbyist and shill, Kerry Morrison, to email the freaking chief executive of LADOT, Seleta Reynolds, to complain on your behalf,1 hinting in her most inimitable manner that NO FAIR!!!!

Hi Seleta — it’s been awhile, [sic] but I thought I’d go straight to the top to find out who I can talk to for some information I can share with our community.

We recently moved into the middle of Hollywood Blvd — into a retail storefront. I hope you can stop by and see us sometime! We call this the “mid-BID”2 — and it’s the section of the Boulevard that still suffers from the doldrums.3

That said, we have a lot of meetings in our office, and in the past several of weeks, [sic] we’ve had a couple of people get tickets for parking at a meter beyond the two hour timeframe. In these two cases, the person ran out to put a few more quarters in the meter to buy some time, and when they went out, there was a ticket for violating the two hour time. (So, it was not an expired meter.)4
Well, the big news here is not that zillionaires don’t know that meter feeding is illegal. Even a lot of non-zillionaires don’t know.5 The big news is not even that zillionaires are too cheap to park around back on Schrader or Cherokee for $10 like everyone else who’s going to hang around the Boulevard for more than two hours or that they’re too cheap to get their zillionaires’ club, the HPOA, to freaking validate parking for them. The big news is not even that Kerry Morrison somehow thinks it’s OK to involve the freaking General Manager of the freaking Los Angeles Freaking Department of Transportation in a freaking PARKING TICKET problem; zillionaires naturally think their problems are so sensitive and important that they can only be handled by the boss.

The big news, friends, is that Seleta Reynolds actually did handle the complaint. She instructed her subordinate, Bruce Gillman, to write to Kerry and smooth the ruffled feathers and so on. The tickets didn’t get fixed, and we suppose that marks some progress for this formerly corrupt city of ours, but emails were exchanged for over a month on the subject. How many parking ticket complaints made by non-zillionaires get that kind of sustained attention, we wonder. From now on, we’re writing to Seleta with all our parking ticket woes, and we encourage you to do the same, fellow Angelenos. Here’s her contact information:

seleta.reynolds@lacity.org.

You can tell her we sent you. Meanwhile, read below the fold to find out what this has to do with zillionaire paranoiac delusions about food trucks and more hypocrisy about small businesses.
Continue reading Kerry Morrison Goes Straight to LADOT Boss in Attempt to Fix Parking Tickets for Board Members, Admits to Habitually Flouting City Parking Laws, Whines About Food Trucks Being Subject to the Same Laws as Everyone Else →

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Lawsuits

Street Vendors v. Fashion District BID et al. Settlement Conference Scheduled for June 22, 2016

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California-centralJudge Beverly Reid O’Connell filed an order today in Santiago et al. v. Fashion District BID et al. setting a settlement conference to convene on Wednesday, June 22 in front of magistrate judge Charles Eick. These things are surely top secret, so there’s nothing to report or to attend, but I thought I’d drop the filing on you. It suggests that nothing much is going to happen in this case for a few weeks, anyway.

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Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, Hypocrisy

LAHSA Commissioner and BID Boss Kerry Morrison Conspires to Use Illegal Amplified Classical Music at Night to Repel Homeless Sleepers on Vine Street: “This is a Fairly Elegant Solution”

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Kerry Morrison, LAHSA Commissioner and supporter of playing loud classical music to repel homeless people.
Kerry Morrison, LAHSA Commissioner and supporter of playing loud classical music to repel homeless people.
Kerry Morrison is a commissioner of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, an organization whose mission statement claims that their purpose is:

To support, create and sustain solutions to homelessness in Los Angeles County by providing leadership, advocacy, planning, and management of program funding.

One of these solutions, according to a newly obtained email from Morrison to LAPD Captains Cory Palka, bosom buddy of Hollywood white supremacists, and Peter Zarcone, is evidently to blast classical music at homeless people until they go away:

Hi Captains,

There is a big foyer in front of the Ricardo Montalban Theatre on Vine Street.

For quite some time, this have [sic] been a favorite sleeping place for homeless individuals in the BID.

About a year ago, we encouraged Gil Smith1 to try an experiment (had heard about this from another BID): play classical music all night long and see if that would drive away the sleepers. Sure enough, it had an immediate impact and cleared them out.

