As you’re probably aware I have been trying to understand the situation with the Westwood Village BID and the Westwood Neighborhood Council and all them uppity UCLA students who want more bars open more hours.¹ But, as you’re probably also aware, Westwood Village BID Boss BIDdie Andrew Lloyd Thomas, probably under the reeking influence of his lawyer, the ballistic barrister of Burbank, which is to say Carol Freaking Humiston, is really, really less than forthcoming with public records.²

One useful strategy for combating the kind of rabid knee-jerk obstructionism practiced by Carol Humiston’s zombie clients is to request records involving them from every possible agency that might have any. This may give access to the records more quickly.³ It’s also possible that this strategy will reveal interesting but hitherto unsuspected issues.

And that’s exactly what happened when I hit up UCLA for emails between their campus coppers and the WVBID. I threw in LAPD for good measure because LAPD is always interesting, and I got a small pile of emails, which you can find here on Archive.Org. Surprisingly, there were a bunch of emails between an old frenemy of this blog, Senior Lead Officer Julie Nony, a UCPD cop name of Kevin Kilgore, and a bunch of random undergraduate student government types.⁴

The short version is that Julie Nony was trying to get the students to host some blabbermouth jive known as Days of Dialogue and she was surprised that students were dragging their feet about it because everyone knows they’re a bunch of damn bomb throwing radical firebrands who would totally be interested in sitting down with some cops and having a conversation like this:

1. Non-cops: Hey, we’re scared you’re going to kill us when we’re just walking to the corner to buy milk.
2. Cops: I hear what you’re saying which is that you’re scared we’re going to kill you when you’re just walking to the corner to buy some milk.
3. ????
4. World Peace!!

Turn the page for the long version and transcriptions of the relevant emails.

If you don’t recall, Julie Nony is mostly famous for loving lizards of all species and also being the world’s foremost expert in applied homeless psychology.⁵ Anyway, as of January 2018 Julie Nony and UCLA cop Kevin Kilgore were deep into their discussions of the aforementioned Days of Dialogue. Kevin Kilgore is all like I emailed ASUCLA and they didn’t answer and we need them to sponsor otherwise UCPD has to pay for the room:

From: Kilgore, Kevin
Sent: Monday, January 29, 2018 9:37 AM
To: ‘Julie Nony’ < 32016@lapd.online >: Eddy Limon < 36732@lapd.online >; Luqman Watkins < 38073@lapd.online >: Chris Ragsdale < 26690@lapd.online >

Please let me know your thoughts.
Thanks,
Kevin

And then comes Julie Nony’s genius response:

From: Julie Nony [mailto:32016@lapd.online] Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2018 2:11 PM
To: Kilgore, Kevin <Kilgore@ucpd.ucla.edu>; Eddy Limon <36732@lapd.online>; Luqman Watkins <38073@lapd.online>;
Chris Ragsdale <26690@lapd.online>
Subject: Re: Days of Dialogue – looking at February dates for UCLA

Senior Lead Officer Julie Nony
Los Angeles Police Department

I mean, what is she thinking? She cites some Infowars-flavored and totally wrong⁶ theory about how UCLA students are all marching in the streets in support of a contradicted-by-facts conclusion that therefore they ought to be hyperenthused about hosting some PR event for the LAPD. Then she wants to try to advance her goals by whipping up some fake feeling “competition” between student groups? Like “hey students! Other students might get to host the cop conversation before you!” Where’d this lady go to school, the freaking University of Phoenix?

But all of that’s really nothing compared to this March 2018 email from Julie Nony to Kevin Kilgore. Here she’s trying to recruit UCLA people to attend some movie about how the cops “are constantly striving to improve relationships,” whatever that’s supposed to mean. But they’re not striving alone. In fact, our LAPD hopes “to cause a ripple effect throughout LA with smaller viewings of the screening and/or open the discussion 60yrs [sic] later after Ghandi [sic] and MLK paved the way for peace.” This is quite a trick, by the way, considering that Gandhi died in 1948, which was 80 years ago. In fact, the famously gun-happy LAPD is offering these UCLA kids a chance “to further their education on reinvigorating non-violence in America.”

Did you even know that the LAPD was following the “way for peace” paved by “Ghandi [sic] and MLK”?? Did you even know that before 60 years ago there was no “way for peace”?? Did you even know that Julie Nony was now assigned to the LAPD’s Community Relationship Division?? Did you even know there was such a thing?? Well, it seems that there is. According to their website they were created in August 2015 by Eric Garcetti and Charlie Beck in order “to consolidate and prioritize community engagement and relationship-based policing in the aftermath of events that occurred nationwide in response to what occurred in Ferguson, Missouri and in New York City in late 2014.”

Say what you will about Eric Garcetti. Say he’s a nihilist who wants to bring on the traffic apocalypse in order to convince Los Angeles to get on a damn bus. Say he’s renowned for his ability to give a speech while simultaneously orally pleasuring any number of real estate developers. Say he’s too busy positioning himself as the progressive Donald Trump to even spend time in Los Angeles, let alone run the damn City. But nevertheless, despite his manifold flaws, he’s got a certain kind of eccentric genius to him.

He has an astonishing ability to govern in ways that you or I could never think of. Most people, when tasked with crafting an LAPD response to the murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, might, I don’t know, find a way to make them stop shooting people at a higher rate than every other police department in the entire damn country. But instead of something logical like that, Eric Garcetti sends Julie Nony out to harangue a bunch of kids at UCLA about “Ghandi [sic] and MLK.” Be honest. That would never have occurred to you.

It’s part of the peculiar tragedy of this City that none of this seems that surprising. To close, here’s a transcription of Julie Nony’s entire email:

On Mar 15, 2018, at 5:35 PM, Julie K Nony <32016@lapd.online> wrote:

Senior Lead Officer Julie Nony
Los Angeles Police Department
Community Engagement Section
Community Relationship Division
(O) 213-486-6000

Image of senior lead LAPD officer Julie Nony is ©2018 MichaelKohlhaas.Org.

1. As always, don’t forget that MK.Org official editorial policy is highly in favor of more bars open more hours (with less hipsters but one can’t have everything usually) but we are even more in favor of everyone following the damn rules, which would seem to prohibit back-room deals between BIDs and neighborhood council advocates.
2. For now, until he gets learned a lesson in statutory compliance.
3. And may also help build a record proving that Humiston’s babies are illegally withholding stuff.
4. There’s a whole post simmering about UCLA’s CPRA practices, which are mostly pretty good, if slow, but which have some fairly eccentric aspects that reveal a little potential shadiness amongst the student government types. I hope to write on this soonish.
5. She is also famous for being a condescending asshole to any citizen who asks her anything that seems to her, in her infinite cop wisdom, to presuppose that everything in Hollywood is not precisely perfect. I will be writing on this phenomenon soonish as well.
6. But I repeat myself.