Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, Hypocrisy

Kerry Morrison’s Homeless “Buddy” and Star of her Upcoming “Documentary” Apparently Received Special Treatment at Hands of BID Patrol in 2008

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This man, who is not Kerry Morrison's buddy and who's not starring in her documentary and who never took luncheon with her, was arrested 10 times and warned twice by the BID Patrol in 2008.
This man, who is not Kerry Morrison’s buddy and who’s not starring in her documentary and who never took luncheon with her, was arrested 10 times and warned twice by the BID Patrol in 2008.
You may have seen the news elsewhere that Kerry Morrison was granted a Stanton Fellowship by the Los-Angeles-based Durfee Foundation. I’ve refrained from writing about it here because it struck me as more of a private matter. However, in February Kerry Morrison sent an email to Dan Halden of CD13 with her application attached. This put it on the public record and made comments on it of public interest, and it turns out to shed a great deal of light on otherwise mysterious goings-on at the BID Patrol.

So here is a copy of Kerry Morrison’s Stanton Fellowship application. This is an exceedingly rich document, and you’re reading the first of what I expect to be many, many posts about it. It’s well worth the time it’ll take you to read the whole thing, though, because it’s even weirder than you’re thinking it might be.

This man, who is Kerry Morrison’s buddy and who is starring in her documentary and who did take luncheon with her, was arrested 4 times and warned innumerable times by the BID Patrol in 2008.
This man, who is Kerry Morrison’s buddy and who is starring in her documentary and who did take luncheon with her, was arrested 4 times and warned innumerable times by the BID Patrol in 2008.
Anyway, in her application, as part of her plan to fix what she sees as flaws in the mental health care system vis-a-vis homelessness, she plans to:

Tell the story. I have been collecting photos, videos, notes from interviews and observations now dating back to 2008. With the permission of my three friends, and possibly other [sic], I see the potential to create a documentary that will weave the human story around the policy, systems and community cultural change necessary to embrace the needs of these individuals. Create a documentary to tell their story and show the before and after.

Her “three friends” are homeless men that she and her friends in business-oriented astroturf homeless services front group Hollywood 4WRD helped in various ways.1 A careful analysis of the Andrews International BID Patrol 2008 arrest reports and the 2008 daily activity logs that at least one of these three, whom Kerry Morrison calls “my buddy,” was accorded a free pass by the BID Patrol, being given innumerable warnings for violations for which his peers who weren’t the object of Kerry Morrison’s special interest were routinely arrested.

This “buddy,” whose name is Torrey, was arrested by the BID Patrol four times in 2008 and none before or since.2 Two of these arrests were in January, both for trespassing. The third was in April 2008 for indecent exposure, and the fourth was in July for public urination.3 He appears 92 times in the 2008 daily logs:

It’s hard to be sure exactly when Kerry Morrison started taking an interest in him. In May 2008 the BID Patrol was conspiring with a business owner to get Torrey to leave Hollywood. Then he was never arrested after July 2008 and in August 2008 he was having lunch with Kerry Morrison. This happened at least once more in October 2008. So some time in June or July 2008 seems a likely guess.

In contrast, there were a number of homeless people arrested 10 or more times by the BID Patrol in 2008, so I thought it would be interesting to compare how many contacts these non-buddies had with the BID Patrol. It turns out that the man pictured above, whose name is Gary, is fairly representative. He had 11 recorded contacts with the BID Patrol:

And these 11 contacts resulted in 10 arrests.

We have written before on the selective, highly biased criteria that the BID Patrol uses in deciding who to arrest. For instance, don’t arrest Kerry Morrison even if she confesses to violating LAMC 41.18(d). Also don’t arrest nonhomeless people. But to this point I’ve thought that the only important distinction was between the homeless (arrest them all) and the nonhomeless (don’t arrest any of them). Now it turns out that being Kerry Morrison’s “buddy” and a star of her forthcoming documentary will also prevent arrests. Who’d have thought it?

Stay tuned for further commentary on Kerry Morrison’s Stanton Fellowship application!


All images are public records and therefore in the public domain.

  1. As an aside, I can’t resist noting that she’s also planning to give a TED talk. Res ipsa loquitur, friends.
  2. It’s possible that this figure is wrong. The arrest report for his April 8, 2008 arrest for indecent exposure states: “THE DEFT. HAS HAD NUMEROUS CONTACTS AND ARRESTS FOR PC 314.1 IN THE PAST AND TRESPASSING ON PRIVATE PROPERTY.” According to the records supplied to me by the HPOA he was arrested twice in January 2008, both times for trespassing. Again according to these records he was not arrested in 2007, although he was warned 19 times by the BID Patrol. It’s not impossible that he was arrested and they just didn’t give me the records. It’s also not impossible that the officer who filed the report was mistaken.
  3. This arrest report is one of the weirder ones I’ve read. Evidently it’s some kind of requirement that public urinators be seen by the public while urinating, because the arrest reports never fail to note that, e.g., women and children could clearly see the defendant urinating (I’m not making that up; women and children is what they say). In this case, though, it’s so much worse: “THE DEFENDANT’S URINE STREAM PROJECTED APPROX. THREE FEET ONTO THE ROADWAY FOR AT LEAST ½ MINUTE. THERE WERE LITERALLY SEVERAL HUNDRED TOURISTS ON FOOT ON THE NORTH SIDEWALK, MANY OTHERS DRIVING BY, AND APPROX. ONE HUNDRED MODEL TYPE WOMEN IN LINE DIRECTLY ACROSS HOLLYWOOD BL. WAITING THEIR TURN FOR AN AUDITION. “ Moral of the story? Don’t pee on the sidewalk in front of one hundred model type women or the BID Patrol is gonna take you down.
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2 thoughts on “Kerry Morrison’s Homeless “Buddy” and Star of her Upcoming “Documentary” Apparently Received Special Treatment at Hands of BID Patrol in 2008”

    1. As Papa Karl once said, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”

      And Marx forgot to add that if the facts and personages are of the opposite of great importance, they often skip the tragedy and jump straight to occurring both times as farce.

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