# 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

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.

While I am thrilled to be able to report these significantly smaller totals, and while we at MK.org are proud to take credit for preventing what’s quickly adding up to be more than 1,000 meaningless arrests of homeless people in an astonishingly short period of time, I still have to wonder how it is possible that A/I and the HPOA can possibly justify this huge reduction. My CPRA requests to the HPOA have yielded no discussion or policy changes that can explain the drop.

So what did they think they were doing in 2014 if they could reduce their arrests so drastically just in response to scrutiny? Why were they making all those superfluous arrests? Or, if the arrests weren’t superfluous, why are they not making them now? Given the weirdly neurotic penchant for secrecy exhibited by Kerry Morrison, Steve Seyler, the HPOA, and Andrews International, we’ll probably never find out, but there’s no plausible explanation that reflects well on any of these people.

Image of Steve Seyler is ©2014 MichaelKohlhaas.org.

1. The linked-to spreadsheet contains 2016 figures through week 12, but also contains a bunch of 2015 figures for after week 12. This is certainly an artifact of Steve Seyler’s editing methodology. If you look in the properties of the spreadsheet you’ll see that he last edited it on March 31, 2016, so that the later material is certainly artifactual.