As anyone with sense could have foretold, this didn’t end well. The people who actually live in the neighborhood, unlike Kerry Morrison and her alien army of occupation, the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, couldn’t sleep either. They complained, and the music was shut down. But Kerry’s not giving up:

I am going to try to run some interference on this with the property manager over there…because this is a fairly elegant solution…

And what’s the property manager supposed to do here? It’s a violation of LAMC 116.01 to play music loudly enough to disturb sleeping people at night. The property manager can’t stop the residents from calling the cops. And why is Kerry Morrison, commissioner of LAHSA and zealous advocate for hyperenforcement of laws much, much more minor and picayune than this one as long as they’re to be enforced only against the homeless, conspiring with the Executive Producer of the Montalban to break the law by playing amplified music at night? Why is she conspiring to cover up these crimes by proposing to get the property manager of 1600 Vine Street to stop his tenants from reporting these violations to the police?
Continue reading LAHSA Commissioner and BID Boss Kerry Morrison Conspires to Use Illegal Amplified Classical Music at Night to Repel Homeless Sleepers on Vine Street: “This is a Fairly Elegant Solution” →

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Hollywood Property Owners Alliance

Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition Trials Relocation to Hollywood and Bronson, Kerry Morrison Initiates Covert Back-Channel Campaign to Subvert, Undermine, and Thwart Efforts

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Kerry Morrison at the May 18, 2016 meeting of the Board of Directors of the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, describing to her zillionaire overlords how she will use every last drippy little droplet of her political juice to thwart the GWHFC in every possible way.
Kerry Morrison at the May 18, 2016 meeting of the Board of Directors of the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, describing to her zillionaire overlords how she will use every last drippy little droplet of her political juice to thwart the GWHFC in every possible way.
At the HPOA Board Meeting on Thursday, May 18, 2016, Kerry Morrison had a lot to say about the Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition. In particular, the Food Coalition, which reportedly had been considering a move from its long-time feeding site at the corner of Sycamore and Romaine in Southwest Hollywood, has been, according to Kerry, trying out feeding people at the Salvation Army facility at Hollywood and Bronson. If you’ve been keeping up with the ongoing efforts by the zillionaire elite of Los Angeles to torpedo the GWHFC by any means necessary it will come as no surprise to you that Kerry’s little speech about this was filled with misrepresentations and promises to stop this development if it’s at all possible to do so. We will run through her account one piece at a time, and you can watch and listen along here. As always, a complete transcription of Kerry’s remarks may be found at the end of the post.
Continue reading Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition Trials Relocation to Hollywood and Bronson, Kerry Morrison Initiates Covert Back-Channel Campaign to Subvert, Undermine, and Thwart Efforts →

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Hollywood BID Patrol

Hollywood BID Patrol Arrest Rate Continues to Plummet in 2016: by Week 12 there were 23% Fewer Arrests than in 2015 and more than 50% Fewer than in 2014

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Steve Seyler in 2014, one day before he told Kerry Morrison that he was going to "have the Officers slow down a little more..." The effects of that statement continue to be felt in Hollywood.
Steve Seyler in 2014, one day before he told Kerry Morrison that he was going to “have the Officers slow down a little more…” The effects of that statement continue to be felt in Hollywood.
Recall that the Andrews International Hollywood BID Patrol arrested more than 40% fewer people in 2015 than they did in 2014, and that this precipitous drop was almost certainly due to our scrutiny. Well, newly obtained figures show that as of Week 12 of 20161 the BID Patrol had arrested only 130 people. This is an annualized rate of

\frac{130}{12}\frac{arrests}{week}\times 52\frac{weeks}{year}=564\frac{arrests}{year}

Recall that in 2015 the BID Patrol arrested 606 people, so this projected figure represents a projected 7% decrease from last year’s already strikingly attenuated figures.

Furthermore, by week 12 of 2015 the BID Patrol had arrested 169 people, compared to only 130 this year. This represents a stunning 23% reduction from 2015’s level. For the sake of comparison, note that by week 12 of 2014 the BID Patrol had already arrested 261 people. Thus 2016’s week 12 total is less than half of the 2014 figure from the same week.

Read on for a little bit of editorial speculation.
Continue reading Hollywood BID Patrol Arrest Rate Continues to Plummet in 2016: by Week 12 there were 23% Fewer Arrests than in 2015 and more than 50% Fewer than in 2014 →

